“All right, back to the immediate business of the Korean peninsula. What is our formal game plan, and when was it last updated, General Craig?”
“Our last update was three years ago. The previous administration decided we would not honor our agreement of coming to the aid of South Korea because they threw us out. Without the tripwire force there to create a strong emotional reaction, he felt that there was no way the American people would support another war in Asia. When we left, we left them fifty tactical nuclear warheads, mostly in the one quarter kiloton to ten kiloton range. We believe the South has produced several of their own that are larger than that. Additionally, the South Koreans have purchased intermediate range rockets from the Japanese and built some short-range rockets of their own, all capable of delivery of warheads in this size range. In short, Mr. President, we have left the South Koreans out there by themselves. Of course, they brought it on themselves. Our treaty with them is worthless, and both we and they know it.”
“Well, I wonder what the United Nations has to say about this attack. Johnny, call our ambassador in New York City and get some feedback. This has been underway now for some hours, and surely the UN has started their ball rolling. I wonder why Dick Griffith hasn’t checked in with us. See what you can find out. I’m going back upstairs. General Craig, give me a routine report every four hours via a messenger on how it is going unless something really significant happens, like mushroom clouds. Secretaries, we will meet again here with the Chiefs at 14:00 hours. Marge, see me in my office for a few minutes. Oh, one more thing, in addition to the Presidential Daily Brief, I want this group to meet every Monday, Wednesday and Friday mornings for breakfast at 07:00 until further notice. The brain power here is far more synergistic than individually. OK, Marge, let’s you and I go back upstairs, and everybody else, back to the grind.”
Back in the Oval Office, Jason Thornton plopped in his chair and bit his lip. “Marge, I’m a bit troubled about Roberta Stearns’s theory. I wonder if the North Koreans would dare do anything without the permission of China. Call the Chinese ambassador, let’s keep it low-key today, but try and find out what they think, what they are doing about this. Have a report ready at 14:00 hours for all of us.”
“Yes, Mr. President. I’ll call their ambassador immediately.” With that, she nodded and left the Oval Office.
Jason Thornton picked up the phone and punched the number to the war room. An aide answered. “Let me speak to General Craig, or better still, put me on the speaker,” said Thornton. “Gentlemen, I want you to keep an eye on any indicator of mobilization by the Chinese. Anything at all that looks suspicious let me know. Call our folks there and see if there is any indication of any kind of mobilization.”
“This is General Craig, Mr. President. We will contact you as soon as there is any indication of anything at all. We have people in several cities, and we will contact them. We will also monitor via satellite.”
“Thanks, General. Talk to you later.” Jason Thornton hung up his phone, leaned back in his chair and thought of the consequences of Chinese involvement.
Johnny Withers looked into the Oval Office to see his boss lost in space. He knocked on the doorframe to announce his presence. “Mr. President, The Assistant Secretary of Defense is here with a Colonel Burgess from Fort Detrick.”
“Bring them in, Johnny.”
“Yes sir. Gentlemen, this way if you please.” He ushered the two into the oval office.
“Mr. President, this is Colonel Frank Burgess, Medical Corps, and Commander of our DOD Medical Intelligence Unit at Fort Detrick. You asked for him to come a couple of hours ago.”
“Yes, please have a seat, gentlemen. I am particularly interested, Colonel, in the possibility of a biological attack on the United States by the People’s Republic of Korea. What can you tell me about North Korea’s capabilities for such an attack?”
“Frankly, Mr. President, they are extremely good. North Korea has quite an offensive biological weapons program from what we can gather. A defector two years ago made it to South Korea, where we had the opportunity to interview him on a number of occasions. The North Koreans have weaponized a number of biological agents. This guy was really a virologist, working on some novel viruses; actually, he was especially involved with genetically engineering an influenza virus to make it resistant to the two antibiotics amantidine and rimantidine. He said he was quite successful in enhancing both its virulence and pathogenicity. He is aware that they also have genetically engineered a number of other agents, including anthrax and tularemia and a couple of others, but he has no details of them. Each section was very exclusive, and no contact was supposed to occur between working groups working on the different organisms.”
“Colonel, you used two terms, virulent and patho- something. What do those mean?”
“Mr. President, virulence refers to the severity of the disease caused by an organism. Pathogenicity refers to its ability to cause disease without reference as to the severity of the disease. Pathogenicity implies, but doesn’t specifically state, a high degree of transmissibility.”
“In other words, Colonel, he was working to engineer an influenza virus that caused a lot of severe sickness and was highly contagious?”
“Precisely, Mr. President. He indicated that they hadn’t field tested it yet, but they did try it on a number of political prisoners. He said the case fatality ratio, that’s the number dead over the number ill, was quite high, in the neighborhood of sixty to seventy percent.”
“You mean they tested this on people?”
“Mr. President, according to what this defector said, they took about five hundred people and put them in an isolated maximum security prison in a rural area, then sprayed the organism in the ventilation system. Virtually everyone was exposed, even some of the guards, although quite by accident. It survived in the environment longer than they thought it would. They didn’t feed these prisoners anything for two days after exposure, thinking the virus would all die. It didn’t. When they went in after forty-eight hours, it was still quite viable, and a number of the prison staff also became ill. They had to disinfect the whole facility with formaldehyde. The incubation period was about five days. A week after everyone was ill, they executed all of the survivors and cremated everybody. He didn’t know how many were ill from the virus, or how many were ill from the formaldehyde disinfection. They sprayed everything with a solution of it, then aerosolized it and pumped it around as a gas. They even laundered the prisoners’ clothes in formaldehyde. That is pretty toxic stuff in itself. They wanted to make sure the virus didn’t get loose into the environment.”
“So, you think this virus could be here in the U.S.? How would they get it here, how would they maintain it if it is vulnerable to the environment?”
“Mr. President, it is ridiculously easy to smuggle a biological weapon in enormous quantities into this country. We import hundreds of thousand of tons of frozen foods every year. Everything from frozen meat from South America, fresh frozen fruit juices, chilled fruits, and so on are brought in under refrigerated or in the frozen state. The virus is viable for decades if it is kept frozen at very low temperatures. It is far easier to smuggle in biological weapons than it is nuclear weapons.”
“How then, would they disseminate the agent?”
“Mr. President, dissemination could occur by a variety of ways. Aerosolization is by far and away the best. It can be put in aerosolized canisters, in large spray tanks, delivered by aircraft such as a crop duster, as insecticide control sprays in city streets, it could be released in ventilation systems of large buildings, in subways, and so on. If the agent is contagious, and you could figure out a way to expose a large number of people on a single exposure, such as at a professional football game in an enclosed stadium, then it could spread like wildfire among the population. It is really limited by the imagination.
“Some ten years ago, a regional epidemiologist from a rural state sent a letter to the White House with a scenario for a smallpox attack that was quite feasible and as scary as they come. It was a plane load of revelers leaving Honolulu after the Christmas and New Year’s holidays. An enemy agent put aerosolized smallpox into the aircraft ventilation system. Four hundred plus people were infected. When they landed in Atlanta, they got on two dozen commuter flights and went all over the Midwest and east coast. In two weeks, we had hundreds of outbreaks over half the country as a result of secondary cases in this scenario.”
“How then, could they maintain this agent in the frozen state if they brought it in this way?”
“That is relatively easy, Mr. President. It can be maintained in home deep freezers supplemented with dry ice. That will keep it at minus twenty degrees Fahrenheit for years. Just renew the dry ice periodically. They could rent lockers in cold storage areas for modest-sized quantities, or somewhat bizarrely, in bovine semen containers.”
“What?”
“Our veterinarian informs us that every rural county in the country has at least one, and likely several bovine inseminators for insemination of both dairy and beef cattle. Each of these commercial inseminators maintains tanks of liquid nitrogen which hold bovine semen at minus seventy degrees Centigrade. They usually have a number of such tanks and can store good-sized quantities of a virus agent in these tanks.”
“Jesus Christ!”
“It gets worse, Mr. President. It seems the neighbor of our informant was also a virologist who is working on smallpox. Our informant learned from this neighbor that they have a red-hot strain of smallpox that they acquired from Russian scientists they hired after the breakup of the Former Soviet Union. They hired these Russian virologists for nice salaries and high positions with lots of benefits who have been continuing their work in North Korea for some years. What I said about the influenza virus also applies to smallpox.”
“Do you have any other good news, Colonel? What about vaccinating our people against smallpox?”
We don’t know if the vaccine we have will be effective against this strain. Mr. X doesn’t know much about it. You will remember that in 2002 and 2003 a number of people wanted to initiate a national mass vaccination campaign against smallpox, but the people down at the CDC scared the living crap out of both the medical community and the general public about adverse reactions to the vaccination. They claimed they could vaccinate the county in a few weeks in the face of a release of smallpox. It won’t spread so fast they can’t control it , so they claimed. So, the entire country is at risk if we are attacked with smallpox. It takes a week or two to build immunity after vaccination. There is some evidence that some degree of immunity is immediately conferred, but it probably isn’t sufficient for protection in the face of exposure to a large dose. Smallpox, too, is spread by aerosolization, but you have to be relatively close for person to person spread. That’s generally considered to be six or eight feet. Some people cough, and then spread millions of the virus from their throats when they do.”
“What else do you want to tell me, Colonel?”
“I don’t know what information would be of benefit to you at this time, Mr. President.”
“Alright, make sure you leave your phone and fax number outside in case I can’t get ahold of you through Secretary Neville. I presume you have a secure phone arrangement at your office?”
“Yes, Mr. President. I have a secure hotline. I can be reached any time, day or night, at my office. I live about twenty minutes from my office and can be there if I get a heads-up call.”
“Thank you, Colonel. I appreciate your candor and your immediate response in coming.”
“Thank you, Mr. President. I wish I had better news.” Johnny Withers escorted them out. The President’s personal bodyguard, Robert Lee, standing in the corner, with his arms folded across his chest, watched them through narrow eyes as they left.
