Abstract
Another day, another anthrax scare. Last November, 480 students and teachers were evacuated from an elementary school in Indianapolis after the school office received a letter claiming to contain anthrax. Here two local firefighter-investigators hose down a third. Indianapolis had experienced another anthrax hoax three days earlier.
Anthrax hoaxes: Hot new hobby?
By Leonard A. Cole
On April 24, 1997, a petri dish labeled “anthrachs” arrived in a package mailed to the offices of B'nai B'rith in Washington, D.C. The dish contained a red, gelatinous material which, nine hours later, was determined to be harmless. Meanwhile, police cordoned off the area around the building, rerouted traffic, and quarantined more than a hundred B'nai B'rith employees and residents of a nearby hotel.
Some of the police who walked into the “hot zone” without protective gear balked at the emergency medical team's orders to take their clothes off and shower. In one instance a policeman struck an emergency service worker before high-ranking officers prevailed on him to obey.
It was the nation's first major anthrax hoax. But not the last.
In February the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) reported that between October 30 and December 23 of last year, seven major anthrax threats were recorded. Letters claimed to contain bacteria, or phone calls warned that anthrax had been placed in ventilation systems at health clinics and other buildings in Indiana, Kentucky, Tennessee, and California.
As many as 1,800 potential victims were prescribed a variety of protective measures. At some locations they were told to go home, place their clothes in plastic bags, and shower. At others, they were quarantined, made to take their clothes off and shower with soap and diluted bleach, and begin taking antibiotics. In a few cases, presumed victims were hospitalized for observation. In each case, after a day or two–or sometimes longer–lab tests showed no evidence of anthrax contamination.
Rabije Megjuami, a Kosovar refugee, reacting to news of a peace settlement.
New York Times, June 4, 1999.
The surge in incidents had just begun. On Christmas Eve, a day after the period covered by the CDC report, a Palm Desert, California department store received a phoned anthrax threat. Two hundred shoppers and employees were made to strip and shower in a makeshift outdoor facility. A few days later, a similar threat was made to a Pomona nightclub, and 800 people were evacuated and quarantined for four hours.
On February 5, the very day the CDC issued its report, the media reported four more incidents. Letters claiming to contain anthrax arrived at the Washington Post and a federal building in Washington, at a post office in Columbus, Georgia, and at an NBC news office in Atlanta. The Atlanta threat prompted the evacuation of a three-block area; a dozen people underwent decontamination and were taken to a hospital.
In the following weeks, the hoaxes kept on coming. Between February 18 and 22, there were 35 more anthrax alarms. One threat, made during a snowstorm in Kansas City, Missouri, resulted in 20 people being made to leave a Planned Parenthood Clinic. They then endured an outdoor shower and scrub-down (with their clothes on) in freezing temperatures.
By March, Neil Gallagher, assistant director of the FBI's national security division, reflected on the Bureau's frustration: “Not a day goes by without us hearing from somewhere in the United States about an anthrax threat” (Deseret News, March 3, 1999).
By May, sending a letter or making a phone call claiming to have spread anthrax seemed to have surpassed the time-tested phoned-in bomb threat in popularity. Reports of anthrax hoaxes were averaging more than one a day, and had disrupted the lives of more than 10,000 presumed victims.
So how did anthrax hoaxes become so popular? Was it the success of the hoax at B'nai B'rith? Did would-be hoaxers pick up on dire government warnings of apocalyptic events? Were they influenced by imaginative novels like The Cobra Event, or did they get the idea at the movies? Or was it the result of some local TV station's sweeps-week story touting how easily the water supply might be contaminated?
We all remember Defense Secretary William Cohen, a 5-pound bag of Domino sugar in his hand, claiming that an equal amount of anthrax would wipe out half the population of Washington. And did the military's controversial decision to vaccinate U.S. troops against anthrax give the threat a special cachet?
Anthrax was mentioned as a possible Iraqi weapon during the Gulf War in 1991. But interest in it faded quickly after the war. In the mid-1990s, however, U.N. weapons inspectors expressed suspicion that Iraq might still be harboring anthrax weapons. Also in 1995, chemical terrorism captured headlines when the Aum Shinrikyo cult released sarin, a nerve agent, in the Tokyo subway.
Meanwhile, the Pentagon had begun to lump biological, chemical, and nuclear weapons into an inclusive new category as “WMD,” or “weapons of mass destruction.” These threats, reportedly brandished by an assortment of “rogue states,” also helped the Pentagon, not inconveniently, justify its still sizable post-Cold War military budget.
Still, on the domestic front, official Washington remained unconcerned. On February 22, 1996, a spokesman for the Defense Intelligence Agency told the Senate's Select Committee on Intelligence that his agency knew of no terrorist organizations that were actually “developing chemical, biological, or radiological weapons.” Similarly, an FBI spokesman said that the Bureau was unaware of any bioweapons threat from any international or domestic groups.
But things change. In May 1997, within days of the anthrax hoax at B'nai B'rith, FBI director Louis Freeh offered a very different view. The acquisition or use of biological or other weapons of mass destruction by individuals or terrorist groups, he said, “constitutes one of the gravest threats to the United States.”
Stories about the threat of germ warfare and bioterrorism, often naming anthrax as a likely weapon, began to appear with greater frequency: The New York Times publishes an annual index listing the stories it prints by category. There were 27 stories in the Times's “Biological and Chemical Warfare” category in 1994. By 1998, there were 278.
Then, too, the media often treated stories about hoaxes as if they involved real germs. This was especially true in February 1998, when two men suspected of carrying vials of anthrax were arrested in Las Vegas. The material turned out to be a harmless vaccine, but government officials and the press reacted as if the men were carrying the genuine article.
The result was a spate of stories about how easy it was to develop bioweapons, how devastating they were, and how vulnerable the country was. Anthrax was usually touted as the “bioagent most likely.”
Bioterrorism movies like “Outbreak,” and novels like The Eleventh Plague (not to be confused with my own nonfiction book of the same name) mixed fact and fiction in ways that obscured the lines between fantasy and legitimate worry. In an April 26, 1998 story, the New York Times's Judith Miller and William J. Broad claimed that a popular bioterrorism novel, The Cobra Event, heightened President Clinton's sense of alarm about germ weapons.
“See you in rehab, Jonesy!”
With funding for combating bioterrorism soaring to $1.4 billion this year, even bioscientists who think the threat is exaggerated are reluctant to contradict officials who say it is “only a matter of time” before one of the many anthrax alarms turns out to be real. [For more on fact v. fiction on the bioterrorism front, turn to “An Unlikely Threat,” page 46.]
Certainly at some level the threat is real enough and should not be ignored. But before panicking, it might be wise to recall that, during the last 100 years, the sum total of deaths in the United States known to have been caused by bioterrorism is zero.
Leonard A. Cole, the author of The Eleventh Plague: The Politics of Biological and Chemical Warfare (1998), is a political scientist at Rutgers University in Newark, New Jersey.
In brief
▪
Bill Hartung, writing in the World Policy Journal (Spring 1999), questions the rush to give the Pentagon more money for new weapons–especially for more airplanes. As Hartung points out, the world's second largest and most capable fleet of warplanes (after the current U.S. Air Force) is “sitting in mothballs at the U.S. government's ‘boneyard’ at Davis-Monthan Air Force Base in Arizona in the form of fighter jets, transport aircraft, and attack aircraft that have been prematurely retired to make room for the new improved models that the Pentagon buys every year.”
▪
We need a counterproliferation program to stem the increasingly brazen proliferation of acronyms. It's bad enough that Barry R. Schneider, director of the U.S. Air Force Counterproliferation Center at Air University in Alabama, lists 75 acronyms in the introduction to his new book, Future War and Counterproliferation. Even worse, Schneider has replaced the popular but admittedly tedious term “rogue state” with yet another acronym, “NASTI.” Further–and this is the really unconscionable part–NASTI has another acronym embedded in it. NASTI stands for “nbc (Nuclear, Biological, and Chemical)-Arming Sponsors of Terrorism and Intervention.”
▪
In the wake of the alleged Chinese spy scandal, Los Alamos National Laboratory started battening down the hatches at its web site, hiding everything of any conceivable value behind a firewall to protect it from public viewing. (Pouf! There went the snapshots of mushroom clouds.) Among the disappearances: the lab's image map of the periodic table.
▪
In a June 10 test, the “Theater High-Altitude Area Defense” program–lovingly called THAAD–finally hit something other than the nation's collective pocketbook. After six failures, a 20-foot interceptor smashed into a test rocket flying above the White Sands Missile Range in New Mexico. “It's a major milestone,” said a spokesman for the Ballistic Missile Defense Organization, “but we still have a ways to go.” Whew … did he say a mouthful. The successful test followed six duds in the $3.9 billion program, including one on March 29, which–according to official spin–did everything right except hit the test rocket. Alas, even after the June success, there were skeptics aplenty. The Union of Concerned Scientists, for instance, noted that there's a far gap between the June test and a system that would actually work in battle. The test, said UCS, an organization seldom at a loss for words, was “a relatively trivial step.”
▪
The U.S nuclear industry and its friends in the Energy Department like to claim that nuclear power is uniquely climate friendly. In May, however, the Better Business Bureau declared that the Nuclear Energy Institute's (NEI) ads on the subject “have a strong potential to mislead customers” (New York Times, May 14, 1999). The ads, which have appeared in the New York Times, the Atlantic Monthly, and the New Republic, assert that “nuclear power generates about 20 percent of America's electricity without emitting greenhouse gases.” But the bureau points out that the uranium fuel used in U.S. power reactors is produced in plants whose power comes from burning coal, which emits large amounts of greenhouse gases and makes NEI's assertions “overly broad claims that tell, at best, only a half-truth, and therefore have the capacity to deceive.” Because the NEI refuses to voluntarily stop running the ads, the bureau has referred the case to the Federal Trade Commission.
▪
What did it mean when the Fox TV network announced that physicist Stephen Hawking would make a “guest appearance” on the May 9 episode of The Simpsons? Well, not that he would actually appear–the show is a cartoon, after all. The program's frequent “guest stars” are caricatures–only their voices are real. In Hawking's case, however, his speaking voice is synthesized (due to a disability)–so in what sense did he “appear”? Only in the sense that he insisted on doing the typing for the voice synthesizer.
▪
Norway has worried for years about radioactivity leaking from the Russian navy's spent-fuel facility at Andreeva Bay on the Kola Peninsula. So when the St. Peterburg-based Vedeneev Scientific Research Institute for Hydrotechnics devised an imaginative scheme that involved building a trench around the facility, it applied to Norway for funding and the Norwegian government obligingly ponied up. Because foreigners are not allowed to visit the area, however, Norwegian Foreign Ministry officials will have to rely on “pictures showing the project's completion” to judge if their money was well spent (Nuclear Engineering International, April 1999).
▪
A range of debilitating but nonlethal weapons are supposed to be coming soon to an army and a police force near you. These wonders include “sticky foam” used to immobilize an enemy, lights that cause temporary blindness and epilepsylike fits, paints that soften rubber and steel, and so on. Included in the usual recital of amazing new nonlethals are “infrasound” weapons which, according to Pentagon papers obtained by the Bulletin's W illiam Arkin under the Freedom of Information Act, are supposed to incapacitate by causing nausea. However, an extensive search of the scientific literature, says Jürgen Altmann of Ruhr University-Bochum, indicates that acoustic weapons are a sham: “All these effects of infrasound do not really exist,” Altmann told a joint meeting of European and American acoustical societies (New Scientist, March 20, 1999). Altmann believes that a proposed very low frequency weapon was promoted primarily by rumor. “You can't hear it, so you're inclined to believe what people say about it,” he says.
The crystal ball, crack'd
When it comes to predicting the future, pundits and pundettes alike have been so wrong lately that reader-TV viewers must be questioning the concept of expertise itself.
Consider that for nearly a year the punditry suggested that by tomorrow, or by next Tuesday at the latest, the president's popularity was going to drop to zero and the public would demand his impeachment. Well, the months rolled by, the president's popularity level remained the same, and the “experts” looked increasingly foolish.
For further evidence, take a look at the June issue of Brill's Content, a magazine that critiques the media. Brill's has been tracking the predictions of a group of television's most popular political pundits since August 1998. A few of the prognosticators, led by Margaret Carlson of Time magazine, have been “right” in their verifiable predictions more than 50 percent of the time. Most, however, are in a neck-and-neck race with chance. And a few, like ABC's George Will (at 33 percent on March 1), are consistently beaten by it.
“And that's how David negotiated with Goliath for the very first in a long line of historic peace accords.”
But if, as Brill's suggests, many of television's paid experts are so gloriously and publicly wrong, how do they manage to soldier on with confidence? And how can they possibly hold their heads up high when their informed opinions turn out to be less accurate than simple guesswork?
The answer to those questions may come from Philip Tetlock, an Ohio State political scientist, who has been probing very similar issues. For 12 years he has been collecting data from more than 200 experts in various specialties, who have made more than 5,000 separate predictions. Although the accuracy of many of these predictions, which still reach 10 or more years into the future, remains to be seen, he has been able to go back and question the experts about some of the outcomes.
For example, in 1988 Tetlock asked 38 Sovietologists to predict what would happen in the Soviet Union over the next five years. He asked them to predict whether the Communist Party would exercise more, about the same, or less control in 1993 than it did in 1988, and he also asked each expert to rate how confident he felt about his prediction. Tetlock's results appear in the April 1999 issue of the American Journal of Political Science.
(Meanwhile, let's take a moment to remember what Sovietology was like in 1988, when Soviet-watcher Jerry Hough's views were considered “far out.” Hough's assertion at the time–that the Soviet Union would change because a younger, more moderate generation would inevitably replace the first generation of leaders–was less a prediction than an observation. After all, by 1988 Mikhail Gorbachev was firmly in charge.)
Anyway, in 1993, when Tetlock contacted the same “area specialists”–professors, policy analysts, journalists, or government experts–that he had polled in 1988, he discovered that those experts who “got it wrong” were nearly as likely as those who were correct to believe that “their reading of the political situation was fundamentally sound.” In other words, although wrong, they described themselves as “basically right.”
In an article last year in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, Tetlock pointed out that “expertise seemed most strongly associated with hubris.” The principal difference between experts and nonexperts, his data suggests, is not in the accuracy of their predictions, but in the greater confidence experts have in their opinions.
And when those opinions are proven wrong, experts fall back on a wide variety of defenses to support the view that they are not wrong at all, but “almost right.” In the case of the fall of the Soviet Union (and the attendant, inevitable loosening of the grip of the Soviet Communist Party), some experts explained that they were nearly right because, after all, “the hardliners almost overthrew Gorbachev.” Others claimed that it was too soon to reject their judgment as incorrect, because Moscow's communists “may yet prevail.”
The experts, Tetlock says, spend a good deal more time developing reasons why they shouldn't be considered wrong than in analyzing why they're right when events turn out their way. In fact, it may be in the complex twists and turns of their “counterfactual” explanations that experts do their best work. So, says Tetlock, one could claim that the more often experts are wrong–the more often they have to develop “counterfactuals”–the more they learn. This, he points out, “suggests a curious conclusion: the more often experts are wrong, the wiser they become.”
Or in other words, the real threat to the development of what we call expert judgment appears to come from being right.
–Linda Rothstein
Blitzkrieg in the backyard
The U.S. Army apparently thinks that abandoned buildings in America's inner cities are the perfect place to undertake training exercises–never mind what the neighbors think. In May, members of Special Ops descended on two public-housing complexes in Chester, Pennsylvania, to test their urban counterterrorism skills (Philadelphia Inquirer, May 18, 1999). The fatigue-clad soldiers, who arrived in the dead of night shooting disintegrating bullets and setting off small explosives, were, according to army spokesman Walter Sokalski, “practicing how they would look at a target building and how they would attack it.”
A native of the southern Mexican state of Chiapas gazes at the “Pillar of Shame,” a sculpture recently erected at the entrance to the village of Acteal. The work, by Dutch artist Jens Galschiot, commemorates the massacre of 45 Tzotzil Indians who were attacked while in prayer by pro-government paramilitaries in December 1997. (Alejandro Nadal's article, “Terror in Chiapas,” describing the Acteal massacre, appeared in the March/April 1998 Bulletin.) Galschiot, who donated the sculpture to Acteal and supervised its installation in May, was later ordered out of the country by the Mexican government. The artist's organization, Art in Defense of Humanism, is on the web at aidoh.dk.
Nearby residents and city officials–only some of whom were notified a few hours before the “law-enforcement training exercise” began–were shocked and terrified. “There was a whole lot of noise, like bombs exploding and people shooting off automatic weapons,” said Manuel Cooper, who lives across from one of the housing complexes. “I saw people running in and out of buildings with pistols in their hands like they were really after somebody. It really had the kids scared. I would have thought they could have picked a better place.”
According to Sokalski, the army gave little advance notice because “we have to protect what we call our tactics, techniques, and procedures.” He told the Inquirer that Chester was chosen because there was a high degree of cooperation from local officials. But according to Mike Lundy, the executive director of the Chester Housing Authority, he didn't even know about the operation “until after it had already happened.” His public safety director, Joseph Anthony, was called at the last minute and told to help out. Anthony “was given the impression that I knew about the operation and sanctioned it,” said Lundy. “That was not the case.”
State Rep. Thaddeus Kirkland, who represents Chester, denounced the operation. “I think it's totally wrong. You don't hold army covert operations in a residential setting.” The army, which has conducted more than 20 urban training exercises since 1994, has received similar criticism in other cities. According to the Inquirer, the army was forced to cut short operations in Charlotte, Pittsburgh, and Houston by local authorities.
Sokalski dismissed criticism of the operations. “This training is important,” he told the Inquirer. “It has proven itself in numerous operations that the U.S. Army has conducted. This army saves lives. We want to thank the communities for being a part of saving people's lives in the future.”
–Michael Flynn
WEB WATCH
Great scientists aren't with us forever. But on the Internet, at least, their memories live on–easily accessible from your desktop browser.
Nobel laureate Glenn Seaborg, a founding member of the Bulletin's Advisory Board and the principal discoverer of plutonium, died this February, but a living Internet memorial–that he in part designed–lives on.
Some of the site's most engaging pages were written by Seaborg himself. The biographical section, entitled “Seaborg by Seaborg,” takes visitors from his youth in a Michigan mining town to his final years at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. On other pages Seaborg tells of his first meeting with Einstein, his favorite novel (Sinclair Lewis' Arrowsmith), and his views on the need for basic research in universities. We even hear from spouse Helen Seaborg on their wedding day.
In his later years, Seaborg felt a growing urgency to share his vast life experience, and he saw the web as a new way to bolster the ideals that drove his life. “As we approach the twenty-first century,” he said, “the problems of arms control, education, and energy loom larger than ever, but so is our tendency to sidestep them. The insights gained from a lifetime's work with these issues could spur discussion and the search for long-term solutions.”
After the winding, nonlinear experience of the Seaborg site with its numerous interwoven links, these pages dedicated to Andrei Sakharov seem more like a visit to a well-planned exhibit.
After spending two decades designing nuclear weapons for the Soviet Union, most notably the first Soviet hydrogen bomb, Sakharov returned to the issues of fundamental physics and cosmology that fascinated him throughout his life. The site follows this development through a series of 13 pages, each devoted to a different time period and phase of Sakharov's life.
An abundance of photos make the site a treat. It pulls its imagery from the Emilio Segrè Visual Archives–a collection of some 25,000 historical photographs, slides, lithographs, engravings, and other visual materials–which is part of the American Institute of Physics's Center for History of Physics. Threaded throughout the site are photographs of family, friends, and co-workers as well as sketches from Sakharov's notebooks, including one illustrating Sakharov's ability to write forward and backward simultaneously.
As the years progressed, Sakharov felt increasingly compelled to speak out on the need for peaceful coexistence, human rights, and intellectual freedom. This Internet “tour” of his life appropriately concludes with a detailed account of his intellectual evolution, including an audio recording of Sakharov discussing the moral obligations of scientists.
The man behind the Leo Szilard web site is Gene Dannen, who, by his own account, spends most of his time researching Szilard's life, a quest he began in 1981. In creating this “labor of love,” he talked to Szilard's younger brother, Bela, to Szilard's long-time collaborator in microbiology, Aaron Novick, and to others who influenced the thought of this intense scientist. He also poked through the Leo Szilard Papers at the University of California, San Diego, which contains more than 45 linear feet of Szilard's letters, patents, documents, and even his slide rule.
The result is a complex look at the life of physicist, bio-physicist, and “scientist of conscience” Leo Szilard. The site may not win a design award, but it packs a wealth of information. From FBI interviews to RealAudio remembrances, it would not be hard to spend hours exploring everything that Dannen has loaded into this site.
Of special interest to Szilard enthusiasts, especially those who weren't able to make it to Budapest in 1998, might be the section detailing the Szilard centennial conference. There you can find abstracts, photographs, full texts from key talks, and even images of the commemorative stamp and telephone card issued by Hungary.
–Bret Lortie