Here’s an insomnia-inducing thought: A suicidal Saudi decides to bring jihad to the
These are the kinds of scenarios that suggest themselves as you read Germs: Biological Weapons and America’s Secret War and why it makes poor bedtime reading. The second part of the subtitle is a bit misleading because the book really chronicles the war we’ve consistently not been waging but should have been: the war against bioterror.
It is, as they say, an ill wind, and some ill winds indeed have lofted this book out of the policy-wonk ghetto to which it might otherwise have been consigned and into the hands of the wide readership it deserves.
For Germs is no Hot Zone, Richard Preston’s un-put-down-able, thrillerlike account of Northern Virginia’s brush with the Ebola virus. This is a sober-sides book by a trio of New York Times heavyweights—veteran foreign correspondent Judith Miller, crack investigative reporter Stephen Engelberg, and Pulitzer-winning science writer William Broad. Despite a questionable and sometimes taxing structure that interweaves a half-dozen highly complex tales—the Soviet germ program, the effort to unmask Iraq’s bioweapons, the history of cults and germs, bureaucratic struggles in the Pentagon and White House—the book maintains momentum through its exhaustive reporting and spare, unsensational style.
Luckily—and not just for the authors—the book arrives at a time when most of us have recently acquired a working knowledge of the difference between anthrax spores and live bacteria, can define the meaning of “weaponized” when applied to germs, and may even have acquired the interesting piece of trivia that b. anthracis gets its name from the coal-black color of the skin lesion its cutaneous form produces. And so, as agar to bacteria, we are a reading public primed to provide a perfect breeding ground for the book’s central argument: that bioterror may be the biggest threat facing us and that we are woefully ill-equipped to deal with it. At the end of this book, one feels like running into the street screaming, “Forget missile shields! Get us some vaccines!”
For we don’t have them: not for Ebola or
Germs is never shrill or polemical, but chapter by chapter it builds a lawerly case for monumental
Yet another reason we should be asking the question: Why, exactly, do we have the CIA?
I bet the authors would have liked to revise their concluding chapter in the light of the last few weeks’ events. It opens with the heavy, measured tread of Times style: “Is the threat of germ weapons real or exaggerated? Our answer is both.” Oy vey. “Political leaders undermined their credibility by asserting that a biological attack against the