William R. Clark, professor and chair emeritus of immunology at the University of California, Los Angeles, has been a research scientist for 30 years and has written a string of books for the general public. His latest, Bracing for Armageddon?, published by Oxford University Press in May, examines the science and politics of bioterrorism in the United States.
His conclusion: We shouldn't be so worried. Although the United States will have spent $50 billion on defense against a bioterrorism attack by the end of 2008, Clark argues that we have much more to fear from natural pandemic outbreaks, such as the viruses causing SARS and H5N1 avian flu. He reviews all the worst-case bioterror scenarios — from agricultural terrorism to poisoning the water supply; from genetically engineered pathogens to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention's official list of bioterrorist weapons — and writes: "It is almost inconceivable that any terrorist organization we know of in the world today, foreign or domestic, could on their own develop, from scratch, a bioweapon capable of causing mass casualties on American soil."
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M-M: When did you begin suspecting that our bioterrorism fears might be a tad exaggerated?
Clark: The more I looked into it, I thought, "Jeez, what are these guys talking about?" What are the odds that a terrorist group, no matter how well financed, would be able to create a bioterror weapon? I began looking into what it takes to really make a successful bioterrorism agent, and I just became very skeptical of this whole thing. The (United States) military gave up bioweapons 30 years ago. They're too undependable; they're too hard to use; they're too hard to make. Then I started checking around, and I found there's a whole literature out there of people who've been screaming for years that this whole bioterrorism thing is really overblown; it's not practical; it's never going to work. Aum Shinrikyo couldn't get it to work; those guys put millions and millions of dollars into it. So you think of a bunch of guys sitting in a cave in Afghanistan — they're sure as hell not going to do it. Is any government going to do it? No. So that made me very skeptical, and I went back to Oxford and said, "This whole thing's a crock." And they said, "But that's even more interesting!"
M-M: Thus the question mark at the end of the title, Bracing for Armageddon?
Clark: Yeah, exactly. Scientifically, it is a crock. And this really verges into the political, but we've spent $50 billion on it. So Oxford paid for me to take a trip back East and talk to a bunch of these voices that haven't been heard and interview them.
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