Is Boston doomed?

Part 3

by Michael Crowley

If it's any comfort, a nuclear attack is thought to be the least likely form of modern terrorism. That's because it's easier for terrorists to get hold of the materials that go into chemical and biological weapons.

Supreme Truth loosed the nerve gas sarin on the Tokyo subway, leaving just 12 dead on the most crowded railway in the world. But their attack was about as inefficient as it could be. The cult members simply punctured their containers of sarin, and people were sickened by the evaporating fumes.

Both chemical and biological weapons have the potential to be far more deadly. Spread widely into the air, they could kill thousands of people easily. That could be done with an aerosol mist, like our hypothetical fifth-inning crop duster, or with a poisoned Oklahoma City-style bomb.

Biological weapons, the more deadly of the two, are based on the idea of cultivating and setting loose nature's most virulent organisms: anthrax, dengue fever, typhus, botulism, yersinia pestis, plague, malaria, or the alarmingly named Q fever.

Advancing technology has made biological weapons cheap and difficult to detect. One former arms-control official told Scientific American magazine she was " `absolutely convinced' that a major biological arsenal could be built with $10,000 worth of equipment in a room 15 feet by 15."

In 1995, a white-supremacist lab technician mail-ordered from a biomedical lab three vials of the bacterium that causes bubonic plague. And during the 1994 ebola outbreak in Zaire, a group of Supreme Truth members traveled to the country, under the guise of a humanitarian mission, hoping to bring home a sample of the virus -- which, you'll recall, causes its victims to bleed from every orifice before they die -- for terrorist use.

In fact, biological weapons can be even deadlier than the kind of small nuclear bomb a terrorist today might build. Thirty thousand to 100,000 people might die if a bomb carrying anthrax spores exploded in downtown Washington, according to one government estimate. (The US government should know: it's been a biological-warfare pacesetter. During the Cold War, the US considered building a plant capable of breeding 130 million disease-spreading mosquitoes a month.)

Michael Moodie, president of Washington's Chemical and Biological Arms Control Institute (CBACI), says the FleetCenter -- where more than 20,000 people attend a typical Celtics or Bruins game -- would be a prime target for this kind of attack. It would take a fairly smart terrorist with some technical knowledge of the arena's air-conditioning and ventilation system. But if someone aerosoled dengue fever into the right vents, thousands of fans would spread out into the city with their newly acquired, highly infectious disease. Within a couple of days the aches and fever would begin, and TV news would report a mysterious new illness in the city. By then, an epidemic would be under way.

And since the effects of an attack like this take time to kick in, a terrorist could be out of the country before the first victims started throwing up.

Perhaps most dishearteningly, a terrorist needn't infiltrate anyplace at all to kill thousands.

We've seen the airplane at work. Or, in another scenario envisioned by CBACI, a terrorist might fit a taxicab with a tank that sprays anthrax from its trunk. A weekday afternoon spinning around highly populated areas of town -- the Common, the financial district, maybe up to Harvard Square (for Commencement) -- would be enough to plant spores in the lungs of tens of thousands of people, who would happily carry on with their lives for two or three days. That is, until they came down with high fevers, started vomiting and aching all over, and developed bleeding lesions. Thousands, maybe tens of thousands would die.

Scientists even believe that biological weapons can be designed to carry ethnic preferences. Whites, for instance, are 10 times more likely than blacks to survive a disease called Rift Valley fever -- a disquieting fact in a city famous for racial strife.

Chemical weapons are even easier to acquire, build, and deliver than their biological counterparts. (For example, a common chemical used to make ballpoint-pen ink can also be turned into mustard gas.) They may also have the most horrific effects. Chemical weapons -- such as sarin, VX, and hydrogen cyanide -- typically act swiftly and excruciatingly. Mustard gas, for one, doesn't aim to kill so much as torture its victims. Its task is to melt flesh. After the horror of soldiers coughing up their lungs in the trenches of World War I, the gas was banned under international law.

It requires a higher exposure to chemical weapons than biological ones to cause death, but they can still be used for mass killing. The World Trade Center bombers loaded their bomb with hydrogen cyanide, and according to the Henry L. Stimson Center, in Washington, had the nerve agent not been vaporized in the blast, everyone in the building could have been dead within six minutes. In case you were wondering, about 4500 people work in the Prudential tower.

The Boston T is another glaring target for a possible chemical or biological attack. Hundreds, maybe thousands of people would be exposed to the vapors from just a few packages left on Green Line trains during afternoon rush hour. (In fact, federal and local officials scrambled this January when the FBI received word of a threatened subway attack.)

"There are no safeguards to our system," admits Mike Rolince, a special agent who handles terrorism issues in the FBI's Boston office. "We don't have the wherewithal to, nor do we want to, stop every person who rides the T."

At least it's not as easy as some people think to poison a city's water supply. That would take vast amounts of chemicals or bacteria, which are often neutralized by sunlight and chlorine. Small consolation.

Part 4

Michael Crowley can be reached at mcrowley[a]phx.com.