Biohazard

The Aral Sea is dying.

Its name means "The Sea of Islands."

On one of those islands, according to Ken Alibek's "Biohazard: The Chilling True Story of the Largest Covert Biological Weapons Program in the World, Told from Inside by the Man Who Ran It," secrets lay.

Rebirth Island, or Tmu Tarakan, was the home of experiments into biological warfare. There they tested all sorts of nasty, bioengineered germs from anthrax to smallpox. It was the scale of the Manhattan Project, also bent on causing suffering.

Whether or not Alibek was consulted in the run up on the Iraq War, I don't know. But maybe there was enough in what he told them, or knew, or intelligence agencies knew, to be worried about what Saddam Hussein was up to.

And maybe I have to take what Alibek and co-author Stephen Handelman write in this book, but if even half of it is true, it's still chilling. All that effort into finding efficient ways to kill or incapacitate lots of people at once. Not what I should be reading, I guess, during "uncertain times."

And while it's a comfort that Alibek says the US hasn't indulged in similar research since the 1960s, I still have to wonder. And hope he's right.

What frightens me most is the Jurassic Park Effect. All of this knowledge, even the material -- the raw powder containing these weaponized germs -- is being bought and sought out by people who didn't have the discipline to attain it. Not that it matters much. Science had the discipline, and knew full well what it was doing.

But maybe we should all read it. And see what the cost of hubris, scientific hubris, is.

Ironically, I make a living off such hubris. The company I work for is cleaning up waste from nuclear weapons production. The Cold War, still paying off in 2020.