A Return to the Manhattan Project?

Great Debates
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Frist Wants New ‘Manhattan Project’
By Staff and Wire Reports
Jan 28, 2005, 03:30
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The world needs an effort similar to that behind the creation of the atomic bomb to tackle the multi-faceted threat of biowarfare, U.S. Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist said Thursday.
“We need to do something that even dwarfs the Manhattan project,” Frist told the World Economic Forum in Davos. The Manhattan project was the codename for the United States’s World War II effort to devise an atomic weapon.

“The greatest existential threat we have in the world today is biological. Why? Because unlike any other threat it has the power of panic and paralysis to be global.”

He predicted that the world would experience another bioweapon attack within the next decade, following the limited casualties seen when anthrax was sent through the U.S. mail system in 2001.

Next time, the death rate could be a much, much higher, said Massachusetts Institute of Technology Professor John Deutch.

An attack using the smallpox virus is overwhelmingly the largest risk, he believes.

The disease was officially eradicated three decades ago but Deutch said it was possible former Soviet stocks were still at large or even that small quantities could be extracted from graves.

“Every country has a vulnerability here,” he said.

VACCINE

In a bid to protect citizens, the U.S. government has ordered millions of doses of smallpox vaccine as part of a wide-ranging security drive in the wake of the Sept. 11, 2001 attacks.

Other governments are also following suit in stocking up on smallpox shots. But experts warned that other avenues were open to would-be terrorists, with diseases such as plague and Ebola hemorrhagic fever virus options for weaponisation.

More worryingly still, sophisticated groups might in the future use genetic engineering to produce hybrid microbes against which there are no defenses.

Francis Collins, director of the U.S. National Human Genome Research Institute, said such developments raised the question of whether there should be restrictions on publication of some scientific research in biology.

Physicists are already limited from sharing information on atomic weapons technology.

Collins said openness was the best strategy but he suggested there could be specific information about protocols used to create dangerous super-bugs that might, in future, be classified.

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Why go to the enormous trouble of engineering effective biological agents, which is fraught with technical and logistical difficulties and will surely never kill people in anything like the numbers these scare stories hypothesise, when you can steal mining explosives (or make your own from fertiliser as the IRA did) and leave them in backpacks or vans in crowded places? Who is going to attack us like this, exactly?

Fear of an external enemy makes government more necessary. Mr Frist obviously likes his Machiavelli.

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Ah, found it: Panic will kill far more than bioweapons.

What we need is not a Manhattan Project, but pricks like Frist to stop making people panic.

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Non-subscription link to same New Statesman article.

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Just because you are being paranoid does not mean that there aren’t people after you. That said, I don’t know what he means by a “Manhattan Project” in the context of addressing the issue of bioweapons. Create an ultimate bio-weapon?

Do we really need an ever bigger sledgehammer to swat flies with?

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If smallpox is “overwhelmingly the largest risk” wouldn’t it make a hell of a lot more economic sense to just start vaccinating people again?

This strkies me as nothing but fearmongering. The odds of even a well-funded terrorist group using a bio attack are remote. Terrorists use reliable techniques that give them the most bang for their buck, not exotic, difficult to use weapons that require a team of PhD’s and can infect your own group easier than your enemy.

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I think he means, like, “go balls-out to find antidotes to bioweapons”. Or something.

Right now you, hear ten million bio-science post-docs, imagining how they can reword their grant proposals to include “bioterror” even remotely coherently, going “cha-CHING!!”.

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But as Sentient said, bioattacks and chemical attacks are fairly ineffective, difficult to build and easy to counter compared to traditional explosives. The Sarin gas attacks in Tokyo, for example, probably would’ve been much more effective in terms of bodycount if the cultists had just used pipebombs. The anthrax mail attacks caused 5 deaths/, hardly devestating.

As for panic, the anthrax scare, coming in the wake of 9/11 when the nation was waiting for the other shoe to drop and Al-Queda to nuke LA or something, still hardly paralyzed the nation with fear. The senate offices were closed for a few days and thier was some siliness for a few months with people calling the cops whenever they found some spilled flour on the floor, but I wouldn’t say there was massive hysteria.

Part of the rather annoying, and sometimes dangerous tendency of various members of the US gov’t to couch every Iraq/War on Terror proposal or action in some sort of WWII analogy. I doubt it has any meaning beyond that, as Frist’s proposal seems to be far different from the effort to find an atomic bomb.

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I prefer the progressive Manhatten Project idea of a 10-year program to shift the US to renewable energy sources.

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I’m not exactly sure what it is he wants.

What people forget is that the Manhattan was an engineering project. The physical principles involved were already pretty well understood; it wasn’t a random effort to come up with some uber-weapon.

If the goal is “make sure we have stocks of vaccines,” I suppose that’s not a bad idea. But eliminating bioweaponry altogether is something we don’t even have a theoretical framework for.

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Personally, I’d’ve chosen a more uplifting, positive example of human accomplishment, like the Apollo Program.

But then I doubt that’d get Congress to cough up the dough.

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My objection is to the entire idea that you can do/solve anything if you commit to a huge “project” to do so. People look at the Manhatten project, the polio vaccine drive, and the Apollo moon landing program, and wrongly presume that any scientific goal is achievable by throwing money at it.

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I think the biggest problem, as I hinted at above, is virtually anything could be relevent to “bioterror” if you want to define the applications broadly enough. Certainly any program in virology, microbiology, chemistry, materials science, pharmacology, nanotechnology, etc., etc. could produce information “useful” for combatting bioterror.

The reason the Manhattah Project or the Apollo Program produced a result was because they had very specific goals. Dumping money on such a focused research program does make a certain amount of sense. Combatting “bioterror” is not a focused research program. Bioterror could be anything from an engineered strain of smallpox or HIV down to throwing carcasses in somebody’s well. What’s the focus? What are we most worried about? Perhaps Frist has some very specific problems he’s like to see attacked, but it’s not clear what those are.

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The Manhattan Project cost $2 billion from 1942-1945. Which is about $30 Billion dollars today (more or less)… $10 billion dollars a year on a massive federal centralized bioterror (prevention/cure/containment) program is do-able - but what is it supposed to do? Who administers it? Is the aim prevention? Inoculations? Searching for the bioterrorists in their makeshift labs? Developing “what if” contingencies stateside ?..

I am not sh6tting on the idea. Let’s do a whole lot ore about bioterror, thanks for raising the issue Senator Frist

Having said this, I should not have to be asking these questions. When you present the grand vision it should be a vision and not pie in the sky formless gobbedly gook.

And that is my problem with Frist: Ultimately - really - what is the GD? Yeah let me take the position that *we should ignore any possibility of bioterror * or Bioterror isn’t something we should spend taxdollars on? There is no meat on Frist’s proposal & so no way, really to have a GD on his ‘idea’

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Post doc with poxvirus experience chiming in:

I already have several, but this has been going on, with encouragement, for about four years.