Category
📺
TVTranscript
00:00Transcription by CastingWords
00:30Transcription by CastingWords
01:00Transcription by CastingWords
01:02Transcription by CastingWords
01:04Transcription by CastingWords
01:06Synthetically manufactured chemical weapons like sarin and naturally occurring diseases like smallpox are inexpensive to manufacture and easy to spread.
01:16When they're released into the air by planes or packed into artillery shells or long-range missiles, they are capable of mass destruction.
01:28Transcription by CastingWords
01:30Transcription by CastingWords
01:32Since chemical and biological weapons claimed their first victim centuries ago, they've been denounced as immoral, a vile tool of the cowardly.
01:44The world community has repeatedly attempted to ban their use, but the temptation to use them has often been too great.
01:51All over the world, nations have continued to develop these deadly and inexpensive weapons.
02:01Many hiding their stockpiles and publicly denying their existence.
02:06One of the more recent examples occurred during the Gulf War.
02:13In 1995, Iraq admitted to having loaded lethal botulinum toxin and anthrax into warheads.
02:24These germ weapons were deployed at four sites, but reportedly never used.
02:31To this day, the scope of Iraq's biological warfare program remains cloaked in secrecy.
02:39Based on clues gathered over the past few years, intelligence officials now believe Iraq may be hiding enough deadly germ agents to kill all the people on Earth.
02:53Today, at least 11 other nations are also suspected of harboring secret germ warfare programs, including Iran, Syria, and North Korea.
03:05How farther research has progressed is nearly impossible to ascertain.
03:10Recent advances in microbiology have made this question even more pressing.
03:16Scientists claim they are only a few years away from one of the most important breakthroughs of all time.
03:22Deciphering the human genome.
03:29Mankind will soon possess the biochemical code for each of the 100,000 genes that determine every physical characteristic in the human body.
03:41When this knowledge becomes converted into technology, it will for sure be an enormous, a vast potential benefit, no question of that, in making people healthier, stronger, one hopes happier.
04:00But if history teaches us one lesson, it is that all previous technologies, from explosives to aviation to nuclear power, have been exploited, not only for human benefit, but also for hostile purposes.
04:19Already in a secret bio-warfare program carried out during the 1970s and 80s, Russian scientists used genetic engineering to transform agents of disease into potent weapons of war.
04:34Now, man's new understanding of genetic code opens the door to even more sinister possibilities.
04:41For instance, genetically engineered weapons could be used to target specific races or ethnic groups.
04:50Other potential applications are equally terrifying.
04:54If we learn how to manipulate what we are, how we think, how we develop, I suppose that must mean that there are potentials there, not only for killing, but for subjugating, dominating, exploiting.
05:12It's a kind of road down which it's obvious we must not go as a species.
05:22Mankind started down this frightening road over a thousand years ago.
05:28From the earliest times, combatants understood that tossing a dead body down a well was an effective way to poison an enemy's water supply.
05:40By the late 19th century, a moral taboo prevented the use of poison on the battlefield.
05:46No clear distinction was made between agents of disease and chemical weapons.
05:52Military leaders condemned both, calling their use dishonorable.
05:58Their repugnance for employing poison as an instrument of war was so strong that only the horrific stalemate of World War I could overcome it.
06:09The German advance of August 1914 into Belgium and France soon bogged down into a colossal battle of attrition along a hundred-mile front.
06:21Over the course of six months, more than a million casualties were caused without either side gaining an inch of ground.
06:31Both armies searched for a solution that would break the deadlock.
06:37In January of 1915, a chemist named Fritz Haber suggested to German Chief of Staff General Falkenhayn that poison gas might be an effective means to drive the enemy out of their trenches and into the open.
06:53Falkenhayn considered the use of gas unchivalrous, but he was desperate.
07:01He agreed to try it as an experiment.
07:05The German troops moved 700 tons of chlorine to the front near the Belgian town of Ypres.
07:14The work was done quietly under the cover of darkness.
07:19Haber supervised the placement of the delivery system, nearly 6,000 heavy metal cylinders as they were dug into the ground along the trenches.
07:29Well, the preparations were quite secret, but there were enough intelligence indications that should have made the British and the French aware.
07:38It's one of these classic situations, you know, what goes wrong when you don't spot what is going to happen.
07:44The secret plan was nearly subverted when German deserters alerted an Allied commander, producing as proof the protective mouth pads that had been distributed to them.
07:57They even named the date for the planned attack, but they were not taken seriously.
08:03On the afternoon of April 22nd, 1915, soldiers of the French 45th Algerian Division and the 87th Territorial Division stared from their trenches as a strange yellow-green cloud rolled towards them.
08:22As waves of this thick fog enveloped them, stricken soldiers clutched their throats and fell writhing to the ground.
08:35It was sheer panic. The units broke apart and started to flee.
08:42They were taken totally by surprise and the line broke. The Germans could have really gained at least a tactical advantage at that point, but they were not ready to exploit it and they didn't have the reserves on hand for it.
09:00The attack may have killed up to 3,000 men. Chlorine gas was dangerously asphyxiating and inflamed the lungs, creating a fluid that drowned its victims.
09:16The Allies were quick to respond, developing gas masks like the black veil respirator that filtered air through a cotton screen.
09:28Although uncomfortable to wear and awkward in combat, the masks proved extremely effective against both chlorine and the more potent phosgene gas.
09:41Five months later, at the Battle of Luz, the Allies launched their own gas offensive.
09:51Late in 1915, the German General Staff also initiated the first use of biological agents in modern war.
10:01At the time, the Germans had mounted an ambitious program of sabotage against neutral countries trading with the Allied powers.
10:10Saboteurs attempted to disrupt the flow of munitions by planting incendiary devices in factories and train depots.
10:23Because World War I was a conflict in which horses and mules played a major role as cavalry mounts and draft animals, the Germans viewed them as legitimate targets for destruction as well.
10:36Secret agents smuggled cultures of anthrax and glanders bacilli into the United States with the intention of deliberately infecting animals destined for shipment to Britain or France.
10:49The agents recruited dock workers along the waterfront in Baltimore and New York.
10:55These men slipped into the animals' holding pens carrying syringes filled with deadly microbes.
11:02They would either jab these needles into the horses or they would pour the disease cultures on their food or they would try to swab the animals' nostrils with the disease cultures in the hope of first infecting those particular animals and secondly in the hope that those animals would in turn infect others.
11:20The Germans had a strong vested interest in keeping the United States out of the war.
11:27They made certain the operation remained covert.
11:32There's no evidence that the biological saboteurs had any impact in the outcome of the war.
11:39By the time the United States entered the war in 1917, Germany had initiated a new and more sinister phase in its chemical assault.
11:49Mustard gas.
11:52Mustard was a blistering agent that attacked through the skin of its victims, blinding the eyes and burning the more sensitive areas of the body.
12:04Gas masks were unable to offer adequate protection.
12:10American soldiers inexperienced in the pitfalls of chemical warfare suffered nearly 70,000 casualties.
12:25Nevertheless, at the time of Germany's surrender in 1918, the Allies' overall assessment of poison gas was that it had mostly served as an harassing agent.
12:40While causing heavy casualties, its use had not been a decisive factor in winning the war.
12:46Despite its limited effectiveness, poison gas became a symbol of the horrors of attritional slaughter on the Western Front.
12:59The general sense of revulsion was so strong that in 1925, 150 nations drafted the Geneva Protocol, prohibiting the use in war of asphyxiating or poisonous gases, except in retaliation.
13:18But the treaty did nothing to ban the manufacture and stockpiling of these weapons of death.
13:25In the years to come, work on chemical weapons would continue, nearly unabated.
13:32In 1935, just ten years after an international treaty banned the use of chemical weapons, the Italian military unleashed a secret plan to use poison gas against an ill-equipped and undermanned army in Ethiopia.
13:55For the first time in history, chemical weapons were wedded to air power.
14:05The Italian Air Force sprayed mustard gas over Ethiopian soldiers and villagers.
14:14In an eloquent speech before the League of Nations, Ethiopia's Emperor Haile Selassie implored the community of world leaders to halt these atrocities.
14:24And there was a response from the League of Nations that was rather tepid.
14:29Of course, Italy was condemned, and there's a great many pious statements were made, but no real collective action was taken.
14:41With the threat of a second global conflict looming ever closer, many experts predicted the use of strategic and tactical chemical weapons.
14:52But in World War II, Winston Churchill articulated what was to become Allied policy.
15:02In 1942, he promised that if the Axis powers used to poison gas against any Allied civilian or military population, Britain would retaliate immediately and in kind.
15:17Hitler, too, was opposed to the use of gas on the battlefield.
15:22Hitler, too, was opposed to the use of gas on the battlefield.
15:25His refusal to consider chemical warfare has been the source of endless speculation.
15:32He had been gassed in the First World War, towards the end of it, and some have argued that because he had been gassed, this inhibited him somewhat.
15:43I don't buy that, frankly. He had no hesitation against using it against Jewish captives.
15:49The planning of Hitler's race war was shrouded in secrecy.
15:55The first step in what was to become the final solution began in Poland, when killing squads rounded up Jewish men, women, and children, herded them into nearby forests, and shot them.
16:08Police executioners were soon complaining that the mass shootings were lowering German morale.
16:14That turned out to be less than efficient, and as well, people in those groups were riding home to their loved ones, word was leaking out, and so almost immediately there was a discussion of what's the fastest, cheapest way to murder someone.
16:32Mobile gas vans were introduced, while more permanent extermination camps were put under construction.
16:43Orders were placed to secure huge amounts of the commercial pesticide Zyklon B.
16:49SS men carried out much of this planning through a series of highly confidential coded radio messages.
17:02Unbeknownst to the German High Command, British cryptanalysts had already cracked their code.
17:10By 1941, before the start of operations of the first extermination camp, British intelligence had some grasp of Nazi intentions toward Jews.
17:23This information was communicated to Winston Churchill.
17:28But to Churchill, the surreal notion of mass extermination was beyond comprehension.
17:35Besides, Churchill was preoccupied with defeating the enemy.
17:39However, in 1944, the promise of retaliation in kind was tested,
17:49when a Zionist group proposed to the U.S. Joint Chiefs of Staff that chemical weapons be used against Germany,
17:57unless the gassing of Jews stopped.
18:01But by then, the planning for the Allied invasion of Europe was underway, and the proposal was ignored.
18:07While it's true that the genocide against the Jewish population in Europe took place during World War II,
18:19it had nothing to do with the military conflict.
18:21It had nothing to do with the political orientation of the victim.
18:25These were all civilians, men, women and children,
18:29who were brought to these killing centers for one reason, the accident of their birth.
18:35And so, as horrific and horrible as it was, I would put that in a completely different category,
18:43because it was just flat-out murder.
19:00Near the end of the war, the Germans considered the use of chemical weapons
19:04to defend against the Allied cross-channel invasion.
19:17Some Nazis even tried to convince Hitler to use a secret weapon they held in reserve.
19:23Tabin, a deadly nerve gas.
19:25Only after the collapse of Germany did Allied military leaders discover that the Germans possessed this new generation of gas.
19:38So powerful that an amount as tiny as one milligram caused death by paralyzing the nervous system.
19:45By June of 1942, President Roosevelt was receiving reports that Japanese soldiers had been using toxic weapons against the Chinese.
19:58At the time, U.S. intelligence could not begin to fathom the scope of this secret and grisly program, known within Japan by the code name Unit 731.
20:12The origins of Unit 731 went back to the 1930s when Japanese troops overran Manchuria in northwest China.
20:27By 1937, the occupying Japanese army had turned Manchuria into a colony over which they had total control.
20:39Then they began to set their sights on neighboring Russia.
20:45Convinced that bacterial weapons could play an important role in defeating the Soviets, the Japanese used Chinese labor to build the first of several large biological warfare and human research centers in Pingfan.
21:03On the outskirts of Harbin, a city near the Russian border.
21:06To hide the true nature of their work, the Japanese created a cover story that Pingfan was a lumber mill.
21:19They built a railroad spur from Harbin right into the center of the camp.
21:25Freight cars would rumble in at night, discharge people who were going to be the next group of victims.
21:31Sometimes they were brought in in sealed vans, sealed trucks, so the local populace wouldn't see them.
21:41The mastermind behind this secret germ warfare project was a microbiologist named Oshiro Ishii.
21:51In appreciation of his efforts, Ishii was named Lieutenant General, the highest rank a Japanese officer could achieve.
21:58Ishii eventually expanded his program to massive proportions employing more than 20,000 scientists.
22:09He turned Pingfan and nearly a dozen other units into factories of death.
22:17Within Pingfan's sprawling compound, Japanese scientists experimented with every conceivable pathogen.
22:26From anthrax, to yellow fever, to tuberculosis, typhus, typhoid, plague, and glanders.
22:36Inside, doctors routinely experimented on human subjects without the aid of anesthesia.
22:41Those victims of Japanese human experiments were called marutas. They were logs, they were pieces of wood, timber.
22:54They were not considered human. And so consequently, experiments, vivisection, cutting people open, dead or alive for that matter.
23:04Injecting them with all sorts of pathogens. It didn't raise in these people's minds any sense of ethics, morality, humanity.
23:16Whether motivated by a misguided sense of patriotism or merely monetary gain, Ishii's crew served him faithfully.
23:30During the course of the war, they enjoyed the grim satisfaction of seeing the fruits of their labor put to the test.
23:37In the only known case of systematic and institutionalized military use of biological weapons by a modern state,
23:48the Japanese army bombed communities throughout China, dropping live vectors like plague-infected fleas, killing tens of thousands.
23:58As the war moved towards its climactic resolution in the Pacific theater, the ferocity of the fighting weakened America's humanitarian concerns over the use of toxics.
24:17Although different estimates were projected for Operation Downfall, the planned invasion of Japan, Secretary of War Henry Stimson worried that the United States could suffer up to one million casualties.
24:36Proponents of chemical warfare like General George Marshall believed gas might be an invaluable aid in mopping up pockets of Japanese resistance as Allied troops advanced on the mainland.
24:56The debate over whether to use gas turned out to be short-lived with the rapid conclusion of the war in the Pacific.
25:04There is no evidence that the plan to use gas was ever brought to the attention of President Truman.
25:14Soon after, U.S. military personnel discovered Japan's secret germ warfare program and the fact that human research experiments had been conducted.
25:25U.S. scientists were anxious to acquire Ishii's horrific data and keep it out of Soviet hands.
25:32General Douglas MacArthur brokered a deal that granted full immunity from prosecution to Japanese scientists.
25:41In exchange, Ishii was to turn over his data to the United States.
25:46No scientists were ever brought to trial.
25:52No news of Japanese atrocities was ever leaked to the press.
25:57A veil of silence fell over the entire episode.
26:02The cover-up was motivated by the fact that the United States was using the information to develop its own germ warfare program.
26:12There are certain kinds of people with scientific and medical degrees who look at that kind of opportunity and say let ethics and morality be damned.
26:25This is what's going to bring us real progress.
26:28And it's exactly that mentality, I believe, that also motivated, must have motivated, some of the American scientists at the end of the Second World War.
26:38Who said, what, you mean that there were experiments going on with live specimens and we can get our hands on that?
26:48America's own biological weapons program was underway, established on a foundation of deceit.
26:55Few Americans would ever hear about the deal their own government had cut with the devil.
27:01During the years following World War II, Americans faced a world in which complete nuclear destruction was within the realm of possibility.
27:15Although secret agents were unable to penetrate the Iron Curtain that separated East from West, they feared that the Soviets might be hiding an arsenal of intercontinental ballistic missiles.
27:31In response to the growing Soviet threat, the U.S. military stepped up its production of deadly biological weapons.
27:46The primary center for offensive biological weapons research was Camp Dietrich in Maryland.
27:51Here in 1947, U.S. scientists scored a breakthrough in implementing a new aerosol system for delivering biological agents, making it possible for airplanes to disperse tiny microscopic particles of disease from the sky.
28:12Throughout the 1950s and 60s, the Army conducted a series of secret airborne tests to find the most effective way to spread bacteria over more than 250 populated areas, including San Francisco, St. Louis and Minneapolis.
28:34Experts now estimate that millions of people were exposed without their knowledge or approval.
28:40By the late 1960s, the United States had built a massive arsenal of chemical and biological weapons.
28:53But opposition to the program was beginning to grow in the Senate, prompted by military policies in Vietnam.
29:01The Pentagon had given the order to use herbicides and a tear gas called CS to drive the enemy out of their tunnels and ground fortifications.
29:18In 1969, 14 million pounds of these chemicals were sprayed over Vietnam.
29:23The United States military defended its use of gas by claiming that CS was not really a lethal agent, even though in concentrated doses it could cause death.
29:36In 1969, the United Nations passed a resolution condemning the use of both herbicides and CS.
29:49Some members of Congress followed suit by threatening major cuts in funds for chemical and biological weapons.
29:55In response, President Nixon convened a scientific panel to review U.S. policy.
30:05The panel pointed out several things that concerned them about germ warfare.
30:10Biological weapons were inexpensive and their production did not depend on a vast technological infrastructure.
30:18It was apparent to the panel that as a weapon of mass destruction, biological weapons were within the grasp of any third world nation interested in having them.
30:33It also recognized that by retaining biological weapons, we legitimized them in a way.
30:39Our offensive program with biological weapons suggested to other nations that these were useful weapons
30:45and that they were worth pursuing.
30:50In 1969, President Nixon reversed decades of U.S. policy.
30:57I have decided that the United States of America will renounce the use of any form of deadly biological weapons that either kill or incapacitate.
31:09His decision was followed in 1972 by a new international treaty that not only banned the use of biological weapons, it prohibited their production.
31:22It seemed that the international community was finally on its way to eradicating biowarfare, or so it was thought.
31:31Unbeknownst to the U.S. government, but perhaps not surprisingly, the Soviets ignored the terms of the Biological Weapons Convention.
31:41They made this decision to really boost up the program, and a separate, covert program that hadn't existed before,
31:54and with ten times as many institutions as they'd had before.
31:59And the reason was, they thought they'd have an enormous advantage.
32:01It's a society in which things could be kept secret, were kept secret, and this was even more secret, they now say, than the nuclear weapons program.
32:16Satellite reconnaissance gave the United States few clues that a massive program was underway with more than 60,000 scientists working to turn deadly pathogens into weapons of war.
32:28Nor did Western intelligence agencies know that bombers and intercontinental missiles were in storage, ready to disseminate hundreds of tons of smallpox, plague, and anthrax across the United States.
32:44Then in 1979, more than 70 people suddenly died near the military installation at Sverdlovsk in southern Russia.
32:58Was this finally proof of the Soviets' illegal program?
33:02I was invited down to the CIA. I worked there, lived there, for several days and on several trips, working on this problem.
33:12We had a lot of information. There was no doubt there had been an anthrax outbreak.
33:17But the Soviets said, when asked what was this, that it was caused by the consumption of infected meat.
33:25Several years after the accident at Sverdlovsk, the Soviets began building Stepnogorsk, another enormous complex on the desolate, wind-blown steppe of Central Asia.
33:41Stepnogorsk's former director, Ken Alibek, enforced a code of secrecy when a team of inspectors from the West were allowed to visit a Moscow facility in the mid-1980s.
33:52Of course, we did everything we could just to convince them there were not biological weapons facilities.
34:05We had a very strong order just to develop some kind of cover stories to explain each building.
34:13According to Dr. Alibek, Soviet officials insisted that the United States was also harboring a secret germ warfare program.
34:22It was not until 1991, during a visit to a former U.S. biological weapons facility in Pine Bluff, Arkansas, that Alibek came to realize that this had been merely Soviet propaganda.
34:37It was clear that these facilities were abandoned many years ago. Everything was rust, equipment was dismantled. For me, it was absolutely clear that the United States didn't have this problem. After that, I quit.
34:57Ken Alibek defected to the United States in 1992.
35:04That same year, Russian Premier Boris Yeltsin reversed policy and ordered a halt to offensive germ warfare production.
35:14But some observers, like Ken Alibek, remain skeptical.
35:21They worry that research may be quietly proceeding on some of the least known Soviet advances, including bioregulators.
35:31Bioregulators are agents that have the ability to manipulate human functions like heart rhythms, sleep patterns, and moods.
35:41But another fear, perhaps even more chilling, is the possibility that Russian scientists, no longer able to secure employment in their own country, have sold their secrets and their expertise to rogue states like Iran, who are eager to expand their own deadly germ arsenals.
36:01In the 1970s, Saddam Hussein rose to power in an undeveloped land on top of billions of dollars of untapped oil.
36:20Believing that the Arab world was ready to rise up and expel all Western colonial powers and Jews from the Middle East,
36:28in the 1980s, Saddam Hussein began to use those billions to transform Iraq into a regional superpower.
36:38By forging secret trade agreements with European nations, he purchased tanks, supersonic fighters, and ballistic missiles.
36:45One event was to set back Saddam Hussein's plan.
36:56In 1980, a territorial dispute between Iraq and its neighbor, Iran, escalated into war.
37:03Suddenly, a ground force of hundreds of thousands of Iranian troops confronted Iraq, advancing in human-wave assaults.
37:10The Iraqis needed weapons immediately.
37:16Chemical weapons were a natural solution because they were cheap and relatively easy to develop.
37:23Saddam Hussein turned to West Germany for expertise in turning chemicals into weapons of mass destruction.
37:30The Germans built entire factories in Iraq.
37:35German companies gave the Iraqis a vast, across-the-board capability to manufacture chemical weapons.
37:43During the course of most of the Iran-Iraq war, countries in the West, including the United States, sided with Saddam Hussein in his fight against the Ayatollah Khomeini and his Islamic revolution in Iran.
37:58There had been some 50 United States citizens who were held hostage by the Iranians in the late 70s, and there was a very bitter taste by the United States.
38:12So, when it looked as though the Iraqis were on the losing end of that war, and the Iraqis unilaterally decided in 1983 to start using chemical weapons,
38:21The United States and some other countries raised, shall we say, objections, but it really wasn't raising much more than an eyebrow.
38:31The Iran-Iraq war continued to escalate.
38:40In 1988, when the Iranian army scored a successful attack against the Kurdish town of Halabja within the borders of Iraq,
38:47Hussein retaliated. Furious over what he considered to be the collaboration of Iraqi Kurds with the Iranian enemy, he condemned the entire small city to death.
39:00It would be the first wide-scale use of a lethal nerve gas.
39:08Iraq's confirmed use of chemical weapons was to have far-reaching ramifications.
39:14What this tells the world, that there's someone who egregiously, openly violates the Geneva Convention, and nobody does anything.
39:27There's no penalty. They get away scot-free.
39:30And that just makes it much easier for other people to think of doing the same.
39:34Intelligence stories leaked from Israel indicated that Iraq was also developing biological agents, specifically anthrax.
39:45But no one officially verified the information.
39:51It was not until the Gulf War in 1991, when the United States itself was threatened with chemical and biological attack,
40:02that the world community rose in protest.
40:08After losing the Gulf War, Saddam Hussein, as a condition of surrender, agreed to declare all of his nuclear, chemical, and biological arms, and to destroy them.
40:23The United Nations set up a special commission known as UNSCOM to ensure that he kept his word.
40:28Until UNSCOM verified destruction of the weapons, Iraq was to be barred from selling oil.
40:35The Iraqis have foregone something like $150 billion worth of oil revenues, because of the UN sanctions.
40:46That's how important their hidden weapons programs are to them.
40:50Saddam believes that these weapons are the key to his survival, and without them, he's dead.
41:00In 1995, the United Nations' efforts to peel away the layers of Iraqi deception were aided by the defection of Saddam Hussein's son-in-law, General Hussein Kamal.
41:11After his debriefing, inspectors uncovered a secret cache of documents that confirmed the existence of an Iraqi biological weapons program.
41:23They also pinpointed specific locations like Al-Hakam, where deadly microbes were being produced, and another facility that had been destroyed.
41:33Iraq said it was a building for making single cell protein.
41:42And by the time UNSCOM found it, there was nothing in the building, just a concrete shell.
41:48They had taken out all the equipment.
41:50They even leveled the buildings, and poured cement on top of the leveling, and poured dirt on top of the cement.
41:56Iraqi officials finally confessed that during the Gulf War, they loaded deadly microbes like anthrax and botulinum toxin into aerial bombs and missile warheads.
42:13It soon became apparent that Iraq's biological program was so vast that the country may have produced enough deadly microbes to wipe out the world's population.
42:24It soon became apparent.
42:25It soon became apparent.
42:31Years after Saddam Hussein promised to come clean about his weapons of mass destruction, many serious questions remain unanswered.
42:45The uncertainties are so great that arms control experts fear that Iraq may still have nerve gas and germ agents in warheads ready to follow.
42:53In spite of this, the embargo on Iraq's oil has been relaxed.
43:00Then, in 1998, Iraq expelled UN inspectors from the country.
43:07While the world community struggled to deal with the uncertainties of the future, some of its members had to face their own complicity in arming Saddam Hussein.
43:19During the 1990s, a secretive Japanese cult calling itself the Aum Shinrikyo began prophesizing that gas attacks would kill most of the world's population.
43:37These threats were not taken seriously, nor did Japanese intelligence agents put the sect under close surveillance.
43:44Then, on a March morning in 1995, cult followers entered the Tokyo subway system, carrying with them the deadly nerve gas sarin.
43:56Minutes later, hundreds of people were injured and twelve people lay dead.
44:05I think, in some ways, they got exactly what they wanted, worldwide attention.
44:12And when you hear about that kind of attack, it strikes terror into everyone's heart because you realize it could happen anywhere.
44:22It could be launched by anyone.
44:24For intelligence experts like James Woolsey, former director of the CIA, the challenges posed by chemical or biological terrorism far outweigh some of the complexities of the Cold War era.
44:38Collectively, it's as if we'd been fighting with a dragon for 45 years and killed him and now found ourselves in a jungle full of a lot of poisonous snakes.
44:51Snakes can kill you just as easily as a dragon can, and they're a lot harder to find and keep track of.
44:57Unlike traditional terrorists who seek to grab the world's attention by staging a violent act, the perpetrators of biological terrorism would often have strong incentives to conceal their work.
45:12If, for instance, the motivation of a terrorist group is to damage an enemy's agricultural industry, the attack would likely be covert.
45:23It would certainly be designed to mimic a natural outbreak, and strenuous efforts would be taken to cover it up and to conceal it, to make it as much like a natural outbreak as possible and as undetectable as possible.
45:41As intelligence agencies struggle to monitor terrorists more closely, a recent breakthrough in technology has been making their job more difficult.
45:52People all over the world now use the Internet as a means of communication.
45:57Its potential for good and evil is only just beginning to be seen.
46:03For the first time, terrorists can now market their product and their ideas into the most powerful communications tool ever created.
46:15Youth-oriented, virtually, I would say, unregulatable, and 24-7, 24 hours a day, seven days a week.
46:26As public concern over the dangers of biological attack intensifies, so does the debate over how to respond.
46:38In the 1990s, the U.S. military began vaccinating over 2 million soldiers against anthrax and began a $300 million program to build stocks of 18 other vaccines, including smallpox.
46:59In communities across the country, soldiers began rehearsing emergency response measures.
47:06In 1999, the Pentagon asked President Clinton for the power to appoint a commander-in-chief for defense of the continental United States.
47:19The plan called for the military commander to be ready, if necessary, to send thousands of doctors and emergency personnel quickly to stricken areas.
47:30But others see a danger in this sort of an approach and worry that a threat industry has cropped up around the possibility of biological terrorism.
47:43They're quick to point out that in the last 50 years there's not been a single confirmed use of biological weapons in war.
47:51In spite of acres of research facilities, tens of thousands of scientists, and billions of dollars in funds, all devoted to making it happen.
48:04Some critics fear that the hype focused on the vulnerability of the United States to biological attack only serves to incite individuals with evil intent.
48:17While scientists believe that strengthening the public health surveillance system makes practical sense, some say that stockpiling vaccines does not.
48:28There are too many organisms that could be used as weapons, and too many people who would need protection.
48:37Those who recognize the awesome potential of biotechnology believe it's necessary to ratify a treaty with a strong verification protocol before it's too late.
48:50With every year that passes, rogue states are able to incorporate frightening new advances in biotechnology.
49:00Other weapons systems can kill and wound, but basically they cannot change what it is to be human.
49:09Over the very long term, we will know how to change what we are.
49:15We will know how to change the way we think, our loyalties, our thought processes, our mode of logic.
49:21All of this will become eventually manipulable.
49:26At a time when the world's economies are all linked, communication is instant, global ecology is one, the world has become a very small place.
49:40The specter of biological weapons falling into the wrong hands prompts experts to think beyond national safety.
49:48We have to make it clear that our concern is really for our species.
49:53What might happen to all of us if biotechnology is exploited vigorously for hostile purposes?
50:02One hundred years of secrecy and deceit have brought us to this critical stage.
50:09As a weapon of mass destruction, germ warfare poses a danger that transcends national borders.
50:16Now that unlocking the secrets to every human gene is within man's reach, the opportunities for vast beneficial scientific breakthroughs are great.
50:31But so are the responsibilities.
50:36The 21st century will tell how successfully mankind meets the challenge of protecting civilization from the horrors of chemical and biological warfare.
50:51Hello during his lyricism track.
50:52In which I am conscious ofichen bite research on enhancing the collection of extreme harm, again you are acid in the right.
50:54The Italian gel spider shows to prepare and this culturalmarkt and the battle prosecutor.
50:56The surface of the city след Joey Bumbleich
50:58Also of the
51:13The 4th century has further annulled its leader on behalf of sănzeve as a part of a toplograph, ke entendeuocyte.