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Bioterrorism
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Bioterrorism
Confronting
a Complex Threat
edited by
Andreas Wenger
Reto Wollenmann
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Published in the United States of America in 2007 by
Lynne Rienner Publishers, Inc.
1800 30th Street, Boulder, Colorado 80301
www.rienner.com
and in the United Kingdom by
Lynne Rienner Publishers, Inc.
3 Henrietta Street, Covent Garden, London WC2E 8LU
© 2007 by Lynne Rienner Publishers, Inc. All rights reserved
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Bioterrorism : confronting a complex threat / Andreas Wenger and
Reto Wollenmann (eds.).
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN-13: 978-1-58826-525-8 (hardcover : alk. paper)
1. Bioterrorism. 2. Bioterrorism—Prevention. I. Wenger, Andreas.
II. Wollenmann, Reto.
HV6433.3.B56 2007
363.325'3—dc22
2006033578
British Cataloguing in Publication Data
A Cataloguing in Publication record for this book
is available from the British Library.
Printed and bound in the United States of America
The paper used in this publication meets the requirements
of the American National Standard for Permanence of
Paper for Printed Library Materials Z39.48-1992.
5 4 3 2 1
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Foreword, Richard Danzig vii
Acknowledgments ix
1 Bioterrorism: A Complex Threat 1
Andreas Wenger and Reto Wollenmann
Part 1 Understanding the Threat:
Actors and Capabilities
2 The Legacy of Secret State Programs 13
Jeanne Guillemin
3 Evolution of the Current Threat 39
Milton Leitenberg
4 The Impact of Scientific and Technological Change 77
Malcolm Dando
Part 2 Assessing the Threat: Differing Perceptions
5 Knowledge Gaps and Threat Assessments 93
Peter R. Lavoy
6 Why Do Conclusions from the Experts Vary? 119
Marie Isabelle Chevrier
v
Contents
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Part 3 Managing the Threat: Policy Options
7 When to Cry Wolf, What to Cry, and How to Cry It 155
Anthony H. Cordesman
8 More Transparency for a Secure Biodefense 179
Iris Hunger
Part 4 Conclusion
9 Securing Society Against the Risk of Bioterrorism 199
Andreas Wenger
List of Acronyms 221
Bibliography 223
The Contributors 227
Index 229
About the Book 241
vi Contents
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THE USE OF PATHOGENS AS WEAPONS OF WAR AND TERROR HAS A LONG HISTORY,
but in recent years our focus on these risks has greatly intensified. Ear-
lier, many policymakers thought of bioweapons as the stuff of antiquity
(cadavers catapulted over walls to spread plague in medieval cities
under siege, blankets infected with smallpox to decimate American
Indians opposing the British in their American colonies) or eccentricity
(a Rajneeshee cult spreading salmonella in salad bars to disable politi-
cal opponents, Aum Shinrikyo attempting to obtain and work with
anthrax before resorting to sarin in their efforts to trigger an apocalypse
by attacking Tokyo subway passengers). Starting in 1989, however,
Russian defectors triggered an appreciation of how heavily the Soviet
Union had invested in this weaponry. More recently, the attacks of Sep-
tember 11, 2001, and the anthrax letters that were mailed to US senators
and media figures immediately afterward focused attention on both bio-
weaponry and the imaginative malevolence of terrorist groups that
might use it. Since that time, an order of magnitude more money, effort,
and debate has gone into the subject.
The first response when confronting a newly perceived risk is to con-
tinue to do what was being done previously in other contexts, but to re-
label it as relevant to the new threat. A second common reaction is to
allocate much more money to the problem, permitting us to double, quad-
ruple, or otherwise greatly multiply those preexisting efforts. A third
response is to reorganize: forming committees, councils, commissions,
divisions, and ultimately even departments bearing names that suggest
they will solve, or at least address, the newly perceived problem.
Normally, it is only later that we start to do what we should have
done first: debate the character of the new problem. How substantial is
vii
Foreword
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this risk? What are its special characteristics? Will the problem be the
same in the next decades as at present? How might it manifest itself?
What near-term capabilities might protect us? Are these capabilities the
same as those we should be pursuing for the long term, or do our long-
term and short-term strategies diverge? It is only when these and other
fundamental questions are asked and answered that we can begin to
choose wisely among existing efforts, detect the gaps in what we are
doing, initiate relevant new efforts, and organize and invest to respond
to our challenges.
It took us some years to develop new thinking in response to the
realities of nuclear weapons. Bioterrorism is, if anything, a more com-
plicated problem. It demands not only an understanding of both biol-
ogy—a science that is changing faster than nuclear physics did after
World War II—and terrorism, but also a grasp of such diverse topics as
the physics of aerosols, our food distribution systems, agricultural and
public health systems, mechanisms of decontamination, and systems of
policing and interdiction.
Moreover, in one dimension bioterrorism is a security problem,
related to foreign enemies. In another, it is a domestic problem, subject
to exploitation by criminals and disaffected loners as in the model of the
Unabomber. Viewed a third way, bioterrorism is intimately connected to
natural challenges, particularly those of pandemic disease. From a
fourth perspective, bio-challenges may occur from “bio-blunders,”
problems that arise neither naturally nor malevolently but from scien-
tists who accidentally unleash new pathogens. Fifth, bioterrorism should
not be considered in isolation, but instead in tandem with all other po-
tential hazards.
It should not be surprising, then, that we are still in the midst of
debate and at present have no consensus as to the problem, much less as
to how to deal with it. It is the strength of this volume that it captures
the range and richness of this debate. While we have no consensus, the
way we will get there is through discussions like this.
—Richard Danzig,
Former Secretary of the US Navy (1998–2001)
viii Foreword
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THIS BOOK EVOLVED OUT OF AN ATTEMPT TO SHED NEW LIGHT ON THE BIOTERROR-
ism threat—a threat that became the subject of widespread media atten-
tion and political rhetoric in the aftermath of the 2001 anthrax letters.
It is the result of collaboration by an interdisciplinary group of col-
leagues in areas ranging from security policy and counterterrorism to
public health and the life sciences.
Along the way, we received the support and assistance of many peo-
ple and in a variety of ways. We thank the authors of this book for their
patience with our comments and suggestions and for their willingness to
take into account new developments. A conference organized by ETH
Zürich (Swiss Federal Institute of Technology) was a crucial part of our
collaborative process, and we thank all the conference participants who
presented their views and shared their insights. In addition to the
authors of this volume, they are Ken Alibek, Janet Martha Blatny, Jürg
Balmer, Edward Borodzicz, Richard Danzig, Myriam Dunn, Gerald
Epstein, Ernst Felberbauer, John Gilbert, Frank Gottron, Gigi Kwik Grön-
vall, Jesper Grönvall, Michael Guery, Rohan Gunaratna, Stein Henriksen,
Melissa Hersh, David Heyman, David Humair, Frida Kuhlau, Ajey Lele,
Michael Mair, Mark Maskow, Victor Mauer, Michael Moodie, Eric K.
Noji, Anders Norqvist, Aleksandr Rabodzey, Klaus Riedmann, Martin
Schütz, Yoram Schweitzer, Ted Whiteside, and Doron Zimmermann.
We are delighted that our manuscript ended up in the capable hands
of Lynne Rienner and Lisa Tulchin, who have handled the review and
publication process with great skill. We wish to extend our thanks to
Isabelle Abele-Wigert and Martin Wählisch, and especially to Jennifer
Gassmann of the Center for Security Studies, for their outstanding work
in preparing and organizing the conference. We thank Michelle Norgate
ix
Acknowledgments
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and Christopher Findlay for their excellent editorial assistance. Finally,
we owe a great debt to Susanne Schmid as a truly indispensable part-
ner in our day-to-day work.
While we have greatly benefited from the comments, criticism, and
encouragement of all those mentioned above, the final responsibility for
any errors is of course ours alone.
—Andreas Wenger and Reto Wollenmann
x Acknowledgments
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Bioterrorism
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BIOTERRORISM, A HIGHLY COMPLEX THREAT, IS THE CONCERN OF A WIDE RANGE
of academic and political fields, including science, politics, law, and se-
curity. Soon after the terrorist attacks of 9/11, the 2001 anthrax letters
and a worldwide series of related hoaxes alerted the world’s media to the
potential threat of bioterrorism and catapulted the issue onto the secu-
rity policy agendas of the United States and many Western governments.
The debate about bioterrorism and biodefense is not entirely new in
expert circles, and, given the difficulties in defining the extent and char-
acteristics of the threat, it comes as no surprise that the many expert
evaluations have often contradicted one another. However, the degree to
which this debate has been—and will continue to be—shaped by US
policies, on the one hand, and by a growing gap between the views held
by the academic community and those held by the policymaking com-
munity, on the other, is indeed remarkable.
This book addresses two important topics: the nature and the rele-
vance of the threat to our societies of the deliberate use of biological
weapons, and the difficulties associated with designing the right policy
mix to successfully manage a complex and still largely unsubstantiated
threat. The better we understand the many challenges involved in the
assessment of the threat—the persistence of political conflict and the
changing nature of terrorist warfare, the present and future activities of
state actors in bioweapons production and biodefense research, the
rapid technological advances in the life sciences, the global spread of
dual-use expertise and commercial biotechnological applications, and
the risk of a rapid global spread of natural diseases—the better able we
will be to deal with the problem.
1
1
Bioterrorism:
A Complex Threat
ANDREAS WENGER AND RETO WOLLENMANN
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An examination of bioterrorism elicits a host of complex questions:
How urgent is the bioterrorism threat? Do we underestimate or overesti-
mate bioterrorism, and what are the potential consequences of our esti-
mates? What can we learn from bioterrorism events of the past? How will
the rapid developments of technology and those in the life sciences
affect the future threat? Who are the likely perpetrators of bioterrorism?
How much of a threat are state actors, nonstate terrorist actors, and
lonely insiders of growing governmental biodefense programs? What
policy options are there for managing the bioterrorism threat? How do
governments prioritize their policies for the prevention and management
of natural diseases, on the one hand, and for the prevention and manage-
ment of the malicious use of bioweapons on the other? To what degree is
bioterrorism a security policy issue as opposed to one of health or other
public policies? The authors of this book address these questions.
While not intended as the final word on bioterrorism, the present
book offers the opportunity to compare a variety of views of experts from
a wide range of professional and academic backgrounds. Most of the lit-
erature to date has focused either on the technical aspects of bioterrorism
or, more generally, on the threat posed by weapons of mass destruction
(WMD). Several recent books, for example, discuss technical issues
related to a specific sector of bioterrorism, such as laboratory security,
food safety, infectious agents, viral bioterrorism, and biodefense or syn-
dromic surveillance.1 Others track the evolution of the WMD threat.2
This book, by contrast, focuses on bioterrorism in general and on the
security policy aspects of the bioterrorism threat in particular.
The book consists of three sections. The first covers actors and capa-
bilities; the second, threat perceptions; and the third, policy options. Part
1 deals with the legacy of the secret state biowarfare programs of the
twentieth century, analyzing the factors that have influenced the histori-
cal evolution of state bioweapons capabilities. Aiming to provide a bet-
ter understanding of the past, it also addresses the controversies sur-
rounding the current threat by both state and nonstate actors. With a view
to the future, it concludes with a discussion of the impact of scientific
and technological change in biology and the associated life sciences on
the potential malicious use of microorganisms by a wide range of actors.
Part 2 addresses the various, and sometimes contradictory, percep-
tions held by different communities about the nature of the biological
weapons threat. It identifies a high level of uncertainty as a key character-
istic of the bioterrorism threat and discusses a series of knowledge gaps
about the scope and sophistication of existing biowarfare programs and
past instances of biowarfare. Examining the literature and identifying
2 Bioterrorism

uncertainty as the key determiner of such perceptions, it shows why
experts make such very different policy prescriptions even though they
usually work with the same historical data.
Part 3 highlights a set of policy challenges relating to bioterrorism
and offers some solutions to them. It emphasizes the practical problems
that policymakers face when making decisions about the trade-offs
needed between investing resources in defense against bioterrorism and
investing them in the prevention of natural diseases. Finally, it discusses
endeavors for more security in the biosciences and in biodefense pro-
grams, and it calls for more transparency as a precondition for an in-
formed public policy debate at the national and international levels.
Introducing Part 1, Jeanne Guillemin investigates the history of state
biowarfare programs as a means of providing the reader with an assess-
ment of the future likelihood of a bioweapons attack. Unlike chemical
and nuclear weapons, biological weapons were rarely debated in public
in the twentieth century. Secrecy, Guillemin shows, was the most im-
portant facilitator of the growth of the biological warfare programs of
all major powers—whether democracies, republics, monarchies, totali-
tarian states, or military dictatorships—yet the extent of such programs
remained largely unknown, even well into the twenty-first century. In
addition to secrecy, scientific advocacy, an existing military-industrial
infrastructure, the political perception of a dire threat to national sur-
vival, and the doctrine of total war, with its justification of using civil-
ians as targets—all played an essential role in allowing for the creation
of state biological programs.
The end of the Cold War brought about a new awareness of the dan-
gers of biowarfare as the focus shifted to the potential diffusion of bio-
logical weapons to lesser states and nonstate terrorist actors. According
to Guillemin, however, this diffusion is directly affected by the policies
of advanced states in general and the United States in particular. Accel-
erated by the events of 9/11 and the subsequent Amerithrax3 cases, US
interest in—and consequently the research and funding of—biodefense
increased dramatically. Dozens of counter-bioterrorism programs, most
of them concealed from the public and not subject to congressional
oversight, are now entrenched in a wide range of US federal agencies as
a result of the shift in US policies toward defending all its citizens
against germ attack. The emphasis of these programs, Guillemin points
out, is on the development of new biodefense technologies, which has
inadvertently led to a huge increase in the number of trained micro-
biologists who know how to grow and test lethal pathogens for warfare,
Bioterrorism: A Complex Threat 3

exacerbating the danger of the diffusion of such expertise and technol-
ogy to potential bioterrorists.
The US export of a narrow national security mission to its allies,
Guillemin argues, undermines the long-term security interests of the
United States. A strictly civil defense approach to bioterrorism, like that
of the United States, ignores both the unstoppable global diffusion of
biotechnologies and also the risk of an unusually deadly outbreak of an
infectious disease. The spread of biotechnologies and natural epidemics
can be effectively regulated and controlled only by multiple, coordi-
nated international efforts. The alternative to transparency, institutional
oversight, and organizational accountability at the national level, and to
the criminalization of biological weapons at the international level, Guil-
lemin concludes, is a disease catastrophe that will highlight the danger of
government secrecy and the failures in international cooperation at the
cost of lives and public trust.
Analyzing the current biological weapons threat from state and non-
state actors, Milton Leitenberg takes issue with the claim of some ex-
perts that bioterrorism is the greatest existential threat of our age. Leiten-
berg shows that the number of state bioweapons programs has decreased
markedly over the past few years. Various US authorities implicitly
acknowledged the lessening threat of biowarfare when they dropped
South Africa, Libya, Iraq, and Cuba from their intelligence assessments,
and when they became more cautious after their intelligence failures in
Iraq and qualified their assessments of several other national bioweapons
programs, among them those of Iran, North Korea, and Syria. Accord-
ing to Leitenberg, no state is known to have assisted any nonstate or ter-
rorist group in obtaining biological weapons.
Leitenberg goes on to show that there has been an extremely low
incidence of real biological events in the past, in contrast to the large
number of hoaxes spawned by political rhetoric and media attention.
Aside from several right-wing groups in the United States and the Raj-
neesh group in The Dalles, Oregon, no terrorist group is known to have
successfully cultured any pathogen. The most serious known attempt,
Leitenberg notes, was Al-Qaida’s efforts to develop bioweapons, which
appear to have been at the early conceptual stage when the group’s facil-
ity was overrun by US forces in Afghanistan and the individual who car-
ried out the laboratory work was arrested. In fact, the production and dis-
tribution of anthrax powder in the United States in 2001 remains the most
significant example of a nonstate biological weapons capability.
Since the mid-1990s, the risk and imminence of the use of biologi-
cal agents by nonstate actors and terrorist organizations have been sys-
tematically and deliberately exaggerated and remain almost certainly
4 Bioterrorism

the single greatest factor in provoking Al-Qaida’s interest in bioweapons,
according to Leitenberg. He further points to increasing concerns about
the risk of a natural flu pandemic, concurring with Guillemin that the
current political rhetoric of the US government should be tempered in
the face of the greater likelihood of a natural disease outbreak, and that
the United States has been using an overwhelming proportion of its
resources to prepare for the wrong contingency.
Focusing on the fields of biology and chemistry, which in recent
years and through recent research breakthroughs have expanded into the
fields of molecular biology and biochemistry, Malcolm Dando addresses
the potential for the misuse of new and developing technologies. Dando
first outlines the stages of development of these sciences in the twenti-
eth century, moving on to show that the palette of agents now available
to potential perpetrators has grown significantly as a result in particu-
lar of new manipulations of old viruses and bacteria. Of special concern
is the fact that genetic engineering of traditional agents could increase
the number of possible agents and the characteristics and uses of such
agents to the extent that biodefense becomes unable to anticipate and
protect against the threats.
In the not-too-distant future the rapidly expanding knowledge in
biology could allow potential attackers to target any number of physio-
logical processes in the human (or animal) body in many different ways.
It took a hundred years, Dando points out, to achieve the ability to de-
code human DNA, and another fifty years to describe the DNA se-
quence of the human species. If developments in genetic science con-
tinue at the current pace, the ease with which various pathogens could
be synthetically produced could well increase—and with it the diversity
of pathogens and the means of delivering such pathogens. Thus, Dando
argues, the future impact of the advances in biology has to be thor-
oughly investigated in order to curb the potential hostile use of life sci-
ence research.
Dando draws the conclusion that we need a web of prevention, that
is, a multilateral set of policies, including better intelligence on poten-
tial perpetrators, effective controls on exports of agents and equipment,
and a strengthening of current public health and emergency planning
procedures. This web of prevention, Dando argues, has to be bound
together by the internationally accepted norm that modern life sciences
must not be used for hostile purposes. The best way of achieving this,
Dando suggests, is to ensure that the Biological and Toxin Weapons
Convention (BTWC) is reassessed by the states parties to give the con-
vention permanent organizational support and to ensure that strong
measures are taken to strengthen the BTWC.

Introducing Part 2, Peter Lavoy addresses the contrast between, on the
one hand, the extraordinary rhetoric of the United States and other gov-
ernments in describing biowarfare and bioterrorism as one of the most
frightening security threats and, on the other, the low level of prepared-
ness of those governments, societies, and armed forces to deal with this
threat. In explaining this contrast, Lavoy highlights two knowledge gaps,
both linked to a lack of certainty about nearly every aspect of the threat.
The first gap is the poor level of understanding about the scope and
sophistication of the biological warfare programs that state and nonstate
groups might currently possess. The second results from the technical,
political, social, cultural, and other difficulties in identifying, character-
izing, and attributing attacks involving biological weapons once they
have occurred.
Discussing the biological weapons programs of the former Soviet
Union, Iraq, and Al-Qaida, Lavoy points to the failure of the US intel-
ligence community to adequately assess these programs at different
points in time, when that community has either seriously underestimated
the threat, as with the Soviet Union, or dramatically overestimated it, as
with Iraq. Lavoy attributes these errors to a tendency of the US intelli-
gence community to deal with a lack of reliable information by rally-
ing behind one specific hypothesis to explain an adversary’s conduct.
Addressing a set of cases of alleged biowarfare by both superpowers
and other states during the Cold War, Lavoy acknowledges the propa-
ganda value of biological weapons while noting also the extreme diffi-
culty in authoritatively validating their use or nonuse.
The two knowledge gaps addressed by Lavoy make it extremely
difficult for governments to develop effective strategies and policies
and to assign adequate resources to the management of potential bio-
warfare and bioterrorism. In order to ameliorate these policy problems,
governments should try, Lavoy advises, to gain more information about
the status of biowarfare programs and about the cases in which biolog-
ical agents have been or may have been used. Since major information
gaps will persist, Lavoy concludes, the military acquisition and war plan-
ning process should be based on planning scenarios that feature realistic
biological weapons employment.
Marie Isabelle Chevrier addresses the widespread view that expert
evaluations of bioterrorism appear to vary widely. She analyzes bioterror-
ism threat assessments by well-known experts, focusing particularly on
the framing of the research question, the data considered, and the meth-
ods used. Chevrier finds similar arguments in the assessments, based on
similar data, using similar reasoning, and evidencing little disagreement
6 Bioterrorism

about the likelihood of bioterrorism and the likely vulnerability of mod-
ern societies. Although the policy prescriptions of the experts vary con-
siderably, the assessments themselves, Chevrier finds, mostly show that
a successful bioterrorism event causing mass casualties is not likely to
occur.
However, Chevrier demonstrates how the use of vague terminology
makes it difficult to understand what experts mean when they describe the
future likelihood of mass casualty bioterrorism as either “low,” “not
likely,” “extremely unlikely,” or “possible but not probable.” Most ex-
perts fail to relate the likelihood of an event to a specific time frame (for
example, “highly likely within the next five years”), and all find that there
is insufficient historical data to predict with any certainty the likely occur-
rence of future bioterrorism events; consequently, most researchers have
felt, Chevrier points out, that terrorist incidents involving chemical agents
were appropriate cases from which to draw inferences about bioterrorism.
However, given the differences in production and dissemination between
chemical agents and biological agents, Chevrier notes, such analysis may
overstate the estimated probability of a bioterrorism attack. The bottom
line in most of the assessments is widespread agreement that any bioter-
rorism estimate is surrounded by a great deal of uncertainty.
Chevrier divides the assessments into two groups, those done before
2001 and those undertaken after the anthrax letters of 2001. She found
that the assessments done after 9/11 and the Amerithrax cases represented
some change, but not a substantial one. However, the gap between the
academic and the policy communities has grown since 2001, driven by
highly publicized exercises simulating worst-case scenarios. Most aca-
demic bioterrorism experts have been far more cautious and reserved in
their assessments than those in the policy community. While the former
often focus on the nexus between the terrorism threat and the biological
weapons threat, the latter tend to see the bioterrorism threat in the larger
context of the likelihood of deliberately caused disease.
Introducing Part 3, Anthony H. Cordesman notes that for policymakers
there is no reliable way to establish the level of effort needed to deal
with the biological weapons risk. Nonetheless, although there are grave
uncertainties and extreme difficulties in tracking any form of biologi-
cal warfare activity, governments cannot ignore the fact, Cordesman
states, that Islamic terrorists have shown an interest in acquiring biolog-
ical weapons. Further, the difficulties in manufacturing, weaponizing,
and disseminating bioweapons are being steadily reduced by the spread
of biological facilities, dual-use equipment, and technical skills. At the

same time, Cordesman warns, governments should be extremely careful
about crying wolf. The fact that a threat exists does not predetermine the
kind of response that is needed; the priority the bioterrorism risk should
be given in the context of other security policy and health risks; and the
levels of investment in time, expertise, and money that are required.
According to Cordesman, most governments that have examined
bioterrorism in terms of technological capability have acknowledged the
possibility of a high-level attack. But dramatizing worst-case scenarios,
he argues, should give way to real-world capability studies. Most
bioterrorism events are likely to take the form of attacks where there is
little real damage in terms of lethality, and where the main impact is
most likely to be a mix of panic and political and economic effects. The
level of uncertainty in the use of a bioagent and in terms of its poten-
tial lethality remains very high. The technical expertise is concentrated
in official laboratories and research centers, but it is often lacking at the
broader public policy level. As a result, Cordesman concludes, there is
little transparency about the scale of national efforts that could shape an
informed public policy debate or foster international cooperation at the
operational level.
Addressing key policy challenges in the management of the biolog-
ical risk, Cordesman points to the problems—with regard to both
national policy and global cooperation—in determining the extent to
which investments in the defense against and response to biological ter-
rorism are competing with those in natural disease research, and also in
defining possible synergies between the two. Even though there are
practical limits to transparency and cooperation, he concludes, both are
key to any effort to prevent bioterrorism, to deal with its political im-
pact, and to create cost-effective programs. For if bioterrorism does
become a serious reality, there will be an immediate need for large-scale
cooperation—a fact that planning and preparation efforts should take
into account.
Iris Hunger identifies a trend toward more secrecy in the biological
field and argues that this trend has to be reversed in order to prevent an
erosion of existing international norms against the use of biological
agents as weapons. The rapid developments in the biosciences, together
with the increasing civilian use of biotechnologies and the lack of
national and international control measures, have resulted in a growing
threat potential from bioweapons, from both states and terrorist groups.
One reason why the threat is growing is the dual-use nature of many of
the research, development, production, and testing activities in the bio-
logical field. Since it is often difficult to differentiate between peaceful
8 Bioterrorism

and hostile activities, transparency, Hunger argues, must be the basis of
such activities in the long run.
According to Hunger, two recent developments have increased the
level of secrecy in scientific biodefense work in general, and in US efforts
in particular. As a reaction to 9/11 and the Amerithrax events of 2001,
governments have drastically limited their openness in the biosciences,
while at the same time the scientific community has been imposing
restrictions upon its own activities. In the United States, the reemer-
gence of the category of “sensitive but unclassified” information, allow-
ing restrictions on unclassified research, has occurred along with stricter
controls on the transfer of knowledge to foreign nationals and, at the
same time, the inclusion of prepublication review clauses into grants
and contracts.
In addition, many states have created or enlarged their existing bio-
defense programs, a trend that is particularly pronounced in the United
States. Not only has the US government not reported some of its secret
biodefense programs to the member states of the BTWC, but it has also
provided an enormous funding boost to bioweapons research, which in
turn has dramatically increased the number of individuals who know
how to deal with these agents, while funding for other diseases has been
cut. Yet Western states have a chance to influence how biological re-
search is conducted, Hunger asserts, since most of the sensitive research
is still done in the West. Thus, they should lead by example and set
legally binding standards by which biodefense programs that are close
to the line between offensive and defensive activities can be identified
and closely monitored.
This book makes apparent how difficult it is for governments to design
sensible policies against bioterrorism. The threat of the malicious use of
microorganisms or toxins by state and nonstate actors, along with the
high level of uncertainty regarding both the intentions and capabilities
of potential malevolent actors, defies traditional approaches to threat
analysis. Consequently, if the aim is to secure our societies against the
risk of bioterrorism, we must involve experts from a variety of aca-
demic and policy fields, including public and private actors at the local,
national, and international levels.
Drawing on the findings of the chapters in this book, the conclud-
ing section discusses a series of key policy challenges in managing an
elusive threat. Although the threat may be exaggerated and manipulated,
it can neither be denied by experts nor ignored by policymakers. For-
mulating and implementing policy to protect a population against the

threat of bioterrorism is a remarkably different challenge from formulat-
ing and implementing policy to secure a state against the threat of an
armed attack by another state. With this difference in mind, the conclud-
ing section discusses the new policy challenges to both states and soci-
eties in their efforts to define countermeasures, assign responsibilities,
and provide resources.
Notes
1. For example, see David McBride, Bioterrorism: The History of a Crisis
in American Society (New York: Routledge, 2003); Barbara A. Rasco and Gleyn
E. Bledsoe, Bioterrorism and Food Safety (Boca Raton, FL: CRC Press, 2005).
2. For example, see Jonathan B. Tucker, ed., Toxic Terror: Assessing Ter-
rorist Use of Chemical and Biological Weapons (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press,
2000); Brad Roberts, ed., Hype or Reality? The “New Terrorism” and Mass
Casualty Attacks (Alexandria, VA: Chemical and Biological Arms Control
Institute, 2000).
3. The US Federal Bureau of Investigation dubbed the anthrax attacks
“Amerithrax.” It created a special website, which was given the same name, for
the ongoing anthrax investigation.
10 Bioterrorism

Part 1
Understanding the Threat:
Actors and Capabilities

A DEFINING CHARACTERISTIC OF THE TWENTIETH CENTURY WAS THE EXPLOITATION
of the advanced sciences of chemistry, biology, and physics for military
advantage in the realm of unconventional strategic weapons. Biologi-
cal weapons were the least successful of this trio of weapons of mass
destruction (WMD), in the sense that they were never fully assimilated
by any state military. In the twentieth century, biological weapons were
never used on a grand scale in battle the way chemicals were in World
War I. Nor did they become a symbol of ultimate strategic military
force, as nuclear weapons did after the 1945 US bombings of Japan.
Instead, despite extensive development by the major powers (France,
Japan, Britain, the United States, and the former Soviet Union), their
history remained secret or ignored.1 In the twenty-first century, though,
biological weapons have assumed a new symbolic importance, greatly
influenced by US policies, that links them to the potential exploitation
of biotechnology by outlaw states and terrorists. Understanding the fun-
damental characteristics of the former programs can inform us about
future prospects for biological weapons and restraints on them.
How the twentieth-century biological warfare ventures began is
itself a historical conundrum. The literature on technological innova-
tions in the modern military offers many examples of organizational
resistance to the assimilation of new weapons.2 Yet the major military
powers of the twentieth century (with the notable exception of Ger-
many) embarked on large antipersonnel germ weapons programs, despite
admitted uncertainties about whether such weapons were technically
possible or morally defensible. The potential of biological weapons to
cause large-scale death and havoc accounts for the allure they had for
certain advocates and also for the skepticism and even revulsion with
13
2
The Legacy of
Secret State Programs
JEANNE GUILLEMIN

which they were greeted by others within government. Biological weapons
rely on living organisms that are inherently difficult to produce and stan-
dardize. They depend on the scientific ability to produce germs that kill
or weaken important life-forms—humans, livestock, and crops. Their
destructive effects might be delayed and uncertain; they might also (as
with anthrax spores) result in prolonged environmental contamination, or
they might (as with contagious diseases) infect friendly troops and civil-
ians. Their main advantage—the element of surprise—could readily be
subverted if an adversary were forewarned and protected with vaccines,
antibiotics, masks, or other defensive technologies.
At present, most analysts presume that the advanced industrial pow-
ers are highly unlikely to resort to biological weapons given the end of
the Cold War and the legal and moral norms against this category of arms.
All but a few nations are party to the 1925 Geneva Protocol, which bans
the use of both chemical and bacteriological weapons. The same is true
for the 1972 Biological and Toxin Weapons Convention (BTWC), which
bans bioweapons programs and the possession of such weapons. The
intense secrecy necessary to hide a state program (to conceal its labora-
tories, production facilities, training and testing grounds, modes of trans-
portation, and special troops) is generally uncharacteristic of advanced
industrial states, and difficult for any country to sustain in a world of
globalized commerce, travel, and communication. In addition, modern con-
ventional and nuclear weapons have long fulfilled the requirements of
national defense, including deterrence. Biological weapons have almost
no place in modern state arsenals, nor do chemical weapons, which were
banned by the 1993 Chemical Weapons Convention.
The end of the Cold War focused new attention on the potential dif-
fusion of biological weapons to less politically powerful nations. The
United States, in particular, has emphasized the danger that hostile
“rogue states” and terrorists beyond the reach of political persuasion
might acquire biological, chemical, or nuclear weapons. Still, as in the
past, the policies of advanced industrialized nations directly affect the
diffusion of the weapons they invent, including biological ones.3 Now
the world’s preeminent power, the United States sets the standard for
restraints against germ weapons programs and use. Since the mid-
1990s, instead of engaging in broad international cooperation to reduce
risks, the United States has emphasized limited national security goals.
Following 9/11 and the 2001 anthrax postal attacks, this approach inten-
sified as a part of new homeland security initiatives. The US “war on
terror” has also entailed the engagement of US allies, particularly the
North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) and NATO-affiliated nations,
14 Understanding the Threat

in defensive exercises as well as in efforts to interdict traffic in materials
relating to biological, chemical, and nuclear weapons. US preoccupation
with bioterrorism has introduced a new integration of national security
and the US biological sciences, ranked first in the world. The question is
whether this approach can keep new biotechnologies and their inevitable
global diffusion beyond Western industrialized nations for strictly bene-
ficent rather than destructive purposes. A review of the political circum-
stances that fostered the former state programs suggests what the future
threats of the hostile exploitation of the life sciences might be and what
policies might reduce these threats.
Historical Background
A hundred years ago, the United States was neither the world’s first mil-
itary power nor its leader in the biological sciences. Rather, Germany
and France emerged from the nineteenth century as dominant forces in
both armaments and microbiology. In World War I, at Ypres in Belgium,
Germany, then the leading nation in the chemical industry, launched the
first mass chemical attack, provoking a chemical arms race that still has
repercussions today. Also in World War I, the German army mounted a
minor biological campaign against its enemies’ pack animals, attempt-
ing to kill them with anthrax and glanders. After the war, partly in fear
that a rearmed Germany might resort to germ air attacks, France and,
soon after, the Soviet Union began their first forays into biological war-
fare programs. The militaries of both countries used their existing
chemical programs as the basis for this new kind of indiscriminate
weapon, anticipated for use in aerial bombing. After its 1931 military
invasion of Manchuria, Japan (not a party to the 1925 Geneva Protocol)
established a secret biological warfare program there, near the city of
Harbin. In 1940, the Japanese Imperial Army began the only modern
use of germ weapons in battle, attacking Chinese cities and towns with
plague-infected fleas and poisoning food and wells. As part of its bru-
tal retribution for the 1942 Doolittle Raid on Tokyo, the Japanese army
attacked thousands of villagers southwest of Hankow with anthrax and
glanders because they had aided or shown support for the US pilots.4
Britain’s biological program, created in 1940 while it was under
German air attack, had the most lasting consequence for sophisticated
weapons development. The Soviet program was undermined by the
1937–1938 purges, and the French venture came to a halt with the Nazi
occupation in 1940. After the US entrance into World War II in 1941,
The Legacy of Secret State Programs 15

the United States took its cue from the British and in late 1942 insti-
tuted its program for developing virulent disease agents, aerosols, and
bombs. After the war, British and US advocates of biological weapons
argued that the lethal impact of their newly invented biological bombs,
much lighter than chemical ones, might achieve the devastating capabil-
ity of atomic weapons. They speculated that the Soviet Union, and later
Communist China, could be subdued with disease agents such as
anthrax, tularemia, and brucellosis, against which entire cities would be
unprotected. During the Vietnam War, the US Army proceeded aggres-
sively with biological attack simulations, achieving what it claimed was
a new capability for regional dispersal of disease agents.
In the 1960s, the United Kingdom, armed with a nuclear weapons
capability, retreated from its offensive biological programs and pro-
moted legal restraints against biological weapons. France did the same,
but more discreetly and slowly. In 1969, President Richard Nixon, con-
curring with the British, renounced biological weapons on behalf of the
United States. Nixon’s decision paved the way for the belated US ratifi-
cation of the 1925 Geneva Protocol and the formulation of the 1972
BTWC. Thus, the military exploitation of new biotechnologies seemed
to end. But by 1975, the Soviet Union was using a radical moderniza-
tion of its biological sciences to mask a large biological warfare pro-
gram. For nearly two decades, until its demise in 1991, the Soviet Union
violated the 1972 BTWC, despite its having served as a depository nation
for it, together with the United States and Britain.
Totalitarianism enhanced the bureaucratic secrecy that allowed the
Soviet program to thrive. Yet the governments that sponsored biological
warfare programs included representational democracies as well as total-
itarian states and military dictatorships. Of the smaller states, apartheid
South Africa and Saddam Hussein’s Iraq were eventually known to be
emulating the WMD programs of the major powers, while Israel has
been strongly suspected of nuclear, chemical, and biological weapons
programs, the latter as early as 1947.5
The Importance of Secrecy
Secrecy was the most essential factor in the growth of the biological
weapons programs of the twentieth century. Closed-door decisions
facilitated the creation of offensive programs and sheltered them from
oversight and severe budget cuts, so that eventually they established

secure organizational niches. The world learned a great deal about chem-
ical weapons during World War I and a great deal about nuclear weapons
at the end of World War II. In contrast, biological weapons were rarely
discussed in public forums and never aroused the kind of international
protest that brought about treaty and organizational restraints on chemi-
cal and nuclear weapons proliferation.6
The extent of the secrecy that enveloped each of the major biologi-
cal warfare programs would be difficult to exaggerate. In open as well as
closed societies, in war and in peace, the programs were often unknown
to those in the other sectors of the military, and government leaders were
often uninformed about or ignored the goals and achievements of their
own biological weapons programs. In renouncing the US offensive bio-
logical weapons program, President Nixon accurately pointed to the fif-
teen years that had passed without the program’s being subject to com-
prehensive review. During those years, a few congressional members had
made sure that funding for the program was ample and secure. Later, in
a much different context, the massive Soviet program was embedded in
bureaucratic layers of secrecy until the 1990 defection to Britain of one
of its leading scientists.7
Throughout the history of biological weapons, secret information was
shared among allies, if not with the public. Soviet relations with satellite
and client states likely included the sharing of information and perhaps of
technology relevant to biological warfare. During World War II, Britain,
Canada, and the United States shared personnel, research, and testing
grounds; this tripartite arrangement continued after the war and later
included Australia. In 1947, the US government secretly made a deal with
Japanese bioweapons scientists to protect the Japanese from war crimes
prosecutions in exchange for information on Japan’s program and its use
of germ weapons. In this way, evidence of the devastating impact of bio-
logical weapons on civilians, which otherwise would have been presented
at the Tokyo war crimes tribunal (1946–1948), was suppressed.
Also during the history of secret biological weapons programs, gov-
ernments encouraged disinformation to protect these ventures. When
Japan attacked Chinese civilians with plague-infected fleas and with poi-
soned food and water, it masked its aggression by allowing these attacks
to pass as naturally occurring epidemics. In the 1950s, the United States
and Britain dismissed as propaganda reports about the December 1949
Soviet trial of Japanese germ warfare scientists its troops had captured in
China in 1945. In other contexts, states exploited the public fear of and
ignorance about diseases associated with biological weapons. In 1952,

the Chinese and North Koreans accused the United States of using crude
Japanese methods of attack in the Korean War, and they produced a huge
compendium of largely concocted data to bolster their claims.8 Following
these accusations, the Chinese government instituted a nationwide anti-
insect campaign, which it based on propaganda about US disease attacks.9
In the Soviet Union in the 1970s, two accidental outbreaks caused by
the covert program were also explained as epidemics of natural occur-
rence. In the first, in 1972, several people were infected with smallpox in
the Aral Sea test area. In the second, in 1979, sixty-eight people died from
inhalational anthrax in the city of Sverdlovsk (present-day Yekaterin-
burg), in the Ural Mountains. An investigation of the latter showed the
harmful effects of military secrecy: first, diagnosis was delayed, and sec-
ond, the affected community was not alerted to the risks of exposure.10
In the 1980s, the United States accelerated its defensive toxin projects
and promoted chemical weapons innovation and production, while at the
same time it accused the Soviet Union of assisting Laos and Vietnam with
mycotoxin attacks on Hmong tribes and on Cambodians.11 Cuba and the
United States had long accused each other of making or using germ
weapons, and they continued to do so after the Cold War had ended.12
Persuasive Scientific Experts
In addition to secrecy, four other factors allowed the major programs of
the twentieth century to begin and to endure: scientific advocacy, estab-
lished military-industrial resources, a perceived dire threat to national
survival, and a total-war doctrine. Not all advanced industrial nations,
even those capable of starting a biological program, chose to do so.
Rather, key leaders, by interpreting national interests, determined whether
and how research on this unusual weapon would commence.
Scientists played an essential role in laying the groundwork for state
biological programs and in recruiting other scientific experts. In the
interwar period, French, Soviet, and Japanese scientists were part of a
general arms buildup. In France, Auguste Trillat started his career at the
Institut Pasteur in Paris after obtaining his doctorate in chemistry in
Munich. In World War I he was part of the French chemical corps. Then,
in 1921, he became the first head of the French program, after reporting
confidential information from a German source that Germany had begun
its own biological weapons initiative. That information exaggerated Ger-
many’s activities, which centered on rearmament with conventional
weapons and air power. Later, as the Nazis took power and Germany’s

belligerence intensified, Adolf Hitler’s aversion to biological weapons
restrained those German scientists who might have pursued such weapons
programmatically.13 Nonetheless, until the 1940 hiatus, the French pro-
gram drew on the Institut Pasteur for resources and personnel.14
In the Soviet Union around 1925, military biologist Jacov Fishman
started a biological weapons program as part of the modernization of
the Soviet army promoted by General Mikhail Tukhachevsky.15 That
program was short-lived due to the 1937 Stalinist purges that led to the
execution of Tukhachevsky and the incarceration of Fishman and many
microbiologists from the fields of military and public health. In Japan,
General Ishii Shiro, a military physician, spearheaded in 1931 the Japa-
nese Imperial Army’s offensive program, which lasted until 1945.16
The more technically sophisticated programs, which began with the
United Kingdom and the United States in World War II, relied heavily on
the talents of academic microbiologists. In 1939, in response to German
military aggression, key civilian microbiologists in Canada, Britain, and
the United States began to think like military strategists. In 1939, Nobel
laureate Frederick Banting, the codiscoverer of insulin, urged the cre-
ation of a British offensive and defensive program and built his own
research team in Toronto with funds from private donors.17 Similarly,
before becoming head of the British program at Porton Down in 1940,
bacteriologist Paul Fildes advocated his country’s need for a retaliatory
and offensive capacity against Germany, and later he successfully argued
this position at the highest levels.18 In 1941, the United States began
drawing on its many university scientists. Columbia University scien-
tists Theodor Rosebury and Elvin Kabat wrote a comprehensive outline
of select potential bioagents and a plan for a biological weapons pro-
gram.19 Rosebury went on to lead the important division that pioneered
the study of aerobiology at Camp Detrick. After the war, as a civilian,
he wrote openly against biological warfare programs.20 Ira Baldwin, a
University of Wisconsin expert on fermentation, became an important
leader of the US wartime effort, in particular of the initiative to produce
anthrax bombs.21
The role of civilian versus military scientists in the resurgence of the
Soviet program in the 1970s is less well recorded. The well-known
Soviet academician Yuriy Ovchinnikov is often portrayed as having per-
suaded the Kremlin to create Biopreperat, the state conglomerate that
housed both commercial and secret research. At the same time, within
the military, the older World War II veteran General Yefim Smirnov, for-
mer head of the Soviet public health ministry, was a powerful advocate
for a biological warfare capability.22

The Existing Military-Industrial Infrastructure
The most advanced state biological programs (in France, Britain, the
United States, and the former Soviet Union) were adjoined to the chem-
ical weapons programs created during World War I. The use of chemi-
cal weapons in World War I established a precedent of indiscriminate
attack employing the dispersal of toxic aerosols and mustard gas to
break the impasse of trench warfare and claim broad terrain. In the
interwar years, bomber aircraft presented even broader possibilities for
strategic, long-range chemical attacks and, more theoretically, for bio-
logical attacks.
Adding early biological programs to established chemical ones
brought considerable technical advantages. In the best of circumstances,
the chemical programs had already developed effective bombs and
spray generators, mastered aerosols, and conducted aerial tests. In the
1940s, the British biological warfare program, though small, benefited
greatly from its physical proximity to the chemical program at Porton
Down, where it was able to take advantage of its experts on aerodynam-
ics and engineering. Its technical innovations were shared with the United
States in 1942 and after. In the United States, the new biological program
heralded an expansion of the militarily marginal chemical programs,
with budget increases and enlarged testing sites and production facili-
ties. The chemical program also had vociferous advocates in the mili-
tary, industry, and among congressional officials who argued to govern-
ment on behalf of both types of programs.
The move from laboratory research to volume production of disease
agents, coupled with the mass production of suitable munitions for strate-
gic attack, distinguished the two postwar superpower programs. The US
program’s accomplishments in these areas from World War II until 1969
brought biological weapons close to the early mass destruction capabil-
ity envisioned by Banting, Fildes, and others. Before it ended, the Soviet
program increased the scale of its endeavor, adding long-range missile
capability and attempts to exploit the techniques of modern genetics.23
The Japanese program differed from programs in the West in that it
was relatively isolated from Japan’s chemical program. Although joint
aerial chemical and biological exercises were occasionally conducted,
the large central facility, Unit 731 near Harbin, was exclusively devoted
to biological weapons research, as were subsidiary facilities. General
Ishii, the creator of the Japanese program, was never able to devise a
successful biological bomb, and the program’s aerosolization techniques
lagged significantly behind those of the Western allies. During World

War II, when the Japanese decided to retreat from chemical weapons,
their biological program continued unaffected and unimproved.
Political Perceptions of a Dire Threat
A principal justification for offensive biological programs was the exis-
tence of a dire threat to national survival, a perception that bolstered the
rationale for seeking an unconventional advantage over the enemy. By
the early twentieth century, aided by increasingly destructive weapons,
the military forces in Europe could threaten each other with extreme lev-
els of physical destruction and human harm, and carried out those threats
in two world wars. When the specific threat of biological weapons arose,
though, it was usually ill-founded—a by-product of the larger conflict,
but one with organizational repercussions.
In the 1920s, for example, the French suspected that their traditional
enemy, Germany, would use its advanced microbiology and superior air
power to invade and conquer France. Concerning German air power and
intentions, the French assessments were accurate, but France was in error
concerning its enemy’s biological weapons. Although the German mili-
tary had used anthrax and glanders in World War I, such use had proved
to be of limited military value. As Germany began rearmament, French
fears fueled its own pursuit of a biological weapons advantage. Later,
Britain and the United States became similarly convinced of a biological
threat from Nazi Germany. It was only in late 1944 that reliable Allied
intelligence sources showed conclusively that Germany had no biologi-
cal program.24 By then, however, both the British and the US biological
programs had become organizationally entrenched.
Japan’s belligerence in the 1930s presented a different model of
political motivation. In the 1930s, a militarized Japanese government
had ambitions to make Japan the dominant force in Asia, replacing the
British Empire. The dire threat to the nation, as Japan’s leaders per-
ceived it, was a lack of raw materials for industrial growth—an eco-
nomic dilemma to which the solution was expansion into China.25 In
1931, the Japanese forcibly occupied Manchuria and set up a puppet
government under army control. In addition to building new cities and
transportation systems, Japan located its secret biological warfare pro-
gram there. Armed conflict with Soviet troops in the north, and then the
war with China, troubled this territorial expansion. Years later, when
asked to justify the program’s secret horrors (which included human
vivisection, the murder of Chinese research subjects, and attacks on

civilians), one former Japanese biologist replied, “Because in a war, you
have to win.”26
Each government differed in the way authority was granted to its
military to foster innovative biological programs. In 1940, with London
under siege, a few key civil servants initiated the British program, plac-
ing it at Porton Down without the permission of the war cabinet or of the
prime minister.27 Later, Prime Minister Winston Churchill approved the
program, although his advisers disagreed about the program’s offensive
goals. US president Franklin D. Roosevelt perhaps knew little about the
US wartime biological program, which was orchestrated mainly by Sec-
retary of War Henry Stimson. In imperial Japan, Emperor Hirohito, him-
self a biologist, likely approved the military program and authorized its
expansion. Some believe that Soviet secretary-general Leonid Brezhnev
personally gave the order to create Biopreperat, the conglomerate that
housed both the secret biological weapons program and open biological
research. Despite these variations, in each case civil authorities invari-
ably made the crucial decision to start the program and then gave pro-
gram officials extensive latitude to covertly pursue their objectives.
In the long Cold War era, dire threats to national survival were per-
ceived both in terms of nuclear annihilation and mutual destruction.
After World War II, the US and British offensive programs were revived
in response to the perceived threat of Soviet aggression and the spread
of Communism in Eastern Europe and China. Although military advo-
cates argued that the Soviet Union would have biological weapons by
the early 1950s, this estimate failed to take into account the war’s
severe toll on Soviet public health conditions and the retrograde impact
of Stalinism on its biological sciences. As the Cold War commenced,
US and British civil and military advocates spoke out in favor of the
potential of germ weapons to rank with nuclear weapons in their de-
structive power.28
The United States, Britain, and France later abandoned germ weapons,
in part because their nuclear and conventional weapons provided suffi-
cient deterrence against the threat of aggression. Why the Soviet Union
opted for biological weapons in the 1970s remains unexplained. Its
nuclear arsenal was enormous, and its biological program was too secret
to serve as a deterrent. Soviet leaders may have erroneously believed
that the United States still secretly maintained its advanced program. As
a monolithic garrison state, the Soviet Union may simply have been
seeking to maximize all its military options.29
Cold War geopolitics spurred some diffusion of superpower biological
programs to lesser states, but how much is uncertain. The best documented

instances are the now defunct programs in apartheid South Africa and
Saddam Hussein’s Iraq, which were also fueled by perceptions of dire
threats to national survival. Much more remains to be known about the
extent to which other states under similar pressures and with sufficient
resources—for instance, Israel, Cuba, Iran, Syria, Taiwan, and North
Korea—secretly opted for biological weapons or, as in the case of Libya,
rejected them.
Total War and Civilian Targets
The doctrine of total war, a response to the new scale of industrial-age
warfare, included a justification for attacking civilians, who were inte-
gral to the production of weapons and the general sustenance of the
armed forces.30 By some reckonings, the destruction of a factory could
weaken the enemy as much as a battlefield victory could. Frederick
Banting wrote about the basis of the doctrine in his 1939 argument for
a British biological weapons program:
In the past, war was confined for the most part to men in uniform, but
with increased mechanization of armies and the introduction of air
forces, there is an increased dependence on the home country, and
eight to ten people working at home are now required to keep one man
in the fighting line. This state of affairs alters the complexion of war.
It really amounts to one nation fighting another nation. This being so,
it is just as effective to kill or disable ten unarmed workers at home
as to put a soldier out of action, and if this can be done with less risk,
then it would be advantageous to employ any mode of warfare to
accomplish this.31
The total war doctrine signaled a striking moral regression. Indus-
trialization had already produced the massification of the labor force
that degraded individual autonomy and rights. The doctrine of total war
went further by postulating that the deaths of enemy civilians en masse
was a significant means to military victory as an end. Military air power
became a vital part of this doctrine, inasmuch as aerial bombings prom-
ised unobstructed access behind enemy lines and the destruction of critical
economic infrastructures, including factories and cities. Visions of biolog-
ical bombs eradicating large populations with deadly diseases were part of
a modernistic approach to warfare, which included chemical weapons as
a theoretically quick way to shorten battles by overpowering the enemy
with a single attack. Within the secret confines of the biological weapons

programs, the total war doctrine gave militaries a license to target entire
enemy populations with deadly or debilitating diseases.
An important supposition underpinning the total war doctrine was
that a technological advantage would prevent the enemy from mounting
an equally devastating retaliatory attack. During World War II, the
Allied carpet bombing of enemy targets in Europe, and similar attacks
on Japan, were conducted under the expectation that neither Germany
nor Japan could counterattack with equal or greater force. The same
rationale applied to the US decision to drop atomic bombs on Japan in
1945. During the Cold War, the nuclear arsenals of the United States
and the Soviet Union pushed the total war doctrine to new limits in that
they introduced the threat of mutually assured destruction to civilians
on both sides of the conflict, “a stable, if grotesque, stalemate.”32
With biological weapons, the expectation was that civilian targets
were at a sufficient distance to avoid a risk of infection in the homeland.
As for retaliation, each program proceeded as though it alone had the
advantage of surprise, which, despite political perceptions of foreign
threats, was generally true. Among major powers secretly developing
biological weapons, the mass protection of civilians against exotic germ
weapons was rarely proposed and never implemented. Soldiers and pro-
gram researchers were, of course, vaccinated or otherwise protected, if
possible, but public health systems operated separately from the secret
military programs, although at the higher echelons in the United States
and Soviet Union, not in total ignorance of them.
Present Threats
The trend in industrial societies has been toward an increase in technolog-
ical risks, particularly the inescapable risk of transnational environmen-
tal damage caused by late industrial-age manufacture and energy use.33
Similarly, the production of nuclear and chemical weapons by the two
superpowers in the twentieth century has become recognized as a desta-
bilizing global hazard in the twenty-first century. In contrast, biological
weapons of the twentieth century have generated a different legacy, one
of US scenarios of potential mass disease attacks that stir the public imag-
ination, even though these predicted catastrophes have not occurred.
An important change in US policy occurred in the 1990s, when there
was a shift toward defending all US citizens against germ attacks by for-
eign enemies, whether such attacks were against US military members

stationed in the Middle East or Asia or against civilians in the home-
land. This defensive position was in part a reaction to post–Cold War
revelations about the Soviet biological program and, in 1992, that of
Saddam Hussein, compounded by unprecedented acts of terrorism that,
in method and scale, seemed to redefine US vulnerability to attack. This
policy shift became embodied in legislation for “domestic prepared-
ness” programs in 120 major cities and in presidential directives for
antibiotic stockpiling and other measures to counter the threat of bioter-
rorism, including a troubled universal anthrax vaccination program for
the US military.34 Although the United States was not at war, the nas-
cent framework for domestic policies was national civil defense, a con-
struct that found favor among Republicans who dominated Congress
after 1994. Domestic preparedness was also generally supported by
elected members of Congress on both sides of the aisle who sought a
new source of funds for their states and districts.
The 11 September 2001 Al-Qaida attacks on the United States rein-
forced this orientation toward civil defense, and the anthrax postal attacks
that followed soon after guaranteed that bioterrorism would be a major
national security issue. Washington’s quick response was to demand in-
creased regulation of any biological research involving disease agents that
had been cultivated for biological weapons use and, subsequently, to ini-
tiate an aggressive project to develop defensive technologies, with an
emphasis on pharmaceutical innovations. The fright value of biological
weapons also lent itself to political rhetoric and media exploitation.35 In
October 2001, the fictional bioterrorist scenario Dark Winter, created by a
Washington think tank and exploited by the press and other mass media,
caught the attention of Vice President Dick Cheney. Dark Winter depicted
invading Iraqi terrorists infected with smallpox causing a US pandemic of
catastrophic dimensions, based on facts that were later roundly criticized
by medical experts.36 Convinced by the scenario, Cheney immediately
advised President George Bush to institute a national vaccination cam-
paign. The president did so in late 2002, when the United States was bas-
ing part of its case for the invasion of Iraq on the threat of Saddam Hus-
sein’s biological weapons. By that time, many US citizens had been
persuaded that smallpox was an imminent threat to their health.37 Partici-
pation in the vaccination campaign faltered early on, after several older
first responders died from coronary complications soon after being vacci-
nated. Following the Iraq invasion, as it became evident that Saddam’s
biological program had been destroyed in the 1990s, US fears about small-
pox sharply declined and with them the national vaccination campaign.

The smallpox vaccination campaign aside, the perceived threat of
biological weapons has had lasting organizational effects. Dozens of
federal counter-bioterrorism programs are entrenched in the Department
of Homeland Security, the Department of Defense, the Department of
Health and Human Services, the Department of Energy, the Department
of Agriculture, the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), the Central
Intelligence Agency (CIA), and elsewhere. As part of the national secu-
rity apparatus, many of the activities of these programs have been kept
secret from the public and exempted from congressional or other gov-
ernment oversight. At the local level, state and city governments have
been funded to intensify emergency response systems that adhere to the
civil defense model, even as support for police, firefighters, and public
health infrastructure diminishes. In this new era, a major emphasis has
been placed on the invention of defensive pharmaceuticals (vaccines,
antibiotics, serums, and antivirals) and of surveillance and detection tech-
nologies to counter the threat of bioterrorist attacks.
Scientific and Technical Resources
and Weapons Capability
Sixty years ago, when the United States decided to continue its postwar
biological warfare program, the numbers of expert microbiologists were
relatively low and located in the West, and only a small number of
states had built up the modern military organizations and arsenals that
could potentially support a secret biological weapons venture. Today,
thousands of microbiologists worldwide have skills comparable to those
of scientists working in the old state programs. The military buildup in
industrializing countries has also expanded, in organizational size and
range of weapons. China, India, and Pakistan have acquired nuclear
weapons, and others, including North Korea and Iran, may do the same.
Technologically, the contemporary threat of biological weapons dif-
fusion exists on two levels, neither of which can be effectively controlled
except by long-term international efforts. One threat can be called a
“moderate capability,” that is, proliferation that could arise from skills
and technologies no more advanced than those used in the US and Soviet
programs. These would include, for example, generic methods for in-
creasing the virulence of pathogens, techniques for aerosolization, and
the industrial-scale production of agents and munitions. As in the old
programs, certain technical challenges would have to be met, such as the
large-scale production of virulent agents and the building of effective

mechanisms for agent dispersal. Compared to the proven military value of
modern conventional weapons, even a moderate capability in biological
weapons remains a luxury for small, economically disadvantaged states.
Biological weapons could, however, appeal to more affluent states whose
complex military-industrial bureaucracies might at least temporarily shel-
ter covert programs. Some industrializing nations (for instance, China,
India, Pakistan, and Brazil) now have the microbiological resources that
could be exploited by their militaries should their governments feel com-
pelled to seek a secret, illegal advantage. The major risk of a moderate
capability in biological weapons is the onus of discovery, which would
make a pariah of any nation known to violate existing treaties.
New biotechnologies that have “futuristic” weapons capabilities
pose a second order of threat. These advances range from the cloning of
higher mammals to new techniques for shaping human neurology and
development.38 Such innovations may sharpen the already considerable
divide between the privileged who enjoy the benefits of modern medi-
cine and those for whom they remain beyond reach. The science in
Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World is fanciful, but the use of technology
to create a biologically determined social hierarchy may be a future haz-
ard for humanity. US microbiology has had the edge in biotechnology
so far, but the field is essentially international, and other centers of
innovation, in Asia for example, are emerging.
The US biodefense initiative inaugurated in 2002 also poses some
risks. The inadvertent consequences of biodefense technology—the
unanticipated repercussions that can cascade into the future39—are a
cause for concern. Lacking oversight and mechanisms for critical review,
various biodefense projects could lead to the pioneering of new, more
virulent select agents or futuristic technologies on the presumption, com-
mon in the old programs, that defensive research required offensive
capability. In addition, by creating new environments for honing biolog-
ical weapons skills, increased funding for biodefense research could
have other unanticipated negative consequences. The biodefense project
is predicated on having more high-containment laboratories (six or more
at the maximum level four, plus eleven or more regional centers) and
increased federal funding overall for select agent research in level-two
and level-three laboratories. At the least, this multibillion-dollar enter-
prise will increase the absolute numbers of scientists familiar with the
growing and testing of dangerous weapons agents.40 Unlike those few
government or military career scientists previously working on defenses
against select agents, some thousands of new biodefense scientists, many
affiliated with academic medical centers, must rely on federal grants and

contracts. One problem will be whether they can survive shifting policy
directives from Washington, which can produce boom or bust fluctua-
tions in funding. Another will be the new impingement of secrecy on
their scientific work and other challenges to publication and education.41
The Likely Perpetrators
What are the political opportunities that might engage today’s many
microbiologists in secret biological weapons programs? As in the past,
the future of biological weapons depends on the intent of key authority
figures, either heads of state or those in the higher echelons of decision-
making, or, as another possibility, leaders of terrorist organizations. If
the past is prologue, the states most likely to persist with or to initiate
illegal biological programs are those whose centralized governments,
existing military-industrial resources, and perception of dire political
threats predispose them to seek unconventional weapons. Escalating bor-
der wars, internal conflict, or frustration with guerrilla warfare can lead
to the choice of unconventional weapons; or militaristic economic
national expansion might be used as justification, as with Japan in China.
Eastern Europe—where the Soviet chemical weapons program was dif-
fused to Bulgaria, Yugoslavia, Czechoslovakia, and Romania—has also
been beset by conflict and political unrest. The United States itself is not
immune to pressures to increase its options for unconventional weapons,
especially when its military is engaged in ending insurgent and terrorist
violence in Iraq and Afghanistan.
The past use of chemical weapons suggests models that could one
day apply to biological warfare should the present implementation of
treaty restraints prove insufficient. Following World War I and after the
1925 Geneva Protocol, chemical weapons were used in two different
contexts. One was when an advanced industrial nation had the advan-
tage of attack on foreign soil (Italy against Ethiopia in 1935–1936 and
the US use of tear gas for lethal purposes in Vietnam); the other was
when a relatively powerful developing nation sought to quell insurgents,
civilian activists, or a relatively unprotected state adversary (for exam-
ple, Egypt against Yemeni royalists in 1963–1967 and Saddam Hussein
against Iran in the Iran-Iraq War and against Iraqi Kurds in 1988–1989).
As a relevant example, apartheid South Africa employed small amounts
of chemical and biological agents against insurgents within the state, in
neighboring countries, and also in foreign sabotage.42
Generalized fears about the survival of their traditions and political
influence might also influence nonstate actors to gain access to biological

or chemical weapons. In two well-known, unusual cases involving reli-
gious cults, the choice of biological weapons paralleled in miniature the
processes characteristic of state systems: scientists proposed the method,
the leadership approved it, and resources were freed for laboratory
research and experimental attacks. In 1989, the Rajneesh cult in Oregon
spread nonlethal salmonella in restaurant salad bars and coffee stations
in order to test a way to tilt voting participation in their favor. Some five
hundred people fell ill, none fatally. As a second example, the Japanese
cult Aum Shinrikyo was responsible for twelve deaths and dozens of
injuries in the 1995 sarin nerve gas attacks on the Tokyo subway. Aum
Shinrikyo included a number of scientists who also experimented with
anthrax bacterium growth and dispersal.43
Fear and anger over violated traditions, worker deracination in the
global economy, a distrust of government, military invasion and occu-
pation, and ethnic enmity—the annals of terrorism include all these
motivations. While Islamic extremists have come to represent fanatical
resistance to Western influence, US militia groups and Christian funda-
mentalists have also been violently opposed to larger impersonal forces
that they perceive as threats to individual freedom, their communities,
or to family values. Timothy McVeigh was an out-of-work Gulf War
veteran skilled with explosives who in 1995, influenced by the militia
and the Christian Identity movement and enraged against the US gov-
ernment and society, blew up the Murrah Building in Oklahoma City,
killing 168 people. Even suicide bombers, who appear insanely destruc-
tive, have also been analyzed as consistently motivated by altruistic
resistance to foreign occupation.44
The motivations for terrorism are many, but thus far they have been
only weakly linked to the means of bioterrorism. The 2001 anthrax
postal attacks suggest that even a single disaffected scientist can cause
havoc. For this reason alone, the expansion of the US biodefense proj-
ect requires a prudent assessment of the risks of training a new genera-
tion of microbiologists to research, develop, and test select agents.
Civilians as Targets
The total war doctrine that justified attacks on enemy civilians during
World War II was repudiated by the 1949 Geneva Convention, which
affirmed protection of “the whole of the populations of the countries in
conflict, without adverse distinction based, in particular, on race,
nationality, religion or political opinion” (Section II, Article 13). The
convention could not, however, prevent nuclear or biological weapons

programs premised on mass civilian targeting, nor did the widespread
killing of civilians in conflicts outside advanced industrialized nations
cease.45
Contemporary terrorism after World War II, as it turned to civilian
targets rather than political assassinations, has been characterized as an
aftereffect of the war’s violations of humane political codes and rule of
law.46 The tendency of contemporary terrorists to attack physical infra-
structures such as subways and city centers appears to reenact total war
strategies to disrupt technology “behind the lines.” Civilians in demo-
cratic societies have become prime targets for terrorists, a liability that
requires weighing the political infringements of antiterrorism projects
against the preservation of individual privacy, group protest, political
competition, and constitutional order.47 In other states, such as Bosnia,
Rwanda, and Sudan, the ultimate terrorism, genocide, has posed moral
and political problems about mass civilian murder that the world believed
ended in 1945.48
Biological weapons were created to target large numbers of civil-
ians, and it is that aspect that warrants the most serious concern. What
populations, then, are potentially most vulnerable to the impact of germ
weapons? The level of risk from a naturally occurring disease varies by
individual and group; in the same way, the risks of intentional epi-
demics vary, with some populations (for example, the very young and
very old, pregnant women, those already sick or with compromised
immune systems) more vulnerable to serious infection than others.
Structural factors like social class also affect risk. Minorities and the
poor can be disadvantaged in their general health status, education, and
access to health care.
The literature suggests three different models of civilian vulnerabil-
ity, involving terrorism, warfare, and accidental exposure, in which dif-
ferential health risks can figure as variables. State-directed terrorist
attacks invariably target marginal or low status groups (by ethnicity,
religion, race, gender, or political beliefs) to coerce the wider society.49
The same types of groups were targeted in twentieth-century cases of
individual crimes in which disease agents (usually hoaxes) have been
used.50 It follows that, depending on the national context, populations
against which animosities have already been expressed constitute the
most likely future victims.
International conflict also presents a potential venue for disease
attacks on civilians. Following World War II, after the advanced indus-
trial nations ceased to make war against each other, the most vulnerable
civilians in wars have been those in developing nations, where deaths

due to direct violence have been augmented by preexisting poverty and
disease, intensified by the privations of conflict. An attempt by a more
powerful nation to disguise a hostile biological intervention in a sub-
servient country would perhaps be less feasible now than when Japan
was attacking China in 1940–1943, but it is not beyond the realm of
possibility.
As a third model, the accidental release or spread of biological
weapons agents highlights the health risks of the socially disadvan-
taged, who, like the working-class victims of the 1979 Sverdlovsk out-
break, would suffer disproportionately from an inadvertent exposure.51
Although the mailing of the 2001 anthrax letters was intentional, the
dispersal of spores in postal facilities was likely unforeseen by the per-
petrator and had the effect of an accidental hazard. In the aftermath,
federal officials in Washington proved more protective of predomi-
nantly white, middle-class Senate employees than of the black postal
workers at the Brentwood postal facility, two of whom died after the
alert about contamination in the building was withheld for four days.52
The US expansion of the number of high containment facilities to re-
search and test defenses against select agents has generated fears of
similar differential risks based on social factors. In Boston, for example,
local African American groups protested the location of a level four lab-
oratory adjacent to their communities and demanded government over-
sight and regulation of research. While the new biodefense laborato-
ries follow federal guidelines to prevent accidental releases or security
breaches, no laboratory administrator or scientist can guarantee that
accidents will never happen or that disease risks will be minor.
Secrecy, Transparency, and Biological Weapons
Government secrecy made past biological weapons proliferation possi-
ble, and it remains the greatest threat today. Even though the norms
against biological weapons appear to be widely supported, secrecy can
still provide a state with the necessary latitude to defy those norms,
which increases the chances of nonstate actors’ gaining access to biolog-
ical weapons. The world remains full of highly centralized governments
with military-industrial resources, where internal and external threats
might be used to justify the secret exploitation of lethal and nonlethal
biological weapons. Such threats from insurgents, enemies at the border,
or ethnic or religious minorities might conceivably be employed to jus-
tify the eventual use of biological weapons masked as natural outbreaks

or accidents. All governments, as well as nongovernmental corpora-
tions, depend on “the secrets of the temple,” that is, the information that
insiders keep from outsiders in order to safeguard institutional author-
ity.53 Thus, in many bureaucracies, transparency is interpreted as a
weakness within or incursion on the hierarchical structure, especially
in the military; or as an intolerable disruption of channels of communi-
cation, as in intelligence agencies; or as a threat to profit, as in industry.
In democratic societies, government institutions are charged with
serving the public, and they are obliged to be open, to allow citizens
and their elected representatives to exercise their authority. Regarding
disease threats, governments and other organizations, such as pharma-
ceutical companies, charged with mitigating risks are accountable for
providing the public with open, accurate, and timely communication, so
that the population at risk can make informed decisions. The possibil-
ity of a lethal outbreak from any source requires a responsive and open
government. Today, the way in which a state manages infectious disease
threats can be an indication of good governance—or bad.54 The success-
ful containment of an epidemic depends primarily on informed individ-
ual response on the part of the public, including the recognition of
symptoms and decisions about appropriate preventive interventions and
therapeutic approaches. A most successful scenario in this regard was
the 1947 New York City response to a potential smallpox outbreak, dur-
ing which the coordinated cooperation of local health clinics, volunteer
civilians, the media, and an informed public allowed the orderly vacci-
nation of 5 million people in two weeks—in an epoch when New York
could staff nearly 179 local clinical stations.55
Every instance of governments’ withholding or distorting informa-
tion about disease threats demonstrates the increased risks of delayed
diagnosis or misdiagnosis that secrecy imposes on the victims.56 China’s
six-week denial of the 2003 SARS (severe acute respiratory syndrome)
epidemic precipitated a global alert and the near catastrophe of interna-
tional contagion, even as the crisis generated a rapid global public health
response. Secrecy was also a determining factor in the 1979 Sverdlovsk
anthrax outbreak, which was caused by an accidental emission of spores
from a military facility engaged in activities forbidden by the 1972
BTWC. The outbreak, the largest of its kind in history, was then exacer-
bated by continued government denials and disinformation regarding the
source.57 The impeded flow of US government information in the course
of responses to the 2001 anthrax postal attacks presents another instance
of public endangerment, particularly for minority postal workers. Among
the worst effects of such secrecy is the breakdown of trust between

exposed communities and public health agencies, a trust vital to the con-
tainment of high-risk outbreaks. Currently, as the SARS epidemic demon-
strated, it takes rapid international cooperation, including coordination
with science and industry and the engagement of an informed public, to
ensure protection against a dangerous emerging or unusual infectious
disease. The same coordination of resources and information would be
necessary in the event of a concerted bioterrorism attack.
For the same reasons, secrecy in biodefense research programs height-
ens civilian risk. A cloak of secrecy around laboratory research, for in-
stance, forcibly narrows the critical review of laboratory techniques,
objectives, and results and can easily lead to delayed or faulty solutions.
Although rarely documented in the history of biological weapons, the
organizational culture of classified government research can create
closed systems within which political agendas trump quality science
and groupthink overrides reflection on moral issues.58 In addition to its
negative impact on scientific credibility, secrecy undermines organiza-
tional accountability, so that errors tend to be excused or hidden and
thereby perpetuated. Mistakes and delays also occur through “mission
clash,” when government agencies with different directives and stan-
dards of openness fail to cooperate. During the response to the 2001
anthrax postal attacks, turf wars between public health authorities, the
FBI, the military, the CIA, and other agencies confused an anxious pub-
lic and increased the risks of delayed or inappropriate medical response,
and also impeded criminal investigation.
Given the risks of both moderate and futuristic biological capability,
of chronic international tensions, and of the persistent social inequities in
health risks, one must question why the current minimal restraints on bio-
logical weapons are tolerated. The BTWC remains as if still shackled by
Cold War secrecy, when it could be forcefully updated to increase trans-
parency in this new century. Even if international openness is imperfect,
advanced industrial nations should seize the opportunity to offer develop-
ing nations new biotechnologies important to global health as an incen-
tive for active treaty compliance. Present loopholes in the state-by-state
enforcement of the BTWC make for erratic international security.59
Equally serious is the lack of international law to criminalize the individ-
ual possession or use of biological and chemical weapons, which would
ensure that no perpetrator of such crimes could find a state haven against
prosecution.60 The pharmaceutical industry is behind the curve in under-
standing its civic responsibility to support the BTWC. The US biodefense
initiative also needs comprehensive evaluation and oversight, with a
reduction of the scale of the project to less risky dimensions. If the

biodefense initiative is sustained without accountability to the public,
it could cause more health risks than it eliminates. Further, the US ex-
port of a narrow national security mission to its allies undermines long-
term international security interests. Instead, the United States should
use its primacy to address the policy deficits that compound the risks
of destabilization and preventable human tragedy. Deadly infectious
disease outbreaks from any source can have regional and global conse-
quences, and therefore require innovative international approaches to
solutions and sanctions. Since an intentional epidemic also demands a
criminal investigation, it automatically requires an open, cooperative
response, with no exceptions for the military, the intelligence commu-
nity, private contractors, or industry.
The protection of civilians in the short and long term is the primary
goal in countering the threat of biological weapons, and one on which
everyone should agree. Such disagreement as exists is largely about
which policies might best achieve that goal. A strictly civil defense
approach to bioterrorism fails to reckon the unstoppable global diffusion
of new biotechnologies and the pressures that might propel certain states
toward biological weapons. Nor does civil defense protect citizens
against the risks of an unusual deadly outbreak, whether natural, inten-
tional, or accidental; by definition it does not promote the international
coordination necessary to safeguard the public. The strengthening of
existing treaties to promote transparency, increased oversight at national
levels, and the international criminalization of biological weapons are all
forward-looking policies that would keep the biological sciences active
for beneficent rather than hostile purposes. The alternative is the risk of
a disease catastrophe that underscores the danger of government secrecy
and failed response, at the cost of lives and public trust.
Notes
1. For a historical overview, see Jeanne Guillemin, Biological Weapons:
From the Invention of State-Sponsored Programs to Contemporary Bioterror-
ism (New York: Columbia University Press, 2005).
2. See Stephen Peter Rosen, New Ways of War: Understanding Military
Innovation (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1991).
3. Susan Wright, ed., Biological Warfare and Disarmament: New Prob-
lems/New Perspectives (New York: Rowman and Littlefield, 2002), pp. 3–24.
4. Li Xiofang, Blood-Weeping Accusations: Records of Anthrax Victims
(Beijing: CCP Press, 2005).
5. Avner Cohen, “Israel and Chemical/Biological Weapons: History, Deter-
rence, and Arms Control,” Nonproliferation Review 8, no. 3 (Fall/Winter 2001):
27–53.

6. Frederic J. Brown, Chemical Warfare: A Study in Restraints (New
Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Publishers, 2005).
7. Simon Cooper, “Life in the Pursuit of Death,” Seed 4 (January/February
2003): 68–72, 104–107.
8. Eric Croddy, “China’s Role in the Chemical and Biological Disarma-
ment Regimes,” Nonproliferation Review 9, no. 91 (Spring 2002): 16–47.
9. Albert E. Cowdery, “‘Germ Warfare’ and Public Health in the Korean
Conflict,” Journal of the History of Medicine and Allied Sciences 39 (April
1984): 153–172.
10. Jeanne Guillemin, Anthrax: The Investigation of a Deadly Outbreak
(Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999).
11. Julian Robinson, Jeanne Guillemin, and Matthew Meselson, “‘Yellow
Rain’ in Southeast Asia: The Story Collapses,” Foreign Policy 68 (Fall 1987):
108–112.
12. Guillemin, Biological Weapons, pp. 138–145.
13. Erhard Geissler, “Biological Weapons Activities in Germany, 1923–
45,” in Biological and Toxin Weapons: Research, Development, and Use from
the Middle Ages to 1945, ed. Erhard Geissler and John Ellis van Courtland
Moon, 102–104 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999).
14. Olivier Lepick, “French Activities Related to Biological Warfare,” in
Geissler and Moon, Biological and Toxin Weapons, pp. 70–90.
15. Sally Stoecker, Forging Stalin’s Army: Marshal Tukhachevsky and the
Politics of Military Innovation (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1998), pp.
91–93.
16. “Summary of Information, Subject Ishii, Shiro, 10 January 1947,” Docu-
ment 41, US Army Intelligence and Security Command Archive, Fort Meade, MD.
17. John Bryden, Deadly Allies: Canada’s Secret War 1937–1947 (Toronto:
McClelland and Stewart, 1989), pp. 34–57; Donald Avery, “Canadian Biologi-
cal and Toxin Warfare,” in Geissler and Moon, Biological and Toxin Weapons,
pp. 190–214.
18. Brian Balmer, Britain and Biological Warfare: Expert Advice and Sci-
ence Policy, 1930–65 (London: Palgrave, 2001), p. 27.
19. Theodor Rosebury and Elvin A. Kabat, with the assistance of Martin H.
Boldt, “Bacterial Warfare,” Journal of Immunology 56, no. 1 (1947): 7–96.
20. Theodor Rosebury, Peace or Pestilence? Biological Warfare and How
to Avoid It (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1949).
21. Bryden, Deadly Allies, pp. 118–119, 197–199.
22. Ken Alibek, with Stephen Handelman, Biohazard: The Chilling True
Story of the Largest Covert Biological Weapons Program in the World—Told
from Inside by the Man Who Ran It (New York: Random House, 1999), p. 37.
23. In addition to Alibek, Biohazard, see Igor V. Domaradskij and Wendy
Orent, Biowarrior: Inside the Soviet/Russian Biological War Machine (Amherst,
NY: Prometheus Books, 2003).
24. Geissler, “Biological Warfare Activities in Germany,” pp. 91–126.
25. Louise Young, Japan’s Total Empire: Manchuria and the Culture of
Wartime Imperialism (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998), pp.
55–114.
26. “Japan Confronting New Atrocity,” New York Times, 17 March 1995.

27. Balmer, Britain and Biological Warfare, pp. 36–37.
28. Peter Hammond and Gradon Carter, From Biological Warfare to Health-
care: Porton Down, 1940–2000 (New York: Palgrave, 2002), pp. 102–104;
Balmer, Britain and Biological Warfare, pp. 98–101; “Report by the Joint
Strategic Plans Committee to the Joint Chiefs of Staff on Statements of Policy
and Directives on Biological Warfare,” JCS 1837/34, 11 June 1952.
29. Alibek, Biohazard, pp. 234–235; Raymond L. Garthoff, “Polyakov’s Run,”
Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists 56, no. 5 (September/October 2000): 37–40.
30. Arthur Marwick, Britain in the Century of Total War: War, Peace and
Social Change (Boston: Little, Brown, 1968).
31. Frederick O. Banting, “Memorandum on the Present Situation Regarding
Bacterial Weapons,” London: Public Record Office, WO188/653 10, n.d., p. 3.
This statement was circulated by Banting in Britain in November-December 1939.
32. Graham Allison, Nuclear Terror: The Ultimate Preventable Catastro-
phe (New York: Holt, 2004), p. 129.
33. Ulrich Beck, Risk Society: Towards a New Modernity, trans. M. Ritter
(London: Sage, 1992).
34. Jeanne Guillemin, “Inventing Bioterrorism” in Making Threats: Bio-
fears and Environmental Anxieties, ed. Banu Subramaniam, Elizabeth Hartmann,
and Charles Zerner, 197–216 (New York: Rowman and Littlefield, 2005).
35. See Zygmunt Bauman on “risk-fright” in Postmodern Ethics (Oxford:
Blackwell, 1993), p. 204.
36. Martin I. Meltzer et al., “Modeling Potential Responses to Smallpox as
a Bioterrorist Weapon,” Emerging Infectious Diseases 7, no. 6 (November–
December 2001): 959–969; Thomas Mack, “A Different View of Smallpox and
Vaccination,” New England Journal of Medicine 348, no. 5 (January 2003):
1–4; Raymond Gani and Steve Leach, “Transmission Potential of Smallpox in
Contemporary Populations,” Nature 414, no. 13 (December 2001): 748–751.
37. Robert J. Blendon et al., “The Public and the Smallpox Threat,” New
England Journal of Medicine 348, no. 5 (January 2003): 426–432; Tara O’Toole,
Michael Mair, and Thomas V. Inglesby, “Shining Light on Dark Winter,” Clini-
cal Infectious Diseases 34 (April 2002): 972–983.
38. Matthew Meselson, “Bioterrorism: What Can Be Done?” in Striking
Terror: America’s New War, ed. Robert B. Silvers and Barbara Epstein, 257–
276 (New York: New York Review Books, 2002).
39. Robert K. Merton, Social Theory and Social Structure (Glencoe, IL:
Free Press, 1957), pp. 60–69.
40. Nicholas Schwellenbach, “Biodefense: A Plague of Scientists,” Bulletin
of the Atomic Scientists 61, no. 3 (May–June 2005): 14–16.
41. National Research Council Committee on Research Standards and Prac-
tices to Prevent the Destructive Application of Biotechnology, Biotechnology in
an Age of Terrorism: Confronting the Dual Use Dilemma (Washington, DC:
National Academy Press, 2003), p. 14.
42. Chandré Gould and Peter Folb, Project Coast: Apartheid’s Chemical
and Biological Program (Geneva: United Nations Institute for Disarmament
Research, 2002).
43. David E. Kaplan and Andrew Marshall, The Cult at the End of the
World (New York: Crown, 1996); W. Seth Carus, “The Rajneeshees,” in Toxic

Terror: Assessing Terrorist Use of Chemical and Biological Weapons, ed.
Jonathan B. Tucker, 115–137 (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2000).
44. Robert A. Pape, Dying to Win: The Strategic Logic of Suicide Terror-
ism (New York: Random House, 2005); Mia Bloom, Dying to Win: The Allure
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