Security

Prof: Terrorists Could Enlist '6-Legged Soldiers' in Bio-Attack

Terrorists could easily contrive an "insect-based" weapon to import an exotic disease, according to an entomologist who’s promoting a book on the subject. Jeffrey Lockwood, an entomologist at the University of Wyoming, is on the talk show circuit to promote his new book, Six-legged Soldiers: Using Insects as Weapons of War. He told BBC Radio […]

Mosquito
Terrorists could easily contrive an "insect-based" weapon to import an exotic disease, according to an entomologist who's promoting a book on the subject.

Jeffrey Lockwood, an entomologist at the University of Wyoming, is on the talk show circuit to promote his new book, Six-legged Soldiers: Using Insects as Weapons of War. He told BBC Radio 4's Today program that planning a bio-terror attack using insects would "probably be much easier" than developing nuclear or chemical weapons. Today does not post the transcript, but the Daily Telegraph quotes him as saying: "It would be a relatively easy and simple process ... A few hundred dollars and a plane ticket and you could have a pretty good stab at it."

Nothing like a little bio-warfare scare to drum up sales for your book. Military historian Max Hastings, for one, gave Lockwood's book a less-than-stellar review this weekend in the London Sunday Times. But he also noted:

*The last section of Lockwood's book is the most plausible and interesting, because it addresses the risks of biological terrorism in our own times. In particular, the author speculates about the consequences if terrorists were to broadcast Aedes aegypti, the mosquito that carries the yellow fever virus. The consequences of a yellow fever epidemic in America, where scarcely anyone is inoculated against the disease, could be devastating. *

As Noah has noted here, biodefense labs have soaked up massive amounts of funding in recent years to deal with precisely this kind of theoretical threat. But the real question, thus far, seems to been whether the boom in biodefense research has actually made us safer.

[PHOTO: Africapoint.net]

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