Germs: Biological Weapons and America's Secret War (review)

that antagonism is always just a misunderstanding about common goals. We're introduced, too, to the less-weUknown Hetty Robinson, heiress to a New England whaling fortune and probable forger (Peirce and his father were expert witnesses in the legal case fought over the authenticity of her aunt's wiU). Menand gives himself aU the room he needs for these narrative excursions . Louis Agassiz, Swiss paleontogist , discoverer of the Ice Age, rival of Darwin and dabbler in racial theory (he claimed that whites and blacks are differentspecies created separately by God), gets an entire chapter to himself. Another chapter relates the effects of Agassiz's Brazil expedition on the young WUliam James. Menand is a tireless explainer and linker; for instance he lays out a detailed history of statistics and the long-term controversy over free wiU that it sparked among nineteenth-century intellectuals . And he is a master of summary, recapping tricky arguments incisively or loading a single phrase with subtle commentary. He notes, for example, thatHenryJames, Sr., pushed religious universaUsm so stridently "that his ecumenism was sometimes indistinguishable from intolerance." Is an exclusively historical-biographical -cultural account ofpragmatism adequate? Menand says yes, arguing that the core achievement of American pragmatism is the conception of ideas as fundamentaUy social events. AU four of his subjects shared this "idea about ideas": that ideas cannot be evaluated as right or wrong in the abstract but only as useful or not useful in particular contexts. It is doubtful whether Peirce would have liked this characterization of his thought; he never gave up on mathematical and reUgious absolutes and took pains to distinguish his views from Jamesian pragmatism. Even James and Dewey, whose ideas resemble Menand's more closely, probably put their pragmatism to uses different from his. But in any case, quite apart from biography or history, there are abstract points to be made about pragmatism, and Menand sUghts these. (JB) Germs: Biological Weapons and America's Secret War by Judith Miller, Stephen Engelberg and William Broad Simon & Schuster, 2001, 382 pp., $27 Authored by New York Times journalists , this book had an extraordinarily timely pubUcation. The writing was completed in the summer of 2001, and Germs was published between the September 11 attacks and the anthrax-contaminated letters of early to mid-October. Based on extensive interviews of scientists and government officials and on federal documents available on the Internet, the book is impeccably researched, well written and appropriately organized by chronology. The material is accessible to laypersons with very limited knowledge of microbiology. The authors provide clear and adequate descriptions of the various microorganisms and toxins that can be used as germ weapons as weU as of the scientific methods of gene engineering that enhance their potency and dangers. Particularly significant is the extended discussion of the increasingly blurred distinctions The Missouri Review · 181 between research on biological weapons for offensive uses, prohibited by the 1972 Biological and Toxin Weapons Convention, and research for defensive purposes, permitted by the treaty. The book provides an extensive, weU-documented history of the U.S. germ weapons program from the early 1950s to 2001. We read of the testing of germ weapons on 1000 American soldiers and the spraying of low-virulence microorganisms on New York City and San Francisco to assess environmental dissemination. The authors discuss germ weapons in the context of the Cold War. They describe the gradual revelation of the large-scale Soviet effort that was much more extensive and dangerous than originaUy recognized. Particularly sobering was the 1979 accidental release of anthrax germs at a Soviet testing facUity; it kiUed dozens of persons and was covered up until several years after the demise of the Soviet Union. The book also comprehensively addresses the chaUenges of managing germ weapons in the post-Cold War era. The authors beUeve that only increased cooperation between the United States and Russia can prevent impoverished Russian scientists from being recruited by "rogue states" for their expertise in nuclear, chemical or biological weaponry. U.S. funding ofthese cooperative preventive efforts is currently an issue in Congress. The authors also portray the intense concerns ofU.S. government and müitary officials about the Iraqi biological warfare...