mts%gn@cdp.uucp (09/18/89)
Media Transcription Service : Defence Information,
David & Susan Stott,
12 Sheri Drive, NEWTON-LE-WILLOWS,
Warrington. WA12 8PT
Telephone: Newton-le-Willows 0925 226647
--------------------------------------------------
TRANSCRIPT Ref No. 531
BBC Radio 4 - "Woman's Hour"
Thursday, 7th September, 1989
Report featuring comment by Stephen Rose, Dr. Susan Mayer and
Sir Geoffrey Johnson-Smith
re. Biological Weapons
Presenter (Jenni Murray):
"...they (CW) are not the only indiscriminate way of killing:
biological weapons kill by giving people diseases, and some scientific
researchers are afraid that work done ostensibly for good could some
day be used for evil."
Reporter (Wendy Barnaby):
"...Although biological warfare is not new, it has not been a
popular way of making war - it is clumsy and hard to control. If you
let plague or smallpox loose, your own troops might become infected as
well as the enemy. Nevertheless, fears that this sort of warfare could
become widespread produced the 1972 Biological Weapons Convention -
which Britain has signed - outlawing the development or use of these
weapons. But the convention doesn't prohibit research, which these
days is on the increase in many countries..."
Stephen Rose (Professor of Biology, Open University):
"We know more about the United States than anywhere else because
America is very open about this. All the contracts are published and
you can study the titles of the contracts and get a feeling for what
is going on. And there are something like eighty million dollars'
worth per year of contracts let - sixty or seventy contracts, I think,
at the last count, for work in this area in the United States. In the
U.K., it is very difficult to find out what is going on. We know
something about some of the contracts. Other countries that we know
are engaged in research in this area include France - and the French
are even more secretive than the British are about what is going on -
and we have to assume there must be a research effort in this
direction in the Soviet Union as well."
Reporter:
"This burgeoning of interest has been brought about largely by
the new techniques of genetic engineering: isolating and manipulating
specific genes. To find out how this is done, I visited the
laboratories of the National Institute for Medical Research, where I
met Dr Barbara Skeen. Her work has nothing to do with weapons but, as
a molecular biologist, she uses genetic engineering techniques."
(Then followed a brief description of the sort of techniques used to
separate, clean, identify and label genetic material - DNA - for use
in experimentation.)
Reporter:
"These techniques could be used to make biological weapons, which
would kill people by infecting them with cholera, plague, typhoid or
more exotic diseases. Genetic engineers could manipulate the genes of
an organism to make them lethal. They could do that in several
different ways."
Stephen Rose:
"Firstly, you could take organisms which there are standard
vaccination programmes against - cholera or typhoid or whatever - and
you could manipulate their structure genetically so that, in fact, you
couldn't get a vaccination programme to work against them. Secondly,
you could take existing organisms which are not poisonous, not
pathogenic, like common gut bugs for instance, and you could insert
into them the genes which turn them from non-poisonous into poisonous
organisms. Thirdly, one other class of weapons are not, if you like,
biological organisms themselves but the products, the poisonous
products, of biological organisms - things like anthrax or botulinus,
for example. These are extremely toxic substances which can presently
only be produced in very small quantities. And one possible role which
is being intensively researched at the moment of genetic engineering,
is to produce organisms which are tailored to mass-produce these
toxins in much larger quantity than exist at the moment."
Reporter:
"So, poisons like anthrax or botulinus, which occur naturally
only in very small amounts, could be produced in much larger
quantities and then used indiscriminately against a population
...(tape of WWII radio broadcast) The last thing the Chinese expected
in 1942 was an outbreak of plague. The Japanese used everything they
could get their hands on to win the war, even the services of the
common rat. In biological warfare, just as important as the bacteria
themselves is a means of delivering them, and this is as true today as
it was then."
Stephen Rose:
"All weapon systems - and I use the word 'systems' here - consist
both of a weapon and of a distribution system, whether it is a shell
that you pack it in or a missile that you pack it in or an aerosol
spray that you spray or whatever else it might be. So anyone
interested in weapons has to be concerned both with the delivery
systems and with the actual poisonous or chemical or explosive product
itself."
Reporter:
"At the University of Bristol, work is being done which could be
used to develop exactly this sort of delivery system although
ostensibly the project has nothing to do with biological weapons. Dr
Susan Mayer, of the Department of Veterinary Medicine, has resigned
because she is concerned that one of her colleague's research projects
- which is being funded by the Ministry of Defence - could be
contributing to the development of biological warfare technology. At
the Veterinary School's calf-shed, she explained that the project
originally concentrated on bacteria that infect calves but when the
MoD offered to fund it, the focus changed to bacteria that infect
people. The idea is to develop an artificial lung which would
reproduce conditions in the human lung to see how bacteria can survive
there."
Dr Susan Mayer (formerly of Bristol University):
"I think what's happened with this area of science over the last
couple of years is that there have been some developments and people
have found that, although you may have bacteria in air and they may
die, when they actually go into an animal or a human's lung, because
it is quite moist in the lung, there are other conditions that are
favourable to survival of the bacteria, they will survive in the lung.
This project now wants to actually develop an artificial lung to mimic
those conditions in vitero."
Reporter:
"The 1972 convention does not prohibit this sort of research
provided it is done for defensive purposes. Just what this means was
explained by Sir Geoffrey Johnson-Smith, the Vice-chairman of the
Conservative Back Bench Committee on Defence."
Sir Geoffrey Johnson-Smith:
"Research that I know goes on is rather like with chemical
warfare, that we do want to be knowledgeable about what is possible in
this area with a view to taking protection and defensive measures. You
cannot properly protect yourself unless you know the potential threat.
But that doesn't mean you are going to have that knowledge in order to
use those awful weapons against anyone else. It is so that you can
protect yourself. Having an offensive capability is another ballgame
altogether."
Dr Susan Mayer:
"The Ministry of Defence's interest is obviously only as it will
apply to defence work and the interest that they have expressed is in
actually being able to sample the air and then knowing how infective
it is...to man, is their interest. And although on the face of it that
does seem a very defensive project, in that you could say, I've got my
troops, they have got their respirators on, we sampled the air, there
isn't many bacteria there, they can take their respirators off. But
you can use exactly the same information to decide how many bacteria
you need to put in a bomb, for instance. It's because there is no real
clear division between offensive and defensive measures - you have to
develop one to develop the other - that I find it so frightening that
the MoD are interested in this area of science."
Reporter:
"The MoD acknowledges that it is working on various bacteria:
anthrax, bacilliosis, cholera, pneumonic and bubonic plague and
typhoid. But it stresses that it is from a defensive perspective.
There is no doubt, however, that the new science is opening the way to
new weapons."
Stephen Rose:
"The new genetic engineering techniques produce a climate of
opinion in which everyone, military planners are beginning to look
again at the possibility of using biological weapons. In that context,
you need to know all sorts of things about the weapon systems. You
need to know how they spread, whether you can distribute them in
airborne, in aerosol particles - what happens if you spray them into
the air, for example? - and how they affect people; whether you can
develop filtration systems against them. And the Bristol project fits
very much into that context."
Reporter:
"Theoretically, then, the Bristol project could be used to make
biological weapons. But Sir Geoffrey Johnson-Smith says it is not even
in Britain's interest to have these weapons as part of its arsenal."
Sir Geoffrey Johnson-Smith:
"I also don't think it is in our defence interest - certainly not
in our political interest - to be a nation known as a nation
developing biological warfare; not in our defence interest because,
first, we are part of an alliance with a very strong conventional
capability to defend ourselves and, secondly, we also possess the
nuclear deterrent. So any nation that really wanted to destroy us by
biological warfare would understand that we have, way beyond these
islands, a capacity to destroy them. So why go and duplicate that
capacity with a biological capability? It doesn't make sense -
certainly on the economic grounds it doesn't, let alone the moral and
political grounds."
Stephen Rose:
"Biological weapons are perhaps even more indefensible than any
other category - other than nuclear weapons - because their effect
spreads so dramatically outside the immediate area of war, because
they may affect generations who are as yet unborn and because they are
wholly uncontrollable. They are not merely weapons of mass destruction
for the population against whom they are aimed but the whole point
about them is that their effects would spread indiscriminately, even
outside the boundaries of a country or a population with whom you
happen to be at war. There's no way that you can stop an epidemic of
this magnitude spreading once it has been started."
---
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