Exploiting the Challenges to Bioweapons Development

ABSTRACT

Widespread and often exaggerated generalizations about the global spread weapons of mass destruction (WMDs) have proven to be not only misleading and technologically naïve, but also unhelpful in formulating effective policies to counter their threat. The new book by George Mason University's Sonia Ben Ouagrham-Gormley dispels the popular narrative that governments and terror groups can easily—and inevitably will—develop WMDs, particularly biological weapons, by exploring the complex external and internal conditions that such programs require, as demonstrated by the Cold War-era biological weapon programs of the superpowers. This empirically grounded and realistic assessment of how states try—and often fail—to develop such programs offers a more reliable basis to craft realistic counterproliferation policies that can elicit international support.

KEYWORDS:

• Biological weapons
• biosecurity
• proliferation
• terrorism
• Soviet Union

Notes

1. Donald Rumsfeld, prepared testimony for the Senate Armed Services Committee, “Defense Strategy Review,” 107th Cong., 1st sess., June 21, 2001.

2. As summarized in the unclassified report of the Commission to Assess the Ballistic Missile Threat to the United States (known as the Rumsfeld Commission), in 1988, the United States faced an imminent threat of intercontinental range ballistic missiles armed with biological or nuclear warheads from several states, including North Korea and Iran, within five years (and Iraq in ten years) from the time each state decided to undertake development, although the United States would have diminished or nonexistent intelligence warning about this threat. For various reasons, including faulty analysis, these predictions have not come to fruition after seventeen years. Report of the Commission to Assess the Ballistic Missile Threat to the United States, July 15, 1988, <http://fas.org/irp/threat/bm-threat.htm>.

3. Scott D. Sagan, “Why Do States Build Nuclear Weapons: Three Models in Search of a Bomb,” International Security 21 (Winter, 1996–97), pp. 54–86.

4. The instances of falsification are revealing and suggest an implicit parallel to certain Western defense programs in which performance results are said to be skewed or exaggerated in response to the pressures of unrealistic political expectations, such as US efforts to develop ballistic missile defenses. Political interference impedes genuine scientific discovery across a variety of contexts, not just authoritarian states.

5. In 1941, the United States first undertook feasibility studies on a potential offensive bioweapon program, though, according to Ben Ouagrham-Gormley, “actual offensive work [ … ] did not commence until the fall of 1943, when construction of the first research buildings at Fort Detrick—the program's central facility—was completed.” President Richard M. Nixon terminated the US bioweapons program in 1969.