The Emerging Threat of Synthetic Bioweapons: Unseen Dangers in an Advancing World

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In cybersecurity, a penetration test mimics an actual attack on a system's defenses, employing the very tactics and tools that a real adversary would use. This method is commonly used by governments and corporations alike, with banks, for instance, routinely hiring experts to breach their systems, steal login credentials, and transfer funds illicitly. Upon completion, these experts report their findings, offering solutions to strengthen security.

 

This decade, humanity itself faced a massive, real-world penetration test: the COVID-19 pandemic. This virus, an unthinking enemy, exposed the world's vulnerabilities in combating new pathogens. By the time the virus had run its course, it was painfully evident that humanity had failed the test. COVID-19 infiltrated every corner of the globe, from remote Antarctic research outposts to isolated Amazonian tribes, wreaking havoc in nursing homes, military vessels, and among both the powerless and the powerful—striking down frontline workers and heads of state alike.

 

The harsh lockdowns enforced by autocracies and the rapid development of vaccines in democracies managed to slow the virus's spread but could not stop it. By the end of 2022, a staggering three-quarters of Americans had been infected at least once, and when China finally abandoned its “zero COVID” policy in December, over one billion of its citizens were infected within six weeks. The relatively low mortality rate of the pandemic was not due to successful containment efforts but rather because the virus was only moderately lethal. In the end, COVID-19 primarily burned itself out.

 

This failure against COVID-19 serves as a sobering reminder of the growing biological threats that the world faces, both natural and human-made. While some threats, like avian flu, arise from nature, others emerge from the rapid advancements in science. Over the past 60 years, scientists have gained profound insights into both molecular and human biology, leading to the development of highly lethal and effective pathogens. They have mastered techniques to create viruses that can evade immunity, engineer them to spread more efficiently through the air, and even increase their deadliness.

 

Although the origins of COVID-19 remain uncertain—whether from a lab or wildlife—it is clear that modern biological technology, now enhanced by artificial intelligence, has made it easier than ever to produce devastating diseases. Should a synthetic pathogen escape or be deliberately released, the consequences could be catastrophic, potentially killing far more people and causing greater economic damage than COVID-19. In the worst-case scenario, such a pathogen could claim more lives than the Black Death, which decimated one-third of Europe’s population.

 

To prevent such a disaster, world leaders must prioritize the strengthening of defenses against human-made pathogens. This task is as complex as managing nuclear weapons and addressing climate change, two of the early Anthropocene's other grand challenges. To combat this danger, nations will need to fortify their societies against synthetic pathogens. This includes developing early-warning systems capable of detecting engineered diseases, ramping up the production of personal protective equipment, and significantly improving its effectiveness. They will also need to reduce the time required to develop and distribute vaccines and antiviral drugs from months to mere days. Furthermore, there is an urgent need to regulate the technologies used to create and manipulate viruses. And all of this must happen quickly.

 

The Double-Edged Sword of Biological Progress

For more than a century, biology has been viewed as a force for progress. By the early 21st century, vaccines had eradicated smallpox and rinderpest and nearly eliminated polio. While many infectious diseases remain incurable, and total eradication of pathogens is rare, the advances have been undeniable. The qualified nature of humanity's accomplishments is perhaps best exemplified by the HIV pandemic. Once a near-certain death sentence, HIV now infects millions annually, but thanks to scientific innovation, it has been transformed into a manageable condition through antiretroviral drugs that prevent viral replication. This kind of medical progress depends on distinct yet loosely coordinated efforts in healthcare delivery, public health management, and scientific research.

 

However, this progress is not without its dangers. The same scientific understanding of microbiology that has led to remarkable advances in human health has also enabled efforts to undermine it. During World War I, the Allies explored the use of bacterial weapons, and German military intelligence used such pathogens to attack animals used by the Allies for transport. These efforts included infecting horses and mules in France and Romania, and in Norway, attempting to infect reindeer that were used by the Sami to deliver weapons to Russian forces. German operatives even managed to infect stables in the United States filled with animals destined for Europe.

 

By World War II, these initiatives had evolved into weapons intended to kill humans. In Japanese-occupied Manchuria, military officer Shiro Ishii oversaw Unit 731, a nightmarish facility where biological weapons were tested on human subjects. Thousands of prisoners were killed through exposure to anthrax, typhoid, glanders, dysentery, and the bubonic plague. Toward the end of the war, Ishii proposed a large-scale biological warfare operation, codenamed "Cherry Blossoms at Night," which involved dispersing plague-infested fleas over major U.S. West Coast cities. However, the plan was vetoed by Japan’s army chief of staff, who feared that such an operation would escalate the war to a never-ending battle between humanity and bacteria.

 

Despite this caution, other nations continued to develop biological weapons. In the 1960s, the U.S. Department of Defense launched Project 112, experimenting with ways to mass-distribute pathogens. The U.S. military dispersed spores in the New York City subway tunnels, released bacteria from boats in San Francisco Bay, and sprayed chemicals from aircraft over vast areas, from the Rockies to the Atlantic and from Canada to the Gulf of Mexico. These weapons were intended as a backup plan in case of a Soviet nuclear strike, providing a means to retaliate with biological devastation. By the mid-1960s, government scientists were producing significant quantities of lethal bacteria and toxins designed to "confound diagnosis and frustrate treatment," according to microbiologist Riley Housewright.

 

These developments alarmed civilian researchers, who successfully lobbied against Washington's plans. President Richard Nixon, influenced by these concerns, halted the U.S. biological weapons program in 1969 and called for an international treaty to ban such weapons. Nobel Prize-winning biologist Joshua Lederberg supported this move, warning Congress that biological weapons could be as deadly as nuclear ones but easier to develop. Unlike nuclear weapons, which had been monopolized by the great powers and sustained a balance of deterrence, "germ power will work just the other way," Lederberg cautioned.

 

 

However, the Soviet Union remained unconvinced. In 1971, as negotiations for a treaty were underway, the Soviets released a weaponized strain of the smallpox virus on an island in the Aral Sea, causing an outbreak in present-day Kazakhstan. The outbreak was contained due to the region's sparse population and widespread vaccination, but it highlighted the dangers of biological weapons. Later that year, the Soviet Union and the United States agreed to the Biological Weapons Convention, a treaty banning biological weapons, which was widely praised and signed in 1972. Despite this, the Soviets continued their biological weapons program in secret until the collapse of the Soviet Union, with some 60,000 people employed at its peak.

 

Credit: Foreign Affairs 2024-08-27

 

 

 

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[nobodysfriend]

4 hours ago, Social Media said:

This failure against COVID-19 serves as a sobering reminder of the growing biological threats that the world faces, both natural and human-made.

 

4 hours ago, Social Media said:

Over the past 60 years, scientists have gained profound insights into both molecular and human biology, leading to the development of highly lethal and effective pathogens. They have mastered techniques to create viruses that can evade immunity, engineer them to spread more efficiently through the air, and even increase their deadliness.

 

I just wait for the first appearance of a lethal , man made copy of the coronavirus .

 

Covid 19 has shown how easily a pandemic can affect global supply chains and shut down about everything ...

Some well paid scientists are since busy trying to create the perfect bio weapon deep down in secret state owned , underground laboratories .

I am sure of that , biological warfare enables the country that uses it first , to eliminate their enemies without a shot being fired . ( provided they have the vaccine against it ) .

 

Which country may be the first to use that ...?

China ?

America ?

North Korea ?

Russia ?

Iran ?

Israel ?

 

May be they already have it ready and just wait for the good timing ...?

 

 

 

 

 

[newbee2022]

5 hours ago, Social Media said:

To prevent such a disaster, world leaders must prioritize the strengthening of defenses against human-made pathogens. This

Well, that's a wish. Will never happen as long we see our neighbors as enemies.😳

[MicroB]

21 hours ago, nobodysfriend said:

 

 

I just wait for the first appearance of a lethal , man made copy of the coronavirus .

 

Covid 19 has shown how easily a pandemic can affect global supply chains and shut down about everything ...

Some well paid scientists are since busy trying to create the perfect bio weapon deep down in secret state owned , underground laboratories .

I am sure of that , biological warfare enables the country that uses it first , to eliminate their enemies without a shot being fired . ( provided they have the vaccine against it ) .

 

Which country may be the first to use that ...?

China ?

America ?

North Korea ?

Russia ?

Iran ?

Israel ?

 

May be they already have it ready and just wait for the good timing ...?

 

 

 

 

 

 

As the (hackneyed) article stated, there is quite a long history in the deployment of BW (eg the deliberate infection of pack animals during WW1).

 

One example not cited was the deployment of Francisella tularensis against Germany Panzer units by the USSR around about 1942. Rabbit fever won't kill a lot of people, but it makes you sick. and records showed that it did impact operational effectiveness of tank crews, for a short while.

 

Ken Alibek (anglicised name) was an Uzbek in the Soviet military in the 1980-90s. He's written a few accounts of the Soviet BW programme. What was interesting was how scientists were recruited. In the USSR, most life scientists were usually qualified medical doctors first, as was Alibek. Yersinia pestis (plague) is endemic in central asia. The Russians became genuinely very knowledgeable about this bug. Alibek was recruited as he was promised his research would be about developing new therapies to combat the Plague. What he actually did was study antibiotic resistance in Y. pestis. And as part of that, they developed antibiotic resistant strains. The Russians became so adept at handling this bug, that they developed attenuated strains (harmless), which became their lab rat bug. In the West the lab rat bug is Escherichia coli ("E coli"). Most strains are harmless, and virulant strains, in a lab setting, are fine to work with. The first bacterium to have its genome decoded was E. coli. Much of modern medicine and gene therapy is based on knowledge gleaned from studying E. coli.

 

When the Soviet Union collapsed, he found himself serving in the new Russian Army, and was basically told because he was ethnically Uzbek, he would not be promoted. He became aware there was work going on that broke a few treaties, and so defected and spilled the beans. He later on set up his own Biotech company in the US.

 

Its a lot harder than people suppose to "weaponise" biological material. You generally need the resources of a state. Its not like the movies. Aum Shinryko tried it, and failed, and yet they had access to vast resources, through setting up front tech companies, and infiltrating the Japanese scientific community. They tried spraying botulinum toxin by driving a van around Kyoto Palace. No one died, no one even got sick. 5mg of botulinum, in principle, is enough to wipe out Watford. Botulinum toxin is also known as Botox. People has botox parties handling what is a potential biological weapon. Botulinum temporarily  paralyses muscles. If you ingest it, it makes you very sick. Surgeons routinely use it during certain open chest surgeries. Its used in urology to control bladder spasms among paraplegics. Its used to temporsrily reduce the appearance of wrinkles.  All that Botox swimming around, but nothing in the way of terrorist attacks using it. During my career, I am aware of many incidents, most open source, or individuals attempting terroristic attacks using biological material. In nearly every case, mass casualties never occured; the one that worked was the cult in Oregon who wanted to rig a local election, by getting voters sick, so their voters could swing it.

 

The head of the Iraqi BW programme was a female scientists, who had trained at the University of East Anglia, studying plant disease. I was at Strathclyde University, and we had Iraqis in the Microbiology department, studying the food spoilage by fungi, and how these fungo produced mycotoxins, a super lethal class of toxin. When GW1 kicked off, they were rounded up in the middle of the night. Iraq threw a lot of resources at BW, a lot of knowledgeable people  but still failed to produced effective deployed weapons.

 

Amerithrax was when weaponised Anthrax was put in the mail. Probably thousands of people exposed, but only 2 died, and one of them was in their 90s.

 

The Biological Weapons Convention permits signatories to produce limited amounts for defensive purposes; to study how to detect, how to protect. Hence weaponised Anthrax in the US existed. Weaponised spores have a coating to extend life (spores, when they come into contact with water, will germinate, and will only cause a mild disease; subcutaneous Anthrax infection is a thing among farmers, and is easily treated). Long distance detection involves some imaging techniques such as Lidar, as well as other technologies that can be built into drones.

 

BW detection as a field, is quite young. When the Coalition deployed for GW1, there was no biological defence in use. Solutions had to be quickly cobbled together. The Americans had a pickup that a a prototype system developed in the 70s, that was pulled out of storage, and was driven around the desert. The Brits got RAMC lab techs in Bahrain, and purchased some commercial ATP detectors; ATP is a feature of life. Detect ATP, and you detect life. The theory was that a released BW cloud could be detected by measuring a sudden spike in ATP from the back of a Land Rover. The RAF base had daily bio attack alarms, until they figured out that low tide exposed seaweed beds, and release of plant particles......

 

But the USSR, China et al had bio weapons. Why didn't we have anything to detect or defend against them? Because WW3 was going to fought on the plains of West Germany. Available technologies would have been based on detecing biological aerosol; nothing was  really available to instantly detect the nature of that aerosol. But Europe has a high background of biological material called pollen. The British Army's mantra was "Survive to Fight"; the assemption was that WW3 would be fought in DS3 or DS4 for the entrity (noddy suits), basically in a chemical rain. There would be no point in trying to detect anything.,

 

When Iraq invaded Kuwait, that changed. We knew he had an active BW programme. We knew Saddam had used nerve agent in combat (Halabja). But probably he didn't have enough of the stuff to go full Tonto; it was still a special munition to be used on special occasion. So there was more of a need to do point testing; that crashed SCUD, did it have mustard? And being desert, there is a very low biological background.

 

Following GW1, NATO developed more of a capability, and some of that mid-90s kit is on display at the IWM in London. Some of the work in recent years is pretty cool, and will likely influence medical diagnostics. There has been running for a few years a literal Tricorder competition from the US government; can someone in Indistry develop a universal medical diagnostic scanner like in Star Trek. And some start ups are getting close. The DHS funded a project to detect unknown biological threats (detect things you don't know are a threat), which sounds an impossibility, but it got people thinking about the nature of virulance, signatures of manipulation (typically restriction enzyme sites as evidence of manipulation not seen in nature, or maybe specific antibiotic resistance markers). The winner of that round I think proposed an array of 200,000 markers associated with disease.

 

The major biological threat is not from a lab down the road. Its from nature. Every Pandemic is associated with a change in human behaviour. Flu crossed from birds to pigs to man about the same time as someone figured out pig stys. The Black Death is associated with trade and the emergence of the city. Spanish Flu, as a pandemic, occurred because the end of a World War followed by huge movements of people as everyone went home. Polio pandemics emerged because of better sewage systems for the middle class resulted in less innate immunity to the Polio virus (Polio disportionatly affected middle class kids. Poor kids were exposed at a young age to more <deleted>, and built up an immunity).  Mao flu at the end of the 50s I suspect is related to the end of the Chinese Civil War, and the strife that followed that, with the Red Terror etc. Hong Kong Flue of 68; British Intelligence picked up reports of that first in Canton, so I think related to The Great Leap forward, which saw biblical movements of people in China into cities etc. The HIV pandemic (its easily forgotten, this is still a Pandemic) because of changing human behaviours. In the late 90s, Europe saw a massive increase in tick borne disease, which was  at first blamed on global warming (the ticks moving North), but was actually the result of the fall of Communism leading to the opening up of vast areas to the public for hunting, trekking, leisure activities, and resulting more tick bites...... Covid-19 because of globalisation (corporations forcing Chinese smallholders into previously unfarmed areas, coming into contact with more unknown threats, coupled to Wuhan, through the car and textile industries, becoming internationally connected (the disease went straight from Wuhan to Italy and the US West Coast).  The next emerging infectious disease (EID) might well come from melting glaciers, so a pandemic emerging because of human behaviour.

 

I know the EU and the US are investing heavily into biosecurity; not just manmade threats, but these EIDs. What detection technologies are there out their, what therapies are available, how secure is the medical supply chain to disruption. Syndromic surveillance might be the simplest answer. Syndromic surveillance is just the reporting of disease clusters through tracking symptoms. The Brits tried this in GW1; giving MOs special sat phones to report non-specific symptoms among squaddies exposed to Camelpox etc, and then some team of scientists at DSTL would be engaged in cluster analysis. Didn't work as the MOs didn;t fully understand the phones. A few years later, the French got the system working by detecting anthrax cases among troops in French Guyane,  but the determination made in Paris. Promed is a website that using crowd sourcing of news reports around the world, plus a panel of doctors to give some interpretation, and thats pretty good at picking up clusters of something-going-on, and it might have been one of the sites that was picking up COVD-19 in 2019.

 

[nobodysfriend]

56 minutes ago, MicroB said:

The major biological threat is not from a lab down the road. Its from nature.

I thought that as well ...

If you accept the idea that all life on this planet has it's place in regulated , self balancing ecosystems and biosphere , the human race is a factor that disturbes  this balance that is needed for further evolution .

This planet has a disease , and it is it's own dominant species .

Will Nature react to this threat by creating virus borne pandemics to reduce the predator ?

Covid 19 , apparently , resulted of a zoonotic transmission .

 

I don't know if the planet can be considered a "living being " with a consciousness ?

A consciousness that works on a different , planetary timescale ?

Probably not .

But the Idea that Nature itself will find a way to eliminate a threat to it's own existence is quite pleasing in my eyes ...

But It would not fit well into my " Astrophilosophy " , that is based on the universal capabilitiy of species to survive in their own environment by not disturbing the natural balance of their respective biosphere .

And therefore get the possibility to further evolve ...

But that is another story ...

 

56 minutes ago, MicroB said:

The next emerging infectious disease (EID) might well come from melting glaciers, so a pandemic emerging because of human behaviour.

 

A deadly pathogen buried under ice for thousands of years ?

And revived once it is liberated by the melting glaciers ?

Why not ? ... it is a possibility ...

 

Anyway , thank you for this well written article that provides a lot of useful insider infos ...

have you been working in this field ?