Biological warfare is not expected in the foreseeable future

How effective are biological weapons

"Expert" No. 20-2014

Humanity has long been trying to use bacteria and viruses for self-destruction.

The corpses of animals and people who died from infections were used by the Turks and Mongols to infect water sources and water supply systems. Trebuchets – throwing tools – were used in the Middle Ages to throw corpses, severed heads and excrement at besieged cities. The most famous example is the siege by the Tatar–Mongols of the Crimean Kafa, present-day Feodosia, in 1346. An epidemic of plague broke out among the troops of the Golden Horde. Khan Janibek decided, by throwing plague corpses at the fortress, to get rid of the sources of infection and cause damage to the city. An epidemic really started in the fortress, and it fell. The Genoese, who owned Kafa, fled to their homeland. It is believed that this contributed to the penetration of the "black death" into Europe, where it claimed about a third of the population. However, Janibek did not manage to enjoy the fruits of victory, he too was forced to flee from the fortress in order to save his army.

On the territory of the present-day United States, the British general Jeffrey Amherst became famous, who offered to give blankets of smallpox patients to the Indians who rebelled in 1763.

Anthrax and SAP were tried to be used in the First World War. And with its completion, many governments, inspired by the prospect of obtaining a cheap and effective tool for destroying enemy manpower, launched programs to create bacteriological weapons.

The Japanese program became the most famous, the details of which were revealed in the materials of the trial of its participants and the documentary books by Morimura Seiichi, Mikhail and Nadezhda Supotnitsky. In 1935-1936, two secret formations were deployed in Manchuria by order of Emperor Hirohito, who received the code names "detachment 731" and "detachment 100". In parallel with them, similar "Nami" and "Hey" detachments worked in Central and Southern China. Only in detachment 731 there were more than 3 thousand employees, including the most prominent bacteriologists of Japan. Their task was to create bacteriological weapons to fight the USSR, China and Mongolia. The special formation received a serious production base, which allowed, according to the testimony of employees, to produce up to 300 kg of plague bacteria monthly, and solid funding.

The Japanese were working on the use of pathogens of plague, cholera, gas gangrene, anthrax, typhoid fever. Experiments were conducted not only on animals, but also on Soviet and Chinese prisoners, called "logs", for whom an internal prison for 300-400 people was organized. The consumption of "logs" was at least 600 pieces per year. There were 4.5 thousand flea breeding nurseries in detachment 731, which allowed receiving tens of millions of parasites. Tens of thousands of rats and mice harvested by the Kwantung Army were used for this purpose.

But contrary to rosy expectations, the Japanese faced a lot of problems. They bet on the plague. The fear of its past epidemics forced European countries in the early 1930s to exclude the plague bacillus from the development of bacteriological weapons. The head of the program, a talented scientist Ishii Shiro (pictured), decided: since plague bacteria are not the object of research in Europe, Europeans, in principle, cannot have reliable means of protection against them. However, the plague bacillus rapidly lost its virulent properties in laboratory conditions. I had to cultivate it on "logs". The Japanese managed to reduce the infectious dose of the plague pathogen for humans by about 60 times. But instability became the price for the growth of virulence: bacteria could lose their properties during production, storage and use.

"The virulence of the plague pathogen had to be maintained until it entered the victim's body. And as this task was solved in the technological chain of creating stocks of biological weapons, the “powerful weapons of the poor” began to rapidly become more expensive, and its power began to cause doubts among the “lower ranks” of the detachment. The original idea of spraying bacteria from airplanes didn't work – people didn't get infected. I had to use infected fleas in ceramic bombs. But it is possible to infect a flea only from a plague rat at a short stage of sepsis. And for the activity of insects, a certain temperature and humidity were needed. Infected fleas did not live for a long time, new batches of insects and rats were required. Fleas suffocated in ammunition, most of them died when they were blown up, and the survivors broke their paws when they fell on the target. To continue the work, more and more “logs”, experimental animals, researchers and other resources that were scarce during the war were needed. As a result, Ishii never managed to get ammunition suitable for mass destruction of enemy troops and population, nor to develop an effective vaccine that protects against the plague," says Mikhail Supotnitsky, a military microbiologist, colonel of the reserve medical service. – At the same time, Soviet microbiologists were ahead of the Japanese. A year before the Great Patriotic War, we launched a live plague dry vaccine into mass production. When the Soviet offensive in Manchuria began in 1945, 99.9 percent of the personnel were vaccinated by it. Our troops passed through areas where epidemics of pulmonary and bubonic plague were raging at that time, but not a single Soviet soldier fell ill with them."

However, the activities of the Japanese special detachments have brought their benefits. In addition to extensive bacteriological experiments, they have accumulated a large number of data on extreme conditions. "Logs" were tested for survival in a centrifuge, under X-ray radiation, a large number of experiments were conducted on frostbite, replacement of human blood with the blood of monkeys and horses, resistance to poisons and electric current, removal of individual organs. This largely contributed to the progress of post-war Japanese medicine. And the results of the bacteriological program were handed over by its leaders to the Americans in exchange for their immunity.

A new wave of enthusiasm in the creation of bacteriological weapons was caused by a discovery made after the war. The success of inhalation infection does not depend on the number of bacteria that a person inhaled, but on the dispersion of the aerosol of the damaging agent. Aerosols with particles less than 5 microns give the greatest efficiency, only they can reach the alveoli. For comparison: the length of the plague wand ranges from 1 to 3 microns. "Experiments on the creation of biological weapons had to be started anew. The development of biological weapons has received huge funding, and at the same time many of its varieties have appeared. Many of them were tested by the Americans during the Korean Peninsula War. But their performance was lower than expected. It was difficult to obtain a fine aerosol, as the pressure in the sprayer increased, the bacteria died. The aerosol behaved unpredictably in the atmosphere, and atmospheric impurities had a detrimental effect on bacteria. It is also difficult to obtain a finely dispersed freeze-dried preparation, and, in addition, it cures during storage and enlarges when sprayed. Bacteriological weapons turned out to be too expensive. As a result, offensive biological weapons programs have been declining since the late 1950s," explains Mikhail Supotnitsky.

The difficulties of working with bacteria also explain their low success in bio-attacks. The organization "Aum Shinrikyo" unsuccessfully sprayed anthrax spores in the center of Tokyo. Despite the allure of a cheap and frightening method of mass murder, there were not so many successes. In 1984, a religious sect of Rajneeshists managed to infect 751 Dallas residents with salmonella. And in 2001, letters with anthrax made a lot of noise in the USA. "The main feature of this biotact is its professional execution. Envelopes were sent to several media outlets and politicians with a special recipe intended for equipping American biological munitions – fine powder of the anthrax causative agent of the Ames strain isolated from a sick cow in 1981. This strain is very convenient for combat use in Russia and third world countries: it is resistant to penicillins and cephalosporins, commonly used in our country for the treatment of anthrax, and is also able to overcome the effects of vaccines. In total, as a result of the terrorist attack, there were 22 victims, five of them died, – says Mikhail Supotnitsky. – The topic of biological weapons and bioterrorism is used by Western countries for political and military blackmail of their opponents. US Secretary of State Colin Powell waved a test tube with some kind of powder at the UN, calling it Saddam's biological weapon, which is nonsense for experts. Biological weapons are special ammunition and their means of delivery, not microorganisms in a test tube. In the United States itself, to date, not a single research site has been closed where biological munitions are tested, nor a single research institute where it is being developed. At the same time, back in 2001, the United States withdrew from the biological weapons control regime."

Citizen scientists also contribute. At the end of 2011, a stir was made by Dutch researchers who managed to refine the H5N1 strain of avian influenza. The original virus, despite its high lethality and virulence, killed only a few hundred people, since it was rarely transmitted from person to person. Scientists with the money of the National Institutes of Health of the USA managed to get a form of the virus that spreads easily by airborne droplets in just five mutations. It was discussed that its entry into the open environment could lead to the death of millions of people. The most fierce controversy was caused by the issue of the right to publish a technique for obtaining a deadly virus, which could be used not only with purely good intentions.

The concerns of the public are caused by the work on the creation of synthetic life. Back in 2010, a bacterium with a completely artificial genome was obtained. However, experts do not believe that the results of genetic engineering and "synthetic life" can pose a more serious threat than natural pathogens. "Natural life forms, selected during evolution for many millions of years, are well adapted to the environment and are "balanced" – the activity of individual genes is coordinated. The introduction of additional genes, as a rule, disrupts this balance and generally reduces the fitness of the body, except for very special conditions, such as, for example, the constant presence of an antibiotic. This is true not only for bacteria, but also for all genetically modified organisms. All of them, once in their natural habitat, will be worse adapted than the ancestral forms. And in the field of "synthetic life" science is taking only the first steps, and specially designed monsters, if they are possible at all, are very far away," Konstantin Severinov believes.

Portal "Eternal youth" http://vechnayamolodost.ru14.005.2014