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POTENTIALS

Biotoxins have the ability to kill large numbers of people in a very short period of time. Small quantities are sufficient to kill thousands. Unlike biological agents, biotoxins are unable to reproduce or mutate spontaneously so they are unlikely to turn on those employing them.

As a potential terrorist weapon biotoxins are more than science fiction. The distressing thing about "bioterrorism" is that it does not have to succeed in actually harming anyone or anything in order to have an impact.   Consider, for example, the 1989 cases of the two cyanide-laced Chilean grapes. No one ingested cyanide and no one was harmed by the toxin.   In fact the amount found was too small to be lethal. Yet the publicity surrounding these two grapes caused a voluntary boycott by American consumers that resulted in several million dollars worth of damage to Chilean agriculture, the bankruptcy of more than a hundred growers and shippers and strained relations between Chile and the United States. Imagine the other sorts of damage a terrorist might do by simply announcing that botulin or another biotoxin had been introduced into a city's water supply.

Fortunately heating destroys most living organisms and nearly all of their toxins, so even if these agents were used to contaminate food or water, cooking or heating would render them harmless.   Protection against this sort of "attack" may require little more than adequate locks on access doors and hatches, supplemented by regular analyses.

As weapons of war biotoxins leave a great deal to be desired. Not only are they highly unstable -- the US Army abandoned the idea of using botulin as an aerosol when it discovered that simple sunlight degraded it to impotency -- but extracting most of them is no simple task.   For example, one hundred pounds of shellfish must be ground up in order to make enough saxitoxin to kill just a handful of persons.   Difficulties on this order of magnitude make biotoxins unattractive weapons of mass destruction.

Military planners find it far easier and more efficient to rely on something which can be mass produced, remains stable under a variety of conditions and is easily delivered. Biotoxins may have potential, but are not likely to replace more readily obtainable and easier to utilize methods.