Understanding the Apocalypse

Concocting Viral Apocalypse: Catastrophic Risk and the Production of Bio(in)security Lisa Keränen

The post-9=11 era featured an unprecedented expansion of global biodefense initiatives.

This essay chronicles the rise of biodefense by tracking biological risk construction across

political, scientific, and cultural rhetoric from the late 1990s to the present. It maintains

that the production of bio(in)security entails two interlocking rhetorical operations— framing biological threats as catastrophic risk and enlisting the specter of viral

apocalypse—that license technological solutions to imagined vulnerabilities. The essay concludes by considering the implications of such rhetoric for public health and national

security.

Keywords: Biodefense; Bioterrorism; Catastrophic Risk; National Security; Public

Health; Viral Apocalypse

In 1989, David Huxsoll, Commander of the United States Army Medical Research

Institute on Infectious Disease (USAMRIID), proclaimed that ‘‘it would be absurd

for us to create disease-causing organisms just to test therapies we develop’’ (Huxsoll

as cited in Enemark, 2005, p. 37; see also Wright & Ketcham, 1990). More than

Lisa Keränen is an Associate Professor in the Department of Communication at the University of Colorado

Denver. She wishes to thank editor Brian L. Ott and her anonymous reviewers, the Front Range Rhetoric

Reading Group (especially Sonja Foss, Stephen John Hartnett, Hamilton Bean, and Greg Dickinson), Michael

Zimmerman, and members of the Rhetoric Workshop at the University of Colorado at Boulder for feedback

on various iterations of this essay. A version of this work was presented at a Department of Communication

colloquium at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign on April 21, 2011—thanks to Cara Finnegan, Kent

Ono, and colleagues for their intellectual energy. The author also appreciates Kirstin Runa’s and Jennifer

Malkowski’s research assistance. Correspondence to: Lisa Keränen, Department of Communication, Campus

Box 176, PO Box 173364, University of Colorado Denver, Denver, CO 80217, USA. E-mail: lisa.keranen@

ucdenver.edu

Western Journal of Communication

Vol. 75, No. 5, October–December 2011, pp. 451–472

ISSN 1057-0314 (print)/ISSN 1745-1027 (online) # 2011 Western States Communication Association

DOI: 10.1080/10570314.2011.614507

20 years later, Huxsoll’s absurdity had become reality. Under the aegis of national

security, U.S. scientists genetically engineered smallpox to cross the species barrier,

concocted anthrax resistant to vaccine, and routinely ‘‘amplified’’ germs like the

hemorrhagic Ebola and Lassa viruses, adopting this bland euphemism to describe

intentional changes to the agents’ virulence (Cooper, 2008; Guillemin, 2005; Miller,

Engleberg, & Broad, 2002; Preston, 2002; Warrick, 2006). These known experiments

joined an array of clandestine research predicated on a unifying vision that terrorists

or rogue nations may use biological weapons against the United States or its interests

(Warrick, 2006). Such transportation of the biological sciences into the realm of

security, and hence, the intensification of technological processes that turn medical

science into weapons, are made tangible through intersecting sets of political, techni-

cal, and cultural discourses. In this essay, I reread these discourses and their attendant

material manifestations not merely as an extension of the War on Terror into labyr-

inthine laboratory realms, as many critics have charged (Enserink & Kaiser, 2005;

Goldstein, 2003; Leitenberg, 2005), but as a site where rhetorical scholars may grapple

with the consequences of large-scale organizational rhetorics of science and medicine.

While asking what the biodefense buildup represents, I also want to probe how it

achieves its authority and power. More specifically, this line of thinking leads me

to ask: How do a collection of actors and organizations assembled around the mantle

of biodefense lead us down the path of producing vaccine-resistant anthrax,

amped-up smallpox, omnipresent bio-simulation exercises, and routine lab accidents

involving pathogens like brucellosis, tularemia, Hantavirus, Ebola, and the plague, the

latter of which are among the deadliest germs known to humankind? What forces

underwrite this deliberate extension of malevolent microbes?

While the pat response to these questions may be summarized as ‘‘the

military-industrial complex,’’ the specific mechanisms promoting this intersection

of biology and security remain unelaborated. To detangle some of the threads from

the snarl of forces that drive this process, I reconstruct fragments (McGee, 1990)

from political, technical, and cultural texts and practices that legitimize a constel-

lation that I call the ‘‘biodefense industry.’’ Tacking back and forth across such

fragments, I show how the logic of bio(in)security authorizes the development,

proliferation, and potential use of biological weapons agents. I do so by tracking

the specific rhetorical mechanisms that promote bio(in)security, which emphasizes

humanity’s fundamental vulnerability to biological threats. The fragments that I

investigate derive largely from governmental, technical, and private sector initiatives.

They involve the U.S. Department of Homeland Security’s sprawling collection of

laboratories, open air testing sites, and knowledge centers such as the Plum Island

Animal Disease Control Center, the Biodefense Knowledge Center, the U.S. National

Laboratories, the Dugway Proving Grounds in Utah, and the university-based

Department of Homeland Security Centers of Excellence. While these sites serve as

key nodes in the biodefense initiative, the industry transcends governmental initia-

tives to include a collection of self-styled biosecurity experts, military planners, phar-

maceutical firms, political actors, medical professionals, venture capitalists, and

citizen advocacy and watchdog groups (Rothkopf, 2002). Beyond this arena, scores

452 L. Keränen

of viral thriller novels, films, and popular cultural artifacts support biodefense when

they repackage the anxieties and uncertainties of biological threats for mass audi-

ences, thereby solidifying perceptions of the biological threat (Mayer, 2007). Operat-

ing largely beneath a cloak of secrecy yet animated in the mass media, the biodefense

industry thus comprises a burgeoning and multifaceted business with vast life and

death implications; the germ applications it investigates hold the power to spread

sickness or healing, to incite or quash disease, and to reconfigure the relations

between biology, medicine, and the national security state.

In seeking to uncover the power and operations of this extensive but semi-veiled

system, this essay continues a line of theory and criticism initiated in a 2006 special

issue of Cultural Studies, where James Hay and Mark Andrejevic addressed

‘‘Homeland Insecurities,’’ which ‘‘foreground safety and security as a problematic that

‘cultural studies’ have not considered energetically’’ (p. 332). Regarding homeland

security as a means of ‘‘managing risk,’’ Hay and Andrejevic caution against explana-

tions that point to ‘‘single determinations—single institutions (the State or media) or a particular set of practices (e.g. economic, political, representational)’’ (p. 332).

Instead, they argue, homeland security should be viewed as a tangle of practices,

logics, and articulations that span and complicate the boundaries between State

and non-State, domestic and international, and civilian and military. Extending

the themes originally expressed by Hay and Andrejevic’s special issue, Barbara Bie-

secker’s 2007 Communication and Critical=Cultural Studies ‘‘Forum on Homeland

Security’’ examined, in large part, the identities and subjectivities cultivated by

‘‘the most massive reorganization and consolidation of the state apparatus since

1947,’’ wherein homeland security ‘‘has become not only a household word but also

an extraordinary signifier, a Master signifier, some would say, that shapes our percep-

tions and organizes our practices by lending (a certain kind of) coherence to our

everyday lives’’ (p. 204). Considering this Master signifier in a context of inter-

national interdependence, Jodi Dean (2007) argues that homeland security ‘‘is a

stand-in for a series of inchoate anxieties associated with the rapid intensification

and integration of information and communication technologies and the globalized

economy’’ (p. 209). Given the complexity of this constellation of discourses, agents,

and material, Hay and Andrejevic concluded their special issue introduction by not-

ing that ‘‘a comprehensive analysis and critique of the Homeland Security regime is a

task for collective and ongoing scholarship—a task we believe to be of the utmost

importance to both critical theory and political practice’’ (p. 342). This essay contri-

butes to this ongoing project by confronting the homeland security apparatus from

another vector, namely, the burgeoning biodefense industry and the way it enables

the concerns of homeland security to migrate across technoscientific, political, and

entertainment contexts. Consistent with the vision of Hay, Andrejevic, Biesecker,

and others (Scott, 2006), my essay will address a range of institutional, political,

and cultural alliances that together promote a logic of bio(in)security and that under-

write the expansion of biodefense as a supposed safeguard against germs and terror-

ists run amok, while engendering a significant set of ethical concerns and possible

security dilemmas.

Western Journal of Communication 453

Because of the complexity of biodefense and its appearance across a wide swath of

contemporary life, this essay tracks rhetoric about biodefense across several domains

to demonstrate how the logic of bio(in)security licenses the proliferation of biological

weapons agents and their use. Indeed, a bevy of interlocking political, technical, and

popular cultural discourses converge to keep the germ threat in the eyes of

decision-making elites and viewing publics. The political realm includes a set of

policy discourses, developed since the mid-1990s, which outline the planks of U.S.

biosecurity. Presidential Homeland Security Directive 10, ‘‘Biodefense for the 21st

Century,’’ the unclassified version of which was signed on April 28, 2004, comprises

a central example. In this policy, President Bush charted his plans for strengthened

defense infrastructure against the germ nightmare that included enhanced biological

weapons intelligence, monitoring, testing, preparedness, and response (Bush, 2004).

More recently, President Obama issued a memo that ‘‘emphasized the administra-

tion’s focus on preventing bioterrorism; created the capacity to mitigate the conse-

quences of bioterror attacks, accelerated new medicines, vaccines, and production

capabilities; and advanced an international effort to contain the impact of major

infectious disease epidemics,’’ thus fortifying a system already well in place (Erickson,

2009). Such initiatives are joined by an array of presidential directives, official

speeches, and policy statements compelling accelerated biodefense initiatives (see

Bush, 2002; Klotz & Sylvester, 2009; U.S. White House, 2004). In the technical realm,

scientific journals, academic conferences, and think tank communiqués signify the

sedimentation of expert assessments about biological weapons threats. While dissen-

ters and critics exist (see Leitenberg, 2005), the number of publications configuring

biological weapons agents as a significant security threat is remarkable. One study of

global scientific literature in the post–Cold War period, for instance, found a 250%

increase in biodefense publications following the demise of the Soviet Union, with

scientists from 94 countries adding to the literature (Markusova, Wilson, & Davis,

2002). Finally, popular culture animates biological weapons and emerging epidemics

in biothriller films, books, television programs, and graphic novels (Mayer, 2007;

Pappas, Seitaridis, Akritidis, & Tsianos, 2003). Examples range from novels sporting

names like Slatewiper, Pandemic, Patient Zero, and Plague Maker to films such as 28

Days Later, 28 Weeks Later, I am Legend, Virus, Outbreak, Fatal Error, and Pandora’s

Clock, each of which inscribes the germ threat in vivid and horrifying terms (see

Schell, 1997).

These three domains, the political rhetoric exemplified by the ‘‘Biodefense Plan for

the 21st Century’’ and other presidential=administrative bioterrorism documents, the

technoscientific discourse of experimental reports and modeling predictions, and

popular culture’s dramatizations of biological devastation present overlapping and

mutually reinforcing discourses that bolster biodefense. In one realm, we find a dizzy-

ing array of initiatives, much of them classified, which are designed to fortify the

nation’s germ defensive complex through the application of science and technology.

In another, we witness an evermore elaborate series of simulations and experiments

designed to prepare the United States for a germ attack. And in still another, we

encounter mediated confabulations announcing the presence and anticipating the

454 L. Keränen

outcomes of what Preston has termed ‘‘dark biology,’’ the science of biological weapons

work (Preston, 2009). As the United States funneled billions into biodefense, launched

Projects Bioshield and Biowatch, and planned 11 new biosafety level 3 and 4 labora-

tories, germs ‘‘achieved heightened potency as both symbolic and material objects of

power, fear, and control’’ (Keränen, 2011b, p. 114). To explain how we arrived at this

state of affairs, I track how bioterrorism and emerging infectious disease came to be

framed as catastrophic risk and demonstrate how the rhetoric of viral apocalypse kept

this threat firmly in decision-makers’ minds, thereby demonstrating a perceived need

for technological solutions to our perceived bio(in)security. I begin my analysis by

tracking the construction of bioterrorism across political rhetoric, technical rhetoric,

and popular entertainment sources from the late 1990s to the present and conclude

with a consideration of the ethical and social implications of the biodefense buildup.

Along the way, I maintain that the production of bio(in)security is achieved at a system

level through two interlocking rhetorical operations: the construction of bioterrorism

and pandemic as catastrophic risk and the persistent invocation of the specter of viral

apocalypse. Together, these mechanisms promote technological solutions to perceived

biological vulnerabilities. The result is nothing less than an overhaul of our germ prio-

rities and their hitching to a militarized security state, all while producing hybridized

potential weapons and novel life-forms.

Crafting Bio(in)security: Risk, Catastrophe, and Apocalypse

In charting the rhetorics of biodefense across a wide swath of political, technical, and

entertainment texts, it readily becomes apparent that biodefense rests on a funda-

mental premise of biological vulnerability. Such bio(in)security forms a linguistic

and cognitive bridge uniting public health to national security through a particular

vision of bioterrorism as catastrophic risk. As the Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist

Laurie Garrett wrote in 2001, global populations were ‘‘horribly vulnerable’’ (p. 77)

to a biological attack. This vision of deep vulnerability to biological threats is rhetori-

cally powerful for the biodefense industry because it is supple enough to be hitched to

other social agendas. For instance, industry observers note that the biodefense system

has co-opted recurring concerns about ‘‘naturally-occurring’’ pandemic so that pan-

demic preparedness becomes the ‘‘tail wagging the dog’’ of biodefense (Palmquist,

2008). Immunologist William Clark explains, ‘‘We’re better prepared for a pandemic

because what they’re doing for bioterror would also prepare us somewhat for a

pandemic attack’’ (Clark as cited in Palmquist, 2008). To give another example:

Smallpox, a formerly naturally occurring pathogen that has been eradicated from nat-

ure, has become a potential weapon (because terrorists might acquire it from existing

laboratory stocks), requiring urgent preparation and planning. In order to under-

stand how this change occurred, we must revisit the 1990s, when an emergent frame

of bioterrorism as catastrophic risk arose out of post–Cold War security concerns.

Here, we will witness how the incorporation of biological threats into war-gaming

provided inventional fodder for policy makers to reenvision the security implica-

tions of widespread infectious disease. The resultant rhetoric of risk (Ayotte,

Western Journal of Communication 455

Bernard, & O’Hair, 2009; Beck, 1992; Sauer, 2003) framed bioterrorism as a serious,

catastrophic threat to both national security and international order.

Framing Bioterrorism as Catastrophic Risk: An Emergent Rhetoric of the 1990s

Hints of the coming transfer of concerns about emerging infectious disease to a secur-

ity paradigm were evident in 1989, when tropical disease specialists gathered at a con-

ference in Honolulu participated in a tabletop simulation of an ‘‘airborne Ebola’’

outbreak among African civil-war refugees (Lakoff, 2008, p. 45). As many scholars

have documented (Ayotte, 2011; Dougherty, 2001; Weldon, 2001), Ebola, a contagious

virus known for its hemorrhagic effects and high death rates, ranks among the most

feared of human diseases. Thus, a simulation featuring a mutant, lethal, and airborne

form of Ebola provided a particularly colorful story line for later popular accounts of

the exercise. For example, Laurie Garrett, who dramatized the exercise in the final

chapter of her 1994 bestseller The Coming Plague: Newly Emerging Diseases in a World

Out of Balance, called it ‘‘an extraordinary war games scenario’’ of a ‘‘horrendous epi-

demic’’ that was ‘‘eerily prescient’’ of a later disease outbreak in Rwanda (1994=1995, p. 593). ‘‘The incident showed,’’ she wrote, ‘‘that in a week’s time hundreds of people

on four continents could be exposed to an apparently new microbe, well before autho-

rities were aware of its existence’’ (p. 598). Garrett thus used this imaginative disease

security exercise as evidence of her claims for global viral vulnerability.

Despite the dawning awareness that germs might pose a threat to the welfare of

nations, the paradigm of disease as national security threat would not crystallize until

the mid-1990s, when several exigencies thrust germ vulnerabilities into the inter-

national spotlight. A year after Garrett’s The Coming Plague (1994=1995) became a

bestseller, the Japanese cult Aum Shinrikyo (literally, ‘‘Supreme Truth’’) unleashed

sarin, a chemical weapon, in Tokyo’s subway, killing 12 and injuring hundreds. Sub-

sequent investigations revealed Aum’s biological weapon ambitions and at least 10

attempts to infect Tokyo residents with the biological and toxin weapons agents

anthrax and botulinum (Kaplan, 2001). Meanwhile, Washington DC buzzed with

Soviet defectors’ tales of a biological weapons program far more advanced than the

United States’, replete with a gruesome sounding Soviet ‘‘superplague,’’ a ‘‘chimera’’

that ‘‘combined several types of microbes’’ (Miller et al., 2002, p. 202). Against the

backdrop of HIV and Ebola outbreaks, Richard Preston’s bestsellers, The Hot Zone

(1994) and The Cobra Event (1997), captivated public and official imaginations

alongside dozens of other biothriller films and novels (Dougherty, 2001; Mayer,

2007). In fact, Preston’s fictional Cobra Event, about bioterrorism in a New York sub-

way, purportedly persuaded President Clinton to conduct a review of germ threats

(Preston, 1997, 2009); Clinton soon launched federal biopreparedness initiatives,

including a mandate that the federal government conduct regular Weapons of Mass

Destruction (WMD) preparedness exercises, the earliest of which involved biological

weapons staged in complicated WMD storylines involving multiple sites and

weapons of attack (see Erickson & Barratt, 2004; Keränen, 2008, 2011b; and

Schoch-Spana, 2004, for a brief history of these initiatives). The first three of such

456 L. Keränen

exercises, called TOPOFF for ‘‘top officials,’’ prominently featured pathogen attack.

By the mid-1990s, the White House’s Office of Science & Technology Policy

(OSTP, 1996) was preparing white papers with titles such as ‘‘Addressing the Threat

of Emerging Infectious Disease,’’ thus revealing the interpenetration of concerns

about bioterrorism with naturally occurring emerging infectious disease. As Schell

(2002) has noted, in the 1990s, ‘‘everyone was feverishly fascinated with the process

of infection’’ (p. 807).

The blending of military and civilian biopreparedness initiatives thus helped a col-

lection of public health and security experts to frame infectious disease in general and

bioterrorism in particular as a national security threat of cataclysmic proportion. To

be sure, the threat of epidemics and deliberate infection has always haunted military

(and peacetime) endeavors, as evidenced by the Cold War Epidemic Intelligence

Service (EIS) of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (Pendergrast,

2010). But in the late 1990s, a deliberate effort to prepare for biological inci-

dents—increasingly characterized in terms of bioterrorism—emerged from public health pioneers who translated the horrors of their battle against naturally occurring

smallpox into a clarion call about possible terrorist use of biological weapons. 1 In

1998, Donald Ainslie (known as D.A.) Henderson, one of the public health icons

who had helped the World Health Organization (WHO) eradicate smallpox, founded

the Johns Hopkins Center for Civilian Biodefense. As key producers of knowledge

about the threat of biological weapons, the Hopkins Center’s directors established

a peer-reviewed academic journal, Biosecurity and Bioterrorism: Biodefense Strategy,

Practice, and Science, and began planning a tabletop simulation dramatizing the

smallpox threat, ominously named Dark Winter. Coordinated by the Center’s Tara

O’Toole and Thomas Inglesby, along with staff from the Washington DC–based

Center for Strategic and International Studies, Dark Winter unfolded at Andrews

Air Force Base from June 22 to 23, 2001. Sam Nunn played the U.S. President; other

participants included presidential advisor David Gergen and Judith Miller, the

Pulitzer Prize-winning former New York Times journalist who was later discredited

for her inflated allegations about Iraqi biological weapons capabilities (Foer, 2005).

The exercise vivified a worst-case smallpox scenario in which international leaders

were grossly underprepared to handle a large-scale germ crisis. Dark Winter packed

wide persuasive power: More than 80 members of Congress and 20 ambassadors were

briefed on its anticipated outcomes (Simons, 2002).

While the Hopkins group planned their exercise, in 1998 the ‘‘Catastrophic

Terrorism Study Group’’ of Harvard University’s John F. Kennedy School of

Government, a collaboration of national security, law enforcement, terrorism, legal,

and government insiders, released a report warning of the threat of weapons of mass

destruction, particularly bioterrorism (Carter, Deutch, & Zelikow, 1998a, p. 3).

Framing terrorist use of weapons of mass destruction as a key challenge for the

coming century, the report declared:

Long part of Hollywood’s and Tom Clancy’s repertory of nightmarish scenarios, catastrophic terrorism is a real possibility. In theory, the enemies of the United States have motive, means, and opportunity . . . . The combination of available

Western Journal of Communication 457

technology and lethality has made biological weapons at least as deadly a danger as the better known chemical and nuclear threats . . . . A successful attack with weap- ons of mass destruction could certainly kill thousands, or tens of thousands. If the device that exploded in 1993 under the World Trade Center had been nuclear, or the distribution of a deadly pathogen, the chaos and devastation would have gone far beyond our meager ability to describe it. (p. 5)

Catastrophic Terrorism intersperses confident-sounding assertions with purely

speculative claims. Terms such as ‘‘real,’’ ‘‘successful,’’ and ‘‘certainly kill’’ clash with

the qualifiers ‘‘in theory,’’ ‘‘could,’’ and ‘‘if,’’ while ‘‘chaos and devastation’’ cement

pictures of cataclysm. Taken together, the report reveals the transformation of bio-

logical contingency into a concrete vision for an actionable future featuring all the

elements of catastrophe. ‘‘Experts combining experience in every quadrant of the

national security and law enforcement community all consider this catastrophic

threat perfectly plausible today,’’ the report maintained. ‘‘An act of catastrophic ter-

rorism that killed thousands or tens of thousands of people and=or disrupted the necessities of life for hundreds of thousands, or even millions, would be a watershed

event in America’s history,’’ the report continued (p. 5). Like other technical

discourse of the post–Cold War era (see Laqueur, 1996), Catastrophic Terrorism con-

figures America as having entered a new era of complex threats entailing large-scale

loss of life and societal disarray: the era of catastrophic risk.

The theoretical death counts used in the report mirror other discourse of the late

1990s and 2000s, wherein experts attempted to quantify the risk of bioterrorism into

projected life lost in order to render it in terms audiences could understand. In this

way, the unlikely is rendered as likely and the plausible becomes probable (see

Hartnett & Stengrim, 2006). Consider, for instance, how characterizations of biologi-

cal threats’ catastrophic ‘‘potential,’’ ‘‘possibility,’’ and ‘‘plausibility’’ transform the

imagined into the likely. As early as 1989, one well-respected germ expert noted of

the Honolulu exercise, ‘‘You may say [the exercise scenario of mutant, highly con-

tagious Ebola is] ‘ridiculous,’ but I don’t think we can disregard that possibility.. . . It was, and still is, a potential’’ (Karl Johnson as cited in Garrett, 1994=1995,

p. 594, emphasis added). Here, a simulation involving a hypothetical mutation of air-

borne Ebola becomes a possible future for which to prepare.

To coincide with the Catastrophic Terrorism report, the study’s leaders also pro-

duced a coauthored Foreign Affairs article that amplified security concerns about ter-

rorist use of weapons of mass destruction. Titled, ‘‘Catastrophic Terrorism: Tackling

the New Danger,’’ the essay argued that ‘‘catastrophic terrorism has moved from

far-fetched horror to a contingency that could happen next month’’ (Carter, Deutch,

& Zelikow, 1998b, p. 80, emphasis added). ‘‘Terrorists may gain access to weapons of

mass destruction, including nuclear devices, germ dispensers, poison gas weapons,

and even computer viruses’’ (p. 80). Here, bioterrorism is one of several potential

terrorist uses of WMD; nonetheless, this report enlisted imagined future worst-case

scenarios grounded in the construction of bioterrorism as a catastrophic risk to

help policy makers envision the consequences of not preparing for biological (and

other WMD) attack. Furthermore, Catastrophic Terrorism indexed an imperative

458 L. Keränen

frame: beyond mere plausibility, the report invoked urgency, the need for immediate

action to counter threats.

Bioterrorism as Catastrophic Risk Redux: A Dominant Post-9/11 Theme

While security insiders were cued to the catastrophic potential of biological weapons

well before 9=11, the anthrax mailings that followed the destruction of the Twin

Towers brought the issue to living rooms across America, strengthening a growing

sense among policy makers that the nation was at peril from germs (Powell, 2003).

Suddenly, bioterrorism was a word on everyone’s lips. Coincidentally, on 9=11, Germs:

Biological Weapons and America’s Secret War hit bookstores (Miller et al., 2002), pre-

senting a chilling depiction of post–Cold War Russian, Iraqi, and terrorist biological

weapons threats. Meanwhile, federal agencies began categorizing biological agents in

terms of threat level, and Colin Powell delivered his infamous but now disgraced

speech alleging the presence of a robust Iraqi biological weapons program (Powell,

2003). Beyond the technical and political realms, the nation’s airwaves filled with sen-

sationalistic programs titled Bioterror and Smallpox 2002: Silent Weapon, each of

which told similar tales of widespread devastation following a biological weapons

attack (Schoch-Spana, 2004). What had before 9=11 been an emerging theme among

policy makers and technocratic elites had now become a dominant public frame.

Indeed, the characterization of bioterrorism as a catastrophic risk proved parti-

cularly potent as it reverberated deeply through technical and official discourses.

By 2003, bioterrorism had been solidly recast in catastrophic terms as heralded in

the title of Richard Danzig’s (2003) influential report, Catastrophic Bioterrorism— What Is To Be Done?, which serves as a prevailing example of the power of official

narratives to vivify bioterrorism as ‘‘catastrophic,’’ while reducing complex uncer-

tainty into simple pronouncements of reality. Produced for the Center for

Technology and National Security Policy of the National Defense University (a unit

established in 2001), the report reflects interactions between scientists and defense

analysts. That the scientists quoted are often former members of the Defense Science

Board (DSB; see Hartnett & Goodale, 2009, for an analysis of the DSB) indicates the

close-knit discourse community that forms the background of the report. Following

a bold-faced heading ‘‘Why Bioterrorism Warrants Exceptional Preparation,’’

Catastrophic Bioterrorism argues simply that ‘‘a single biological attack can kill a great

many people, while the technologies to develop and deliver these weapons are rela-

tively inexpensive, accessible, and difficult to detect, much less interdict’’ (p. 1).

‘‘Since inhalation of 8,000 to 10,000 spores [of anthrax] is generally regarded as likely

to be lethal for the average person,’’ Danzig explains, ‘‘a gram perfectly and efficiently

disseminated outdoors under optimum weather conditions and inhaled by an unpro-

tected population theoretically could kill 100,000 people’’ (pp. 1–2). Just as Colin

Powell (2003) dramatized the power of anthrax in the lead-up to the invasion of

Iraq, Danzig marshaled the trappings of scientific authority to help other policy

makers envision how a small amount of invisible spores might pose a ‘‘catastrophic’’

health risk.

Western Journal of Communication 459

This construction interpenetrated technical and political realms. Kwik, Fitzgerald,

Inglesby, and O’Toole (2003) described an ‘‘age of catastrophic terrorism’’ (p. 1) in

the pages of Biosecurity and Bioterrorism, while Richard Falkenrath (2006) similarly cast

biological threats in catastrophic terms in his congressional testimony: ‘‘When viewed

in comparison to all other conceivable threats to U.S. national security, the catastrophic

disease threat is and for the foreseeable future will remain the greatest danger we face.’’

Technical and political rhetoric from this era pivots between the assessments that ‘‘bio-

terrorism is inevitable’’ and that it is ‘‘low-probability, high-consequence.’’ In both

cases, the manifold complexities of biological weapons are radically simplified and pre-

sented in catastrophic terms. On the one hand, many officials assert the inescapability

of bioterrorism (Parris, 2001). For example, Interpol head Ron Noble told inter-

national participants of a South African biopreparedness conference in 2005, ‘‘The

world must face the inevitability of a bio-terror attack by al-Qaeda’’ (‘Bio-Terror

Strike,’ 2005). Similarly, a Washington DC mantra proclaimed bioterrorism a matter

of ‘‘ ‘when’ not ‘if’’’ (see Parris, 2001, p. 235). On the other hand, bioterrorism is

repeatedly cast as ‘‘low-probability.’’ Henretig (2001) noted that the ‘‘risk of [biologi-

cal] attack is hard to quantify and probably very low’’ (p. 718), yet ultimately concluded

that bioterrorism must be considered a ‘‘low-probability, high-consequence event’’

(p. 719). Morse (2003), for instance, notes that ‘‘bioterrorism is one threat facing every-

one these days’’; he dubs it ‘‘low-probability’’ but ‘‘high-consequence’’ (p. 561). The

phrase ‘‘high-consequence’’ reinforces the catastrophic vision of bioterrorism, cement-

ing a picture of devastation and despair. And although countervailing voices tried to

present less dramatic framings of the threat (Leitenberg, 2005), the dominant read

among decision-makers was that the potential dangers of bioterrorism warranted

massive preparation.

At the same time, the growing awareness that biological weapons were initially

indistinguishable from naturally occurring outbreaks led to a reinvigorated focus

on a wider set of biosecurity initiatives encompassing pandemic preparedness, food

safety, and genetics research. 2 As Cooper (2006) has noted, after 9=11, ‘‘official docu-

ments declared that infectious disease outbreak and bioterrorism should be treated as

identical threats, in the absence of any sure means of distinguishing between the two’’

(p. 113). ‘‘To be effective at all,’’ Cooper explains, ‘‘the war on terror would need to

arm itself against the generic microbiological threat, from wherever it might arise’’

(pp. 113–114). By 2004, experts were calling for an ‘‘all-hazards’’ public health

preparedness approach (Hearne, 2004). One rhetorical vision in particular helped

to sustain this move: the repeatedly raised specter of viral apocalypse.

Invoking Viral Apocalypse: Spectacles of Global Contamination

‘‘Readers should imagine the possibilities [of attack] for themselves, because the most

serious constraint on current policy is lack of imagination,’’ declared the Catastrophic

Terrorism report in 1998 (Carter et al., 1998a, p. 5). This statement indexes the grow-

ing role of anticipatory imagining (Vogel, 2008) in biopreparedness efforts. As I

have written elsewhere (Keränen, 2008, 2011b), simulation and spectacle (Baudrillard,

460 L. Keränen

1983, 1994=2004) comprise key mechanisms that make concrete the otherwise invis-

ible threat of biological weapons across a wide swath of political, technical, and cul-

tural texts. Since the major bioterrorism event of the last century killed but five

people and since few among us will ever see a manufactured biological weapon,

the potential for wide-scale epidemic must be rendered in terms accessible to

decision-makers through a commonly imagined vision of the future that I call viral

apocalypse (Keränen, 2008, 2011b). Rhetorically, viral apocalypse makes the invisible

visible and the unlikely likely. It traffics in widespread contagion anxieties, putting a

postmodern spin on longstanding human concerns about epidemic.

As a recurrent form, viral apocalypse comprises two features. First, it appeals to

deep-seated cultural memories about ‘‘the plague’’ (Alcabes, 2009) by employing a

grotesque rhetoric of viral abjection (see Van Loon, 2002, p. 147, on the virulent

abject). Second, it emphasizes widespread casualties, international market collapse,

and the near-demise of the civilized world. 3 As a postmodern apocalyptic rhetoric

(see Brummett, 1991, and O’Leary, 1994, for canonical rhetorical treatments of

apocalyptic rhetoric), one that is at once secular (Schoch-Spana, 2004) and sublime

(Gunn & Beard, 2000), this cultural form invigorates anxieties about globalization

and its increasing contact with the Other into a vivid but distressing postpandemic

future (Lopez-Lavigne et al. & Fresnadillo, 2007; MacDonald & Boyle, 2002). It thus

signifies concerns that a combination of explosive population growth, ecological

pressure, and biological-research-gone-awry will extinguish life as we know it. The

viral apocalyptic form further heralds the failure of the Cold War logic of contain-

ment (Wald, 2008), as germs quickly overwhelm response capabilities and infect

the global citizenry. Within this vision, noninfected human survivors struggle against

the now unhuman-like infected; depictions of widespread violence and global break-

down conclude in desolated daytime streets and despairing citizens. Films such as the

2003 biothriller 28 Days Later (MacDonald & Boyle, 2002) and its equally haunting

sequel 28 Weeks Later (Lopez-Lavigne et al. & Fresnadillo, 2007), animate this vision

as the Rage virus transforms humans into rabid, flesh-hungry mutants. In both films,

governments collapsed, civilization ceased, the streets of the world’s major cities

stood eerily still; humans were reduced to bare life. The scene recurs in I Am Legend

(Goldsman et al. & Lawrence, 2007), a remake of the Cold War–era Omega Man,

where a beleaguered Will Smith valiantly struggles to find a cure for a deadly virus

that sends flesh-hungry hoards nightly to his doorstep. It further grounds the popular

zombie horror television series, The Walking Dead. In most of these depictions—and scores more like them—economic and cultural life terminates, cuing audiences to the

interlinking of pathogenic risk and international stability.

Visions of viral apocalypse also figure widely in popular accounts of biopreparedness

simulations and the scripts for the simulations themselves. In her widely cited Foreign

Affairs essay, ‘‘The Nightmare of Bioterrorism,’’ Garrett (2001) drew from a Johns

Hopkins Center for Civilian Defense bioterrorism role-playing scenario, in which

more than 15,000 people die of smallpox worldwide within two months, and epi- demics rage out of control in 14 nations . . . the global economy teeters on the brink of collapse as nations close their borders and sink into isolation . . . utter chaos

Western Journal of Communication 461

reigns, and the National Guard enforces martial law over the city’s two million resi- dents. Similarly, government authority either breaks down or reverts to military-style control in cities all over the world as smallpox claims lives and pits terrified citizens against one another. (p. 81)

Similarly, in 2004, in what was then the largest-ever international ministerial

smallpox simulation exercise (Smith et al., 2005), the Atlantic Storm tabletop exercise

employed epidemiological modeling to project 666,000 infections, global economic

demise, and strife between countries that had and did not have smallpox vaccines

(Drogin, 2005). According to an article in the International Herald Tribune, the exer-

cise ‘‘destructive and disruptive as it was—could have been much worse’’ (Hamilton

& O’Toole, 2005). That the outcomes of their fictional scenario could have been

much worse is somewhat beside the point, for most situations could usually be worse;

such rhetoric reflects the penchant for catastrophizing that characterizes so many of

these exercises. However, this amplified rhetoric resonates with that of many other

biopreparedness exercises, such as TOPOFFs 2, 3, and 4, the exercises initially man-

dated by the Clinton Administration (see Erickson & Barratt, 2004). Each TOPOFF

exercise entailed at least 2 years of planning and more than 10,000 volunteers repre-

senting hundreds of international, national, state, tribal, and local agencies at a cost

of up to $15 million apiece, and each predicting, according to unclassified estimates,

similar portraits of widespread death and unrest (Erickson & Barratt, 2004; Keränen,

2008, 2011b; Schoch-Spana, 2004). Thus, highly unlikely, ‘‘low-probability’’

simulated scenarios are granted epistemic privilege via vivid viral apocalyptic

imaginations.

Both pre- and post-anthrax mailings, portrayals of the large-scale bioterrorism

simulation exercises conducted in the United States and elsewhere echo the familiar

form of viral apocalypse: mounting death tolls, global economic meltdown, and

international conflict. Reports of Dark Winter presented a ‘‘doomsday scenario’’ that

‘‘was, in fact, a game’’ although ‘‘no one involved was having any fun’’ (Simons,

2002). One explanation of Dark Winter in a National Geographic piece about weapons

of mass destruction noted that a week after the simulated smallpox outbreak began,

‘‘there were 16,000 cases in half the states in the country, and a thousand people had

died—200 from reactions to vaccine. Cities were paralyzed as millions tried to flee the

epidemic. Vaccine supplies were now exhausted, and violence was rampant in the

streets’’ (Simons, 2002). Technical sphere accounts of the tabletop exercise Atlantic

Storm likewise reported, ‘‘There are conflicting reports regarding the number of sick

persons and dead persons. Some reports show an estimated 3700 cases of pneumonic

plague with 950 deaths. Others are reporting >4,000 cases and more than 2000 deaths’’ (Inglesby, Grossman, & O’Toole, 2001, p. 438; see also Inglesby, 2001).

The threat of serious civil unrest and widespread casualty, endlessly replayed in nearly

every viral thriller film from Outbreak onwards and routinely rehashed in televised

dramas like 24 and government preparedness exercises, confronts citizens and

decision-makers with the bloodied spectacle of germs unleashed. That the images

from these cinematic representations so closely resemble those of the scripted simula-

tions fuels questions about the relationship between film and scripts for private and

462 L. Keränen

political life. Indeed, in films ranging from 28 Days Later to I am Legend, a small band

of survivors tries to repel the infected and start anew, characterizing the rebirth that is

the hallmark of apocalyptic discourse. Following great civil chaos and economic col-

lapse, social systems cease, hope nearly—but not completely—dies. Viral apocalyptic forms thus render the potential hazards of biological weapons and emerging infectious

disease in sublime terms that transfix decision-makers and everyday citizens alike.

Beyond their resemblance to Hollywood thrillers, biopreparedness simulations

deeply influence the realm of policy and decision-making. Dick Cheney, Condoleezza

Rice, and scores of other government officials received briefings on the vulnerabilities

exposed by Dark Winter. Scott R. Lillibridge, Special Assistant to the Secretary of

Health and Human Services (HHS) for National Security and Emergency Manage-

ment, deployed Dark Winter lessons as the basis for his testimony before Congress

in 2001 (Lillibridge, 2001), while Richard Falkenrath used TOPOFF scenarios as

evidence in his testimony before Congress about the urgent threat of bioterrorism

(Falkenrath, 2006). Upon viewing a portrayal of Dark Winter, Representative

Christopher Shays noted that ‘‘I felt like I’ve been in the middle of a movie, and

maybe that’s why I was anxious’’ (Shays as cited in Lakoff, 2008, p. 51). Spectacles

of biodisaster resembling Hollywood thrillers thus convert imagined apocalyptic

futures into present action in a move anticipated by Baudrillard (1983). Here, simu-

lations powerfully inform our nation’s biodefense policy. As Baudrillard explained,

‘‘Simulation threatens the difference between the ‘true’ and the ‘false,’ the ‘real,’

and the ‘imaginary’’’ (1994=2004, p. 3). In the absence of actual large-scale biological weapons attacks, the imaginary compels future action, a rhetorical sleight of hand

that, as we shall soon discover, entails profound technological consequences.

Charting the ‘‘Biodefense Bonanza’’: Technological Solutions to Perceived

Biological Insecurity

Persuaded that the United States is vulnerable to biological threats through a cata-

strophic rhetoric built on a unifying vision of viral apocalypse, policy makers have

repeatedly stressed technological—as opposed to political and cultural—solutions to the challenges posed by biological weapons and emerging infectious disease (see

Vogel, 2008). For example, many commentators emphasize the need to apply analytic

modeling to the problems posed by bioterrorism. As the NIH researcher F. Ellis

McKenzie testified in a 2004 issue of Emerging Infectious Disease, ‘‘The events of

September 11, 2001, emphasized that the United States should use every tool avail-

able to help prepare for, and respond to, bioterrorism,’’ including statistical modeling

and real-time modeling during outbreaks (p. 2044). McKenzie’s HHS working group

recommended the rigorous application of mathematical analysis to predicted yet

unpredictable biodefense scenarios, thus revealing a tightening interface between epi-

demiology, biology, and national security. Similarly, in his 2007 testimony before the

U.S. House of Representatives Committee on Energy and Commerce Subcommittee

on Oversight Investigations, Dr. Hugh Auchincloss, Principal Deputy Director of the

National Institutes for Allergens and Infectious Disease (NIAID), spoke of the ‘‘clear

Western Journal of Communication 463

consensus’’ that U.S. biodefense research agendas ‘‘would require additional research

infrastructure, especially laboratories built to modern Biosafety Level 3 (BSL-3) and

Biosafety Level 4 (BSL-4) standards’’ (2007, p. 3). Vogel (2008) observes that DHS’s

National Biodefense Analysis and Countermeasures Center (see also Warrick, 2006)

‘‘will use simulations, computational modeling, laboratory experimentation, and

forward-looking technical analyses to anticipate future bioterrorist threats’’ (p. 561).

Significant here is the role of anticipation in planning initiatives. In mathematically

modeling the outcomes of anticipated bioterrorism, political solutions to the prob-

lems posed by potential bioterrorism are slighted. Such a move raises the question:

In imagining future biological events, do nations in fact make them more likely?

The technological fix for envisioned catastrophic biological events entails at least

four ethical concerns and possible security dilemmas. First, in the effort to apply

technological solutions to the challenges of biological threats, policy makers have dra-

matically altered the nation’s biodefense infrastructure through massive infusions of

funding. The label ‘‘bioterror bonanza’’ captures this profound explosion in cultural

production (Enserink, 2002, p. 1954). Indeed, the federal government designated

more than $14.5 billion to civilian biodefense between 2001 and 2004, with 2005

expenditures totaling $7.6 billion, with increases for all agencies involved with civilian

biodefense, and a stabilized but significant set of expenditures since that time

(Schuler, 2004; see also Franco, 2008; Franco & Deitch, 2007). According to the

Century Foundation (2004, p. 2), ‘‘The nearly $1 billion slated for state and local gov-

ernments in 2002 was fourteen times greater than the previous year’s biodefense

spending’’ and ‘‘represented the single largest investment in public health infrastruc-

ture since World War II.’’ The allocation of more than $6 billion for Project

BioShield—the initiative responsible for air sniffing devices in major metropolitan

areas, stockpiles of vaccines, and critical infrastructure changes—more than doubled the amount spent on the Human Genome Project. NIAID experienced a whopping

1,500% increase in biodefense-related funding in the initial years following 2001 with

97% of funding awards going to recipients who had never previously worked on bio- logical weapons agents (Schuler, 2004). In sum, since 9=11, the government has spent

more than $50 billion on civilian biodefense, a number that does not include what we

can imagine are substantial monies allocated for military biodefense and related

applications. This figure represents $2 billion for each recognized victim of bioterror-

ism (Franco, 2008; Reynolds, 2005). Moreover, President Obama appears just as vig-

orous a supporter of biodefense as his predecessor; he has been praised by biodefense

industry insiders for his enthusiasm and funding for their initiatives (University of

Pittsburgh Medical Center’s Center for Biosecurity, 2009). And thus, public health

and national security become increasingly interlaced.

Second, beyond altering funding priorities, the push for global biodefense may be

hampering research in other areas. By 2005, biodefense funding at NIAID exceeded

HIV=AIDS outlays, leading observers to condemn a bioterrorism ‘‘brain drain’’

wherein health researchers abandoned areas of inquiry with high global mortality

rates (say, tuberculosis, malaria, and dengue fever) to study rarely occurring biologi-

cal weapons agents. Indeed, a commonly expressed concern is that the funding for

464 L. Keränen

biodefense is draining resources from other public health areas (Reppert, 2005). For

instance, Barrett (2006) reports that ‘‘in a survey of 539 local public health agencies,

53 percent reported that bioterrorism preparedness diverted significant resources

away from such public health activities as prenatal care, STD prevention, and school

immunization campaigns’’ (National Association of County and City Health Offi-

cials, 2003, as cited in Barrett, 2006, p. 185). Leitenberg (2005) noted that

‘‘currently one-third of both the National Institutes of Health (NIH) infectious dis-

ease budget and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) budget and

more than half of U.S. Government and corporate vaccine development is relegated

to biodefense, that is, it focuses on the ‘select agents,’ those pathogens that are con-

sidered most likely to be used as biological weapon agents’’ (p. 66). While officials

have been working to redress this imbalance, the question of what expenditures are

justified for ‘‘low-probability=high-consequence’’ biological events remains. More- over, peddlers of home biological weapons testing devices, safe rooms, sniffer sys-

tems, and germ masks testify to a rich and burgeoning culture industry, which

caters to contamination anxiety. While their global neighbors die in droves from

dirty water and malnutrition, citizens of the wealthy West can prepare for the

unthinkable through niche consumerism designed to protect them from anticipated

future contagion.

A third concern, known as the Persephone effect, is that modifications to existing

pathogens may inadvertently create organisms that could be used malevolently (Atlas,

2005, p. 239; Kwik et al., 2003). It appears, for example, that an American scientist,

ostensibly hired to protect the nation from biological threats, sent an engineered

form of anthrax through the U.S. mail in the most significant act of bioterrorism

since the term was coined (Warrick, 2008). In a statement that reveals the potential

magnification of biorisks, Penrose Albright, formerly of DHS, has conceded: ‘‘De

facto, we are going to make biowarfare pathogens at NBACC [National Biodefense

Analysis and Countermeasures Center] in order to study them’’ (Albright as cited

in Warrick, 2008, p. A1). And thus we come full circle to David Huxsoll’s daunting

reality: the routine modification of biological weapons agents in the name of fighting

biological weapons in an ever-expanding array of facilities.

Fourth, even if modified biological agents do not fall into malevolent hands, some

industry observers raise concerns about routine accidents at a growing list of labora-

tories. The now-disbanded bioweapons watch group ‘‘Sunshine Project’’ found doz-

ens of accidents in biosafety laboratories following 9=11, including numerous violations of biosafety regulations and a number of classified or otherwise clandestine

activities that suggest the illegal development of new classes of weapons in the name

of self-defense. Virologist Jack Woodall explains that ‘‘recent laboratory accidents

have shown that however secure the laboratory facilities, laboratory workers have

become infected with SARS [severe acute respiratory syndrome] virus and tularemia

bacteria, and in fact the last recorded outbreak of smallpox began with a laboratory

infection in England’’ (Woodall as cited in Klotz & Sylvester, 2009, p. 124). The bio-

defense industry now employs more than 14,000 researchers at 327 institutions, rais-

ing the potential for leaks or accidental exposure with at least 32 additional

Western Journal of Communication 465

high-security laboratories planned (Willyard, 2007, p. 1004). Some of the known

accidents include a foot-and-mouth outbreak from germs leaked from a U.K. labora-

tory. Moreover, two researchers at the National Institute of Virology in Beijing con-

tracted SARS, infecting seven others, and a Russian scientist died after she stuck

herself with a needle contaminated with Ebola (Willyard, 2007, p. 1004). The world’s

biodefense laboratories therefore signify sites where ‘‘normal accidents’’ spur infec-

tion.

Finally, U.S. intensification appears to be prompting what some have called a

‘‘global biodefense boom’’ (Warrick, 2008, p. A1). In 2006, the Washington Post

reported that India, China, and Cuba also began construction of high-security

laboratories. The secrecy surrounding global biodefense activities seems to be trigger-

ing another biological arms race like the one the U.S. and the Soviet Union engaged

in during the Cold War (Klotz & Sylvester, 2009; Warrick, 2006). In 2008, the new

National Biodefense Analysis and Countermeasures Center (NBACC, pronounced

‘‘en-back’’) opened at Fort Detrick, Maryland, the primal scene of our post–World

War II=Cold War biological weapons program. While DHS officials laud the facility

for improving our nation’s security, local residents express concerns. ‘‘It’s not only a

huge threat to local public health and safety, it is in the forefront of the instigation of

a brand-new arms race in the realm of bioweapons,’’ testified one lawyer and area

resident to the Washington Post, ‘‘Here we are, expanding by about 20 times the size

of the program that we’re now being told generated the only bioattack in our history’’

(Bruce Kissin as cited in Hernandez, 2008). And so it goes: The fear of biological

weapons licenses work with biological weapons agents, which magnifies biological

risk and raises a series of ethical dilemmas and security concerns.

Conclusion: A Brave New World of Biorisks

The dominant critical read of the U.S.’s post-9=11 biodefense bonanza is that it represents a dangerous extension of the War on Terror into a technoscientific front

that strips funding from crucial areas such as malaria, tuberculosis, and HIV=AIDS

(Goldstein, 2003; Klotz & Sylvester, 2009). Supporters counter that because it extends

public health response capacity, biodefense could potentially counter a host of nat-

urally occurring outbreaks and lead to new medical advances (Palmquist, 2008).

Whether or not either or both of these claims bears out upon empirical scrutiny, this

paper locates the biodefense buildup in a widespread vision of bio(in)security collec-

tively produced through representations of catastrophic viral apocalypse that, in turn,

licenses a proliferation of biological weapons agents in the name of biodefense.

Indeed, a collection of experts from security circles, the pharmaceutical industry,

the scientific community, citizen advocacy groups, international policy circles, and

even Hollywood have—across a variety of political, technical, and cultural fronts— pushed the guiding notion of biological vulnerability that may in fact be promulgat-

ing bio(in)security in order to justify and perpetuate its existence. In short, while

these elite decision-makers do not control the endless loop of Hollywood imagery

and simulated confabulations that lodge the germ threat so firmly in the American

466 L. Keränen

psyche, they do confront such visions of viral apocalypse through a series of techno-

logical fixes that make germ work routine, and which sustain biodefense writ large.

The rhetoric of biological threats as catastrophic risk that emerged out of the mid–

late 1990s and intensified after the post-9=11 anthrax mailings thus signifies a recon- figuration of anxieties about emerging infectious disease to the realm of national

security, encouraging a robust ‘‘biodefense.’’ As necessary as protections from epi-

demic may be, this development nevertheless raises questions about the interlacing

of national security and public health. It also raises questions about which health

risks merit large-scale economic and cultural outlays. For instance, while acknowl-

edged acts of bioterrorism killed fewer than 10 people in the last 100 years, cell

phone–related distractions are responsible for 2,600 annual deaths and 333,000 acci-

dents with moderate to severe injuries (Richtel, 2009). Routine medical errors kill

tens of thousands of citizens each year, food-borne pathogens cause more than 76

million illnesses each year in the United States with 5,000 deaths (Institute of

Medicine, 2009; Mead et al., 1999), while cancer and heart disease kill more than a

million (Goldstein, 2003). Yet, concerns about bioterrorism and possible pan-

demic—more than the more mundane and regularly occurring killers—prompt large-scale funding and action; this imbalance is fueled, in part, through viral apoca-

lyptic imaginations.

This essay represents but a beginning inspection of how naturally occurring germs

and newly created biological agents are rising in prominence and symbolic power.

Future investigations of the rhetorical constitution, deployment, and operation of

perceived biological threats are needed. For instance, much work remains to account

for the evolution of viral apocalypse as a rhetorical form that cuts across political,

technical, and cultural domains. The visual imaginary of viral apocalypse in parti-

cular deserves scholarly scrutiny, as does the technical and public framing of biologi-

cal risks across multiple time periods and contexts. Additionally, scholars should

explore the meanings and consequences of the rhetoric of ‘‘public health security.’’

Indeed, the implications of biodefensive activities for research ethics, genetic manipu-

lation, health and safety, and global transparency and international relations remain

to be seen (and operate often under the radar), but deserve intense discussion and

scrutiny from scholars and broader global community. These are but a few of the

projects that scholars in communication and rhetoric can undertake to help explain

how—and with what effect—biorisks are being generated, understood, and activated

in public and private life.

Citing Mitchell Dean, Scott (2006) maintains that scholars should analyze how

changing conceptions of risk ‘‘become latched onto different political programmes

and social imaginaries that invest them with a specific ethos’’ (Dean as cited in Scott,

2006, p. 120). Scott concludes his essay concerning 9=11, BigPharma, and bioterror-

ism with the ‘‘hope that others will join me in exploring rhetoric’s interdependent

and relative roles in the construction, functions, and effects of risk across global

socio-political contexts’’ (p. 138). By supplying a preliminary rhetorical history

and example of biocriticism (Keränen, 2011a), this essay has attempted precisely

that task. Harkening back to Hay and Andrejevic’s (2006) notion of ‘‘homeland

Western Journal of Communication 467

insecurities,’’ it contributes a biological component to critical homeland security

research and ends with an invitation for others to contribute to this emerging vein

of scholarship. If, indeed, biological threats are multiplying both symbolically and

materially, then rhetoricians and critical communication scholars can at the very least

play a more significant part in explaining how biodefense might be reproducing the

very bio(in)security that gives it meaning and power, hence generating a brave new

world wherein biological weapons agents are normalized and awaiting further action.

Notes

[1] I need to acknowledge that the Nunn–Lugar Cooperative Threat Reduction Program of 1992

included biological weapons among its nuclear and chemical weapons threat reduction

plans, highlighting the security concerns that arose following the demise of the Soviet Union.

[2] The terms biosecurity and biodefense are sometimes used synonymously, although there are

debates about what the terms do and should designate. Although some scholars argue that

biosecurity is a broader term, I am using them interchangeably in this essay.

[3] Although some biological weapons agents are bacterial, the term viral in viral apocalypse sig-

nifies the communicability of disease agents and indexes the reinvigorated fascination with

viruses that emerged out of the 1990s.

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