Special Report: Aftermath of Terror

Old Soviet threat drives Smallpox plan, with past returning to haunt the U.S.

By MARILYN CHASE, Staff Reporter of THE WALL STREET JOURNAL

The crash program to churn out 300 million doses of smallpox vaccine is a hedge against fears that the virus, left over from Soviet weapons stocks and leaked to terrorists, could be unleashed against a populace with waning immunity.

A lot of research has gone into making smallpox suitable for use in weapons. In its heyday, the former Soviet bioweapons program churned out 20 tons of smallpox a year by injecting the virus into fertilized eggs. Later, the Soviet Union upgraded its production, cultivating the virus in cultures of monkey kidney cells inside huge bioreactors. The Soviet Union planned for a wartime capacity of 100 tons a year.

Smallpox virus, concentrated and treated with chemicals to prevent bacterial contamination, was produced for pouring into bomblets, for packing in cluster bombs for deployment aboard TU-95 long-range strategic bombers, and for loading onto warheads of intercontinental ballistic missiles.

The U.S. is believed to have done smallpox research but never turned it into a weapon.

Doomsday weapons like the Soviet Union's amplify primitive attempts of centuries past. British soldiers in the French and Indian War gave tribes contaminated blankets from a smallpox hospital in 1763.

Compared to anthrax, a common soil bacterium that naturally infects cattle, smallpox is harder to obtain. Smallpox only infects humans, and outbreaks were quelled over two decades ago. No natural reservoir exists in soil or animals. Nor does smallpox form hardened spores that stay in suspended animation indefinitely, as does anthrax.

However, the techniques of manufacturing smallpox are not overwhelmingly complicated, contends Kenneth Alibek, a former top official of the Soviet program known as Biopreparat, and now vice president of Hadron Inc., a defense-security firm in Annandale, Va. "The virus is quite stable," he says, "and could survive for days in the air if there is no sunlight."

Others insist turning smallpox into a weapon requires more expertise than does anthrax. "This isn't backroom laboratory stuff," contends Terry Taylor, a former United Nations weapons inspector who now heads the Washington office of the International Institute for Strategic Studies, a global security concern. "Although it's one of the hardier viruses, it's still difficult to get into wet or dry aerosol form for weapons."

Some experts worry that terrorists might choose a low-tech alternative to bombs, by deploying infected people as biological "suicide bombers." Infected people become contagious two days before the rash appears. But they are most contagious when the disease is full-blown, with distinctive pockmarks. By this time, sufferers are so weak and ill, it is improbable a stealth carrier could stroll undetected through a mall.

There is no treatment and no cure for smallpox, which has a 30% mortality among unvaccinated people. U.S. government scientists are testing one promising antiviral drug, cidofovir, made by Gilead Sciences of Foster City, Calif. Dr. Alibek argues the U.S. should push antiviral research much harder, as well as investigating substances to boost the immune defenses against the virus.

Encouragingly, Dr. Alibek says the conventional smallpox vaccine would work against even the most sophisticated of Soviet battle strains. "In my opinion, the old vaccine is good enough," he says. "We'll contain it. Many people will survive."

Who has smallpox virus now is a topic of anxious speculation. Circumstantial evidence suggests Iraq and North Korea had the virus and might have tried to make it in to a weapon, says Jonathan Tucker, author of "Scourge," a history of smallpox. Other oft-mentioned candidate countries include Syria and Libya.