Bioterror Borderlands

National biosecurity is a set of practices that regulate how goods, services, and living organisms move through the nation. Of particular interest are bodies that cross borders, be they human, animal, or germ. Microbes cling to other forms of life, including humans, rendering all lifeforms suspect in these borderlands. This chapter explores how nations are made through the management of biological nature, and how containing microbes on the border is a vital act of national security. Today in the borderlands, contemporary cases of food security and swine flu entangle with histories of immigration control practices which were instituted as an act of national care, even as they dehumanized immigrants and naturalized racial discourses about contamination.

Microbes for War and Peace

When the U.S. military created a bioweapons research program at Fort Detrick, Maryland, following World War II, it enlisted microbiology in the production of modern warfare. Biological weapons magnify the potential of germs to harm humans, remaking the terms of risk to account for natures that have been engineered to be more contagious, fatal, and far-reaching. This alliance between war and science also bracketed certain ways of knowing nature by creating spaces and mechanisms to control microbes according to human desires. Beyond the weapon itself, bioweapons research promulgated knowledge of containment, designing top-secret, high-security laboratory spaces for the safe study of deadly microbes, thereby materializing the belief that microbes must (and could) be contained.

Introduction

Bioterrorism has emerged as a prominent fear of the modern age, alongside revolutions in biological science and changing practices of warfare. Bioterrorism is also an important, and often overlooked, site for studying the cultural politics of nature. Nature is at the center of contemporary concerns as never before, but its forms are no longer recognizable in a traditional sense. Massive expenditures on disease control over the last century have been a central site for the production of nature. Institutions of health, war, and science built around modern natures, are setting new terms for biological citizenship and environmental futures for the 21st century. The introduction overviews key histories of bioterrorism and theoretical underpinnings for a critical study of biosecurity.

Agents of Care

Following 9/11 and the subsequent anthrax attacks, the U.S. government enlisted the public health industry in homeland security and defense, bringing weapons like disease surveillance and life science research to the war against terrorism. As Congress poured out funding for bioterrorism preparedness, agencies like the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention rearranged themselves around new logics of biosecurity. In the decade after 9/11, CDC brought its surveillance, science, and communication practices to bear on questions of national security, and became a federal organizing agency for emergency response and pharmaceutical stockpile stewardship. The political transformations at the CDC exemplify how bioterrorism changed the role of government in disease management, along with the specific work of the nation’s largest public health agency.

The Wild Microbiological West

Biological laboratories propagate the idea of biosecurity in its original sense: using technological practices to contain and control microbes. Today, biosecurity is understood broadly as the elimination of vulnerability to biological threats. This chapter describes a debate that tore at the threads of community in Hamilton, Montana, during which residents asserted that the government must protect citizens from the risks created by the first high-security, BSL-4 laboratory to be built since 9/11. In public discourse and eventually in the courtroom, residents demanded that the government assess risk in terms of a newly dangerous world. The 100-year history of the Rocky Mountain Laboratories shows repeated discord between scientists’ faith in technological containment and citizens’ imaginings of their own biological demise.

Conclusion

Fears of bioterrorism persist more than a decade after 9/11, continuing to shape public health practice and scientific research. The conclusion revisits two themes of the book: that the materiality of microbes matters, and that by changing what it means to be human and a biological citizen, microbes create new systems of governance for a world full of unspecified risks. Whether there exists a biological threat or not, the work to prepare the nation is shaping citizens’ lives. I draw attention to the outcomes of bioterrorism preparedness not because they are inevitable consequences of the search for national security, but because we have the ability to make different choices to create the biological future in which we want to live.

“Smallpox Is Dead”

In the mid-twentieth century, a global war against smallpox demonstrated how microbial nature might be managed according to human desires. The germ theory of disease identified microbes as originators of disease, and vaccine technology produced immunity by using microbes to alter the human body, forever changing the interspecies relationship between germs and humans. While the Cold War was building a national security regime, the smallpox campaign was creating a global system of disease control, infusing the work of public health with new biopolitics of race and nationhood. Modern health institutions are built upon this belief that nature can be managed for the benefit of populations, a foundational premise of biosecurity. Smallpox effects endure in concerns that bioterrorists will revitalize the virus.

Simulation Science

Because no large-scale bioterrorist attack has happened in the modern age, planning for bioterrorism requires imagination. Simulations, ranging from computer-generated models to large-scale role-playing events involving thousands of actors, have gained credibility as a scientific tool for calculating the outcomes of violent events. Expanding use of simulation raises questions about how modeling and scenario planning gain tenacity in the current political climate, used by planners and policymakers to generate knowledge of the future. In bioterrorism preparedness, simulations and scenarios matter because they rationalize political actions that manage human life, individually and collectively, in the present moment. A case study of a terrorism training center in Playas, New Mexico, demonstrates the material and political effects of scenarios and simulation.