The Cobra Event - Страница 4

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The activity around Johnston Atoll in 1969 was officially a 'joint naval exercise,' but that was a cover for the fact that what was going on were hot field trials for the strategic use of biological weapons over large areas of territory. The trials had been gradually increasing in scope since 1964. At the peak of the trials there were enough ships involved to make up the fifth-largest navy in the world. This was as large a fleet as the naval forces used in the air tests of hydrogen bombs in the Pacific Ocean during the 1950s — a fact not lost on the Russians. Captain Yevlikov threaded his little vessel along the outskirts of a formidable naval force, wondering if he would get out alive.

The wave of bioparticles — the bio-aerosol — moved all night. It passed the monkey barges one by one, and later it passed over the Russian trawler. At four o'clock in the morning, the order came to bring the last barge home. All the monkeys had breathed the particles by then. The last tugboat's engines roared, and the crew drove the boat at full speed for the atoll. They wanted to get out of there in the worst way.

The monkeys were placed in cages in the monkey labs on Johnston Atoll. During the next three days, Mark Littleberry and the other scientists saw the effects of the hot agent called the Utah cocktail.

Half of the monkeys became sick and died. They coughed and coughed with Utah until their lungs burned up, but no moisture came out. The other half of the monkeys lived, and remained healthy. They were fine. No problems.

The infected monkeys always died. Once a monkey showed any signs of Utah, the animal was doomed. Not a single monkey became sick and recovered. In other words, the case-fatality rate for Utah in untreated primates was 100 percent. As to whether a primate became infected or not, it seemed to be random chance. Those animals that got one or two particles of Utah lodged in their lungs ended up dead. Those animals that got no particles in their lungs, or those animals that, for some reason, were able to resist one or two particles of Utah in the lungs, were fine. There was no such thing as a mild case of Utah.

This is typical of biological weapons. It is essentially impossible to completely exterminate a population with a biological weapon. On the other hand, it is quite easy to crash a population, reducing it by half or more in a few days.

The animals that had been in closed rooms belowdecks experienced the same death rate as the animals in the open air. Being in a closed room did not help. A bio-aerosol behaves like a gas. Bioparticles are not like nuclear fallout, which falls out, hence its name. The particles of a bioweapon are light and fluffy. Organic. They float in the air. They dance through the smallest cracks. You can't hide from a living hot agent in the air.

Day after day, Mark Littleberry walked along the monkey cages, looking in at the sick animals. They were hunched over, lethargic, broken. Some were deranged: the Utah had gone to the brain. The animals wheezed and coughed, but nothing came up, or they were curled up in the fetal position, having crashed and died.

The doctors took some of the animals away and killed them and opened them up to see what was going on inside them. Littleberry himself opened up many monkeys. He was most impressed with the fact that the animals looked fairly healthy inside. But if you tested a dead monkey's blood, you found that it was radiantly hot with Utah. This scared him. Later he would write in a classified report: 'Well-trained physicians might not recognize the signs of infection by a military weapon in a patient, especially if it is a mixed combination. Physicians should be warned that the effects of a weaponized organism on the human body may be very different from natural disease caused by the same organism.'

Then Littleberry began to see that the monkeys from the farthest barge were dying at the same rate as the monkeys in the barge nearest the release line. The hot agent was just as strong and deadly fifty miles downwind. After fifty miles of drift, the killing power of Utah had not diminished. This was completely unlike a chemical weapon. Sarin and Tabun, chemical nerve gases, lose killing power rapidly as they spread out. Utah was alive. Utah stayed alive. Utah needed to find blood. It needed to find a host. If it could find a host, it would make copies of itself explosively inside the host.

The tests had rendered an area of the Pacific Ocean larger than Los Angeles as hot as hell, in a biological sense. The scientists never found out how far the agent spread during that test, only that it went beyond the test area and kept going. It passed over the last barge and moved on through the night, undiminished in strength. It did not kill any fish or marine organisms, because they don't have lungs. If any sperm whales crashed and died, no one noticed.

Captain Yevlikov and his crew survived, all but the shocked man from the Ministry of Health, who had refused to wear a mask; his lungs shriveled; and they buried him at sea. The Utah grew up in little spots and colonies on the Soviet petri dishes. They froze some samples and carried them back to Vladivostok. It is believed that the frozen samples of Utah were flown by jet transport to a closed military facility known as the Institute of Applied Microbiology at Obolensk, south of Moscow, where the weapon was analyzed and Russian scientists began growing it in their laboratories. This may be how Russia obtained the American weaponsgrade strain of Utah for its own arsenal of strategic life forms. Captain Gennadi Yevlikov was given a medal for bravery and service to his country.

The rising sun over the Pacific Ocean on the morning following the test began to neutralize the Utah, killing its genetic material. Eventually it biodegraded, and no trace of it remained in the sea or in the air. It was totally gone, and all that was left was knowledge.

Invisible History (I.)

THE ROOSEVELT ROOM,

THE WHITE HOUSE, NOVEMBER 25, 1969

President Richard Nixon's prepared statement was very brief, and he took no questions from the press. Sticking to the text, he said that the United States was renouncing the first use of chemical weapons. Then he went on to what was clearly the more important subject to him: biological weapons. 'Second, biological warfare, which is commonly called germ warfare —' He shook the word germ with Nixonian emphasis, as if he shuddered to his jowls at the thought of germs. 'Germ warfare: this has massive, unpredictable, and potentially uncontrollable consequences. It may produce global epidemics and profoundly affect the health of future generations.'

He said that after consulting with experts he had decided that the United States of America would renounce the use of any form of biological weapons, and he was ordering the disposal of existing stocks of the weapons. 'Mankind already carries in its own hands too many of the seeds of its own destruction,' he said. 'By the examples that we set today, we hope to contribute to an atmosphere of peace and understanding between all nations. Thank you.' He walked off the podium without another word.

The next day, in an analysis of 'What Nixon Gave Up,' The New York Times noted rather skeptically that the President was repudiating only 'a few horrible and probably unusable weapons in the American arsenal to gain possible advantages of security for the nation and prestige for himself.' 'Informed sources' said that the chemical weapons given up by Nixon were expensive and unreliable. As for biological weapons, 'experts' said that the United States would have been unable to use them. 'In the first place, the germs and toxins (the dead but poisonous products of bacteria) stockpiled in refrigerated igloos at the Pine Bluff arsenal in Arkansas have never been tested; it is not clear what effect they would have on enemy forces or population.'

Of course the experts had it wrong. Either that or they lied to the Times. Nevertheless, their position prevailed. The idea that bioweapons were never fully tested, were never made to work, or are unusable is a myth that persists to this day. The existence of the Johnston Atoll Field Trials was not reported publicly and is unknown to most civilian scientists.

The trials, which went on steadily from 1964 to 1969, were successful far beyond the expectations of even the scientists involved. The results were clear. Biological weapons are strategic weapons that can be used to destroy an army or a city, or a nation. ('Tactical' weapons, as opposed to strategic weapons, are used in a more limited way, on a battlefield. Chemical weapons are tactical, not strategic, since it takes a large quantity of a chemical weapon to destroy a small number of enemies. There are only two kinds of strategic weapons in the world: nuclear and biological.)

The reasons for Richard Nixon's decision to end the American biological-weapons program were complicated. His intelligence people were telling him that the Russians were getting ready to embark on a crash biological program, and he hoped to encourage them not to do it. The Vietnam War protests were going on, and some protesters had focused on chemical and biological weapons. Not only did the protesters not want the weapons used on anyone by their government, they also did not want them stored near where they lived, or transported across the country. Nixon had apparently considered using biological weapons in Vietnam, but military planners couldn't figure out how to deploy them without sickening or killing vast numbers of civilians. Even so, the Pentagon was furious with Nixon for taking away a new strategic weapon.