Scary scenarios
GERMS: Biological Weapons and America's Secret War. By Judith Miller, Stephen Engelberg and William Broad. Simon & Shuster, 367 pp., $27.00.
Though GERMS has been available in bookstores for only a few weeks, the current biowar being waged against the U.S. has already made it the unacknowledged source for more newspaper articles than any other book in recent history. Its observations have been parroted everywhere. The scientists and doctors who are quoted in the book have been transformed overnight into nationally recognized op-ed columnists and interviewees. Judith Miller has become a fixture on television shows. Consequently, in a sense we are all "reading" this book day by day, whether or not we ever hold it in our hands.
Humanity's heedless relationship with bioweaponry goes back to the period between the two world wars. The authors, New York Times reporters with special expertise in the Mideast, national security and general science, list 20th-century "Canada, France, Germany, Japan, the Soviet Union and the United Kingdom" as among the first countries to research the possibility of biological warfare. "All understood that the weapons they were developing were fundamentally different from bombs and bullets, grenades and missiles. . . . These munitions were alive. They could multiply exponentially and, if highly contagious, spread like wildfire. Strangest of all, given war's din, they worked silently."
