THE ELEVENTH PLAGUE:The politics of biological and chemical warfare. By Leonard Cole (W. H. Freeman & Company, 284 pages)

Every since the anthrax scare of 2001, a number of excellent books have been issued on the subject of chemical and biological warfare (CBW). In this book, The Eleventh Plague, Leonard Cole looks at recent policy decisions which have affected the production of chemical and biological armaments. An instructor of science and public policy at Rutgers University, Cole has written extensively on scientific issues. Although this book was first published in 1997, there is a lot of information in it that is relevant. It is also still in print.

The book is divided into three parts. The first, "In The Name Of Defense," recounts the US military?s experiments with CBW simulates in the cold war era which may have exposed countless citizens to hazardous chemicals. The second, "Lessons From Iraq," discusses Saddam Hussein's decision to use chemical weapons in the Iran- Iraq war and its aftermath. Part three, "New Challenges," looks at ways to keep CBW out of the hands of terrorists and ways to keep them from ever being used again.

If I have any criticism , it is in the first section's tendency to summarize a book he wrote earlier, Clouds of Secrecy: The Army's Germ Warfare Tests Over Populated Areas. This is a minor point to make, since I haven?t had the opportunity to read that book. The US defense establishment has been raked over the coals many times since it became known in the early 1970's that the military had used tracer dust made from heavy metal compounds to examine wind patterns on a simulated gas attack on American cities. Although the hazardous nature of the simulants were known at the time, the military chose to go ahead and carry out the tests anyway, figuring the information gained would be worth the risk. This section of the book seems to be a re-cap of an earlier work.

The second part, "Lessons From Iraq," does give a vivid picture of how it feels to live with the constant threat of a chemical attack. During the first gulf war, Saddam Hussein fired scores of missiles into Israel in an attempt to bring that country into the war. Since it was known that his regime in Iraq had the capability to arm the warheads with CBW's, and because he hadn't hesitated to use nerve gas against Iranian human wave charges a few years earlier, the government of Israel was forced to issue gas masks to its citizens. The front cover of the book even has the famous photograph of violinist Issac Stern rehearsing while wearing a gas mask. For whatever reasons, the missiles were never armed with CBW?s.

"...people still find efforts to infect others repugnant." In the third part of the book, Cole looks at the reasons CBW's have been used so infrequently since world war one. He generally feels that since "healing is regarded as a virtue in all societies," there is a universal restriction that prevents disease from being used as a weapon. At the same time, very little was done about Iraq's use of chemical weapons against Iran in the 1980's. The Western nations stood by passively as two Muslim nations attempted to exterminate each other. Iran reacted to Iraq's attempt to seize disputed territory with teen-aged suicide commandos. Iraq responded with poison gas. The book notes that many of these chemical weapons employ the same technology to produce as do pesticides. The only difference being the size of the intended target.

Although The Eleventh Plague doesn't break a lot of new ground in the history of CBW, or how to defend against it, it does show a need to raise a moral objection to the use of CBW. Disgust over the use of poison gas in the first world war is what led to conventions banning from use. The ignorance of their use by Saddam Hussein's Iraq in the 1980's is what made them such a deadly threat after the invasion of Kuwait in 1991. The forces untied against Iraq had little contingency plans against a gas attack. Quite possibly it was the fear of Baghdad being nuked in retaliation that prevented chemical weapons from being used at all.