The nation is mobilizing against a bioterrorist threat that political leaders warn could kill millions, yet the officials who have begun implementing the campaign have quietly begun focusing on modestly scaled germ attacks they believe pose a far greater danger.
Amid warnings from President Clinton and other political leaders that germ warfare could unleash havoc of near-biblical proportions, 29 federal agencies are gearing up for a federal civil defense effort that may spend $1.3 billion next year.But operational officials say they will concentrate less on the mass terror attacks that could be unleashed by only a few of the most sophisticated terrorists and more on smaller-scale assaults that are within the technical grasp of many terrorist and dissident groups.
They say they are worried less by the threat of an aircraft fitted with crop-dusting equipment that could theoretically wipe out cities with an aerosol of anthrax spores than by the dangers of a garden pesticide dispenser that might kill several hundred people in a subway. They see less chance of someone contaminating a city water system than of someone spreading illness to dozens of people by spreading salmonella bacteria on a restaurant's food.
"We want to help cities deal with these much more likely small events that could be from many more organizations," says Dr. Robert Knouss, the assistant surgeon general who is director of the U.S. Office of Emergency Preparedness. "Somebody spraying salmonella (bacteria) on a salad bar is just lot more likely than the guy spraying 50 kilograms of anthrax spores over Washington, D.C."
The new focus of the government effort against bioterrorism underscores the difficulties authorities face in trying to calculate risks and prepare defenses against a threat that so far has not killed a single American.
Unlike other security threats, germ terrorism has no history, no past examples to show how it might inflict death. The only real bioterrorism incident in U.S. history occurred in 1984, when members of the Rajneeshee cult in Oregon sprayed salmonella bacteria on 10 local salad bars in an effort to dampen voter turnout and throw an election their way. When it was over, 751 people had come down with a diarrheal illness. No one died.
Clinton, responding to increased concern about the potential danger, last month called for a 30 percent increase in federal counterterrorism spending. That set off a debate among experts about how much of a threat really exists and what should be done, and spent, to counter it.
Germ warfare technologies have been advancing steadily around the world - especially in countries such as Iraq and Iran that can't hope to confront the United States with conventional arms.
Germ bombs, like chemical weapons, give their users the theoretical capability to inflict the kind of casualties that were previously associated only with a major military attack.