16 Jan 2024 – Libyan Sands, germ warfare on the subway, and Boeing
Book: Libyan Sands
Libyan Sands: Travel in a Dead World (1935) is British officer Ralph Bagnold’s account of his travels in the Libyan Desert in the early twentieth century. It is surprisingly poetic for a book written by a geologist whose magnum opus is titled The Physics of Blown Sand and Desert Dunes.1 A detail that has stayed in my memory is that certain routes through the desert are marked by the skeletons of camels that died making the journey. Perhaps no longer, but the romance of a “dead world” remains, and Libyan Sands captures it expertly.
From the X-Files
“The vulnerability of subway passengers in New York City to covert action with biological agents” was a study conducted by the US Army in 1968 involving the release of ‘harmless’ pathogens on three subway lines in Manhattan, to ascertain the system’s vulnerability to biological attack. The authors, betraying no apparent concern for testing biological agents on the unsuspecting public, were able to disseminate an airborne agent widely without detection.
The study casts “enemy agents” as the perpetrators of a hypothetical attack. The likely villains now are different. Aum Shinrikyo, the Japanese doomsday cult, attacked the Tokyo subway with a nerve agent in 1995, killing 13 and injuring many more.2 Aum terrorists released the toxins directly inside subway cars; if they had placed them on the track-bed, as done in the Army study, and allowed passing trains to circulate the agent throughout the system, the toll could have been far worse.3
I was reminded of another Cold War-era covert experiment, the spraying of several neighborhoods in St. Louis with an aerosolized material by truck in the 1950s, also by the Army.4 The experiment is sometimes linked with the ill-fated Pruitt–Igoe housing project, in whose vicinity it took place, but since the experiment was conducted in 1953 and the housing project was only occupied starting in 1954, the connection in my mind is tenuous.
From the New York study: “Sitting on bench in 28th Street Station a man also sat on bench… began to look at box sampler case… then asked me what was making so much noise. I answered… the… radio. He seemed satisfied.”5 See something, say something indeed.
Quote of the week
In honor of Boeing:
Then there was a second male voice from the flight deck, this one remarkably calm and precise, making the passengers believe there was someone in charge after all, an element of hope: "This is American two-one-three to the cockpit voice recorder. Now we know what it's like. It is worse than we'd ever imagined. They didn't prepare us for this at the death simulator in Denver. Our fear is pure, so totally stripped of distractions and pressures as to be a form of transcendental meditation. In less than three minutes we will touch down, so to speak. They will find our bodies in some smoking field, strewn about in the grisly attitudes of death. I love you, Lance." This time there was a brief pause before the mass wailing recommenced. Lance? What kind of people were in control of this aircraft? The crying took on a bitter and disillusioned tone.
From White Noise by Don DeLillo (p. 90 of the Penguin edition)
In fairness, that monograph is itself apparently a classic.
For an account of the human aftermath of the attack, Haruki Murakami’s Underground is excellent.
The New York study used a biological agent, while sarin, the substance used in the Tokyo attack, is a chemical agent; I do not know whether this distinction is relevant to methods of dissemination.
For details, see Lisa Martino-Taylor’s 2011 PhD thesis at the University of Missouri: The Manhattan-Rochester Coalition, research on the health effects of radioactive materials, and tests on vulnerable populations without consent in St. Louis.
p. 68