Biodefense and the return to great-power competition

ABSTRACT

The 2017 US National Security Strategy asserts that, “after being dismissed as a phenomenon of an earlier century, great power competition returned,” pointing to actions that Russia and China have taken to reassert their influence and attempt to change the international order. Such a shift has implications for biodefense. It suggests an increased likelihood of the development and potential use of biological weapons by states, which had been downplayed by those who have been more concerned about non-state biological-weapons programs. State program access to expertise, facilities, and resources implies a greater level of technological sophistication than would typically be credited to non-state actors, influencing the requirements for national biodefense programs to detect, characterize, respond, to, and attribute a biological attack. States also could have missions for biological weapons that differ from those intended by terrorists.

KEYWORDS:

• biological weapons
• non-state actors
• terrorism
• biodefense
• Russia
• China
• United States

Notes

1 The White House, “National Security Strategy of the United States of America,” December 2017, pp. 25, 27, <www.whitehouse.gov/wp-content/uploads/2017/12/NSS-Final-12-18-2017-0905.pdf>.

2 Francis Fukuyama, The End of History and the Last Man (New York: Free Press, 1992), p. 122.

3 Peter Roudik, “Russian Federation: Legal Aspects of War in Georgia,” Law Library of Congress, Global Legal Research Center, September 2008, <www.loc.gov/law/help/legal-aspects-of-war/russia-legal-aspects-of-war.pdf>, p. 14. See also US Department of State, “Russia Fact Sheet,” December 18, 2018, <www.state.gov/russia-fact-sheet/>.

4 Tom Phillips, Oliver Holmes, and Owen Bowcott, “Beijing Rejects Tribunal’s Ruling in South China Sea Case,” The Guardian, July 16, 2016, <www.theguardian.com/world/2016/jul/12/philippines-wins-south-china-sea-case-against-china>.

5 Congressional Budget Office, “Projected Costs of U.S. Nuclear Forces, 2019–2028,” January 2019, <www.cbo.gov/system/files/2019-01/54914-NuclearForces.pdf>.

6 Michael O’Hanlon, “Is US Defense Spending Too High, Too Low, or Just Right?” Policy 2020 Brookings, October 15, 2019, <www.brookings.edu/policy2020/votervital/is-us-defense-spending-too-high-too-low-or-just-right/>.

7 US Department of Defense, “Summary of the 2018 National Defense Strategy of the United States,” <https://dod.defense.gov/Portals/1/Documents/pubs/2018-National-Defense-Strategy-Summary.pdf>, p. 4.

8 Ibid., p. 1

9 US National Security Council, “National Strategy for Countering Biological Threats,” November 2009, <https://obamawhitehouse.archives.gov/sites/default/files/National_Strategy_for_Countering_BioThreats.pdf>, p. 1. Elsewhere, this strategy does refer to the risk of nation-state attack, but overall it is largely oriented toward helping ensure that legitimate life-sciences and biotechnology activities are not exploited by terrorists for harm.

10 The White House, “National Biodefense Strategy,” 2018, <www.whitehouse.gov/wp-content/uploads/2018/09/National-Biodefense-Strategy.pdf>, p. 3.

11 Ibid., p. 9

12 Raymond A. Zilinskas, “Take Russia to ‘Task’ on Bioweapons Transparency,” Nature Medicine, Vol. 18, No. 6 (2012), p. 850, <www.nature.com/articles/nm0612-850>.

13 US Department of State, “Compliance with the Convention on the Prohibition of the Development, Production, Stockpiling, and Use of Chemical Weapons and on Their Destruction (Condition (10)(c) Report,” April 15, 2019, <www.state.gov/wp-content/uploads/2019/05/AVC-Condition-10c-2019.pdf>, p. 9.

14 North Atlantic Council, “Statement by the North Atlantic Council on the Poisoning of Alexei Navalny,” press release, September 4, 2020, <www.nato.int/cps/en/natohq/news_177742.htm>.

15 Milton Leitenberg and Raymond A. Zilinskas with Jens Kuhn, The Soviet Biological Weapons Program: A History (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2012).

16 Joby Warrick, “Ebola Crisis Rekindles Concerns about Secret Research in Russian Military Labs,” Washington Post, October 24, 2014, <www.washingtonpost.com/national/health-science/2014/10/23/ce409716-5945-11e4-b812-38518ae74c67_story.html>; Raymond A. Zilinskas, The Soviet Biological Weapons Program and Its Legacy in Today’s Russia (Washington, DC: National Defense University Press, 2016), p. 2.

17 Florian Flade, “The June 2018 Cologne Ricin Plot: A New Threshold in Jihadi Bio Terror,” CTC Sentinel, Vol. 11, No. 7 (2018), <https://ctc.usma.edu/wp-content/uploads/2019/01/CTC-SENTINEL-082018-final.pdf>.

18 Richard Danzig, Marc Sageman, Terrance Leighton, Lloyd Hough, Hidemi Yuki, Rui Kotani, and Zachary M. Hosford, “Aum Shinrikyo: Insights into How Terrorists Develop Biological and Chemical Weapons,” Center for a New American Security, December 2012, <https://s3.amazonaws.com/files.cnas.org/documents/CNAS_AumShinrikyo_SecondEdition_English.pdf>.

19 Commission on the Intelligence Capabilities of the United States Regarding Weapons of Mass Destruction, “Report to the President,” March 31, 2005, pp. 269–70, <http://govinfo.library.unt.edu/wmd/report/wmd_report.pdf>.

20 Elizabeth Pond, “War in Ukraine: Is This the Way it Ends?” Survival, Vol. 59, No. 6 (2017–18), pp. 145–46; “Little Green Men”: A Primer on Modern Russian Unconventional Warfare, Ukraine 2013-2014 (Ft. Bragg, NC: US Army Special Operations Command, n.d.), <www.jhuapl.edu/Content/documents/ARIS_LittleGreenMen.pdf>.

21 National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine (NASEM), Biodefense in the Age of Synthetic Biology (Washington, DC: National Academies Press, 2018), pp. 91–92, <http://nap.edu/24890>; NASEM, Safeguarding the Bioeconomy (Washington, DC: National Academies Press, 2020), pp. 298–99.

22 Gregory D. Koblentz, “Regime Security: A New Theory for Understanding the Proliferation of Chemical and Biological Weapons,” Contemporary Security Policy, Vol. 34, No. 3, (November 19, 2013), pp. 501–25.

23 Ibid., p. 509

24 Christine Larson, “Who Needs Democracy When You Have Data?” Technology Review, August 20, 2018, <www.technologyreview.com/s/611815/who-needs-democracy-when-you-have-data/>.

25 Sui-Lee Wee and Paul Mozur, “China’s Genetic Research on Ethnic Minorities Sets off Science Backlash,” New York Times, December 4, 2019, <www.nytimes.com/2019/12/04/business/china-dna-science-surveillance.html>.