Germs: Biological Weapons and America's Secret War.

• Author: Crowley, Michael
• Position: Political booknotes: plague upon us

GERMS: Biological Weapons and America's Secret War by Judith Miller, Stephen Engelberg, and William Broad Simon & Schuster, $27.00 YEARS BEFORE ANTHRAX-BY-MAIL terrorism horrified America, Bill Clinton had a harrowing germ-war scare of his own. At the elite Renaissance Weekend in Hilton Head in 1997, a molecular biologist urged Clinton to read The Cobra Event, a thriller involving a mad scientist who unleashes a specially engineered virus in New York, causing victims to claw out their eyes and gobble their tongues. The plot may sound like the product of a high-school creative-writing class, but it badly spooked the president. Clinton began pushing the book on friends and fellow government officials, including House Speaker Newt Gingrich, and had Pentagon officials brief him on its plausibility. The response he got was not reassuring. From then on, in the words of one national security official, Clinton became "obsessed" with the threat of biological weapons. He grew haunted by the thought of a crop duster spraying disease over the Mall in Washington, and, in the last years of his presidency, he demanded a strong new government emphasis on preparing for such an attack.

In the wake of September 11 and the anthrax letters of the following weeks, Clinton's phobia, once snickered at by some, has gained a much wider resonance. The news that presumed associates of Osama bin Laden had an interest in crop dusters has spurred some Americans to stock up on pills and gas masks. But there remains a dispute about just how easy it would be to infect thousands, or even millions, of Americans with a single strike; plenty of credentialed scientists have dismissed biological weapons as too difficult for terrorists to acquire and use effectively.

The authors of Germs--three New York Times reporters who have long covered the subject: Judith Miller, Stephen Engelberg, and William Broad--are not so reassuring. After years of studying bioweapons, they conclude that, while the danger is sometimes needlessly exaggerated by policy-makers trying to alert the public (or swell their budgets), it is "real and rising." Although this has been a clear threat to American policy-makers for several years now, the other key conclusion of Germs is that a maddening combination of bureaucratic inertia, political infighting, intelligence failures, and sheer denial has left us vulnerable to both the death and public mayhem that would accompany a successful large-scale attack...