Big Scare

Infected meat or a weapon ?

Two things that seem to be causing the Carter Administration continuing woe these days are 1) overreacting and 2) sending out conflicting signals, especially where the Soviet Union is concerned. Consider the big anthrax scare.

Last week a State Department spokesman announced that there were "disturbing indications" that the Soviets might have violated the terms of the 1972 Biological Weapons Convention, which bans the production and stockpiling of germ-warfare weapons. As evidence, the spokesman cited a mysterious epidemic last spring that apparently killed hundreds of people in Sverdlovsk, a city of 1.2 million some 850 miles from Moscow. The rapid spread of the infection led U.S. intelligence analysts to suspect that the cause was anthrax, a deadly bacterial disease, and that the contamination could not have come from natural sources. Thus, according to State, the epidemic "may have resulted from inadvertent exposure of the populace to a biological-warfare agent" from a nearby factory manufacturing banned weapons.

The U.S. requested additional information from Moscow and expressed its concern to the Soviets at an 87-nation conference in Geneva that was reviewing compliance with the treaty. The Soviets first responded by admitting an outbreak of anthrax in Sverdlovsk. Moscow's explanation: mishandling of infected animal carcasses. A State Department spokesman described the explanation as "plausible." But later, senior department officials declared they were still not satisfied with Moscow's response.

The Soviets did not let the matter rest. The news agency TASS charged that the U.S. had put forward these "brazen anti-Soviet forgeries" as an excuse for stockpiling biological weapons of its own. And at the Geneva conference, the Kremlin's delegate dismissed Western suspicions about the anthrax outbreak as "symptoms of another epidemic disease, namely anti-Soviet hysteria" inspired by the invasion of Afghanistan.

Earlier in the week, U.S. officials made known their concern over Italy's sale to Iraq of equipment that might be used in the development of an atomic bomb. Again, something seemed amiss. It turned out that the U.S. had been aware of the sale since 1978, and that the item, a lead-shielded cubicle known as a "hot cell," is standard equipment in most nuclear laboratories. Officials in Rome speculated that word about American displeasure with the deal had been leaked at this time because Italian support for the tough U.S. position on the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan has been less than wholehearted.

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