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This chapter analyzes international legal regimes regulating the proliferation of chemical and biological weapons. It begins with a brief description of chemical and biological weapons. It then discusses provisions of the 1925 Geneva Protocol, the Biological Weapons Convention (BWC), and the Chemical Weapons Convention (CWC). It argues that the biological and chemical weapons regulatory regimes, with the BWC and CWC as their cornerstones, have succeeded in establishing a comprehensive legal prohibition upon possession, development, proliferation, and use of biological and chemical weapons. This legal prohibition is supported by a pervasive and powerful ancient moral taboo particularly on the use of biological and chemical weapons.

After tracing the emergence of the modern law prohibiting the use of poison and poisoned weapons, this chapter considers the meaning and significance of the rule. It assesses asphyxiating gases, notes the action taken in 1899 to address the matter and looks at the prohibition in the 1925 Geneva Protocol, noting that the instrument also addresses bacteriological weapons. More recent treaties, in the form of the Biological Weapons Convention and the Chemical Weapons Convention, are then discussed article by article, explaining each provision and analysing the obligations of states party to each. In the case of each instrument, participation by states in that body of law is assessed and the status of the relevant rules in customary law is considered. The particular rules relating to riot control agents and the practical implications of those rules are noted.

This chapter describes biological weapons, including the history of their proliferation and use, outbreaks of anthrax and salmonellosis, international control of biological weapons, and specific bioterrorist weapons and their adverse health effects. It concludes with a discussion of what health professionals can do to address biological weapons.

The verification protocol to the Biological Weapons Convention is the subject of the last case study. In the negotiations over this agreement, European advocates of intrusive verification were ready to weaken key provisions to win US support. When the new Bush administration rejected even the watered-down draft, they abandoned the initiative altogether. The chapter argues that effectiveness concerns explain the concessions made in the original negotiations, since a loss of US support threatened to alienate key third countries suspected of BWC violations. After the US rejection, however, European decision-makers had to choose between two equally unattractive outcomes, a protocol with limited membership and an abandonment of the process. That they preferred the latter option was explained in part by their fear of competitive disadvantages for European biotechnical companies, and in part by the strong norm of transatlantic consensus that prevailed on this ‘hard security’ issue.

This chapter describes the three explanations for biodefense—realism, bureaucratic interests, and organizational frames—that this book will test. First, realist theory predicts that the United States will fear biological weapons and help protect itself through biodefense because the threat is credible. Bureaucratic interests predict that both the Department of Defense (DoD) and the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) will compete for funding and autonomy. Drawing on the organizational frame theory, the chapter then identifies organizational frames and stereotypes regarding biodefense, illustrate the military's kinetic frame of reference, and explain why military biodefense is expected to be neglected as a result.

This chapter explores the incredibly complex legal and policy challenges presented by Weapons of Mass Destruction (WMD). It begins by defining WMDs, including their classifications as nuclear, chemical, and biological weapons, and discussing the use of these weapons in modern warfare. As the use of these weapons has starkly illustrated their devastating capabilities, the chapter outlines the domestic and international attempts to control WMDs. The chapter also discusses the risks posed by WMD proliferation and the framework for responding to any WMD-related incident. The chapter concludes by exploring WMD restrictions in U.S. military operations and reinforcing the call for a robust legal structure to regulate these weapons.

This chapter examines how high the barriers to terrorist WMD are at the start of the twenty-first century. Starting from the observation that almost all WMD technologies except nuclear weapons are based on ultrastrong poisons, it introduces the concept of a “lethal dose”and compares different technologies (chemical, biological, radiological or CBR) along this dimension. It then builds on this foundation by exploring the technological challenges that terrorists would have to overcome to obtain CBR weapons. Next, it describes the historically preferred scenario in which poisons are delivered to victims through open-air releases. It examines various alternative strategies followed by a brief discussion of nuclear weapons. The chapter concludes that while today’s barriers to WMD are lower, terrorists also have far fewer resources than any state. This suggests that prudent technology controls can limit the rate at which WMD proliferates.

Chapter 5 analyses the ways in which the taboo has had a detrimental impact on the Syrian conflict. In particular, it focuses on the how specific weapons are perceived within a conflict, where the taboo causes chemical armaments to be prioritised over others via inappropriate hierarchies of threat. The way in which the taboo has dominated understanding of Syria has seen other threats ignored – notably the vast numbers being massacred with conventional devices, but also the significant biowarfare threat that exists in the country. This means that policymakers have focused on the wrong issues in respect to Syria, a situation that precludes ever finding workable solutions to the crisis. Simply put, policymakers are not seeing the real problems. The taboo blinds them; or rather, applies a lens through which they can only see the chemical threat and none of the other issues driving this conflict.

This chapter reveals how military doctrine has assumed that biological attacks are like chemical attacks and thus detectable in advance. The resulting stereotypes caused the military to likewise assume that biodefense could be achieved using the plans and procedures for contamination avoidance, physical protection, and decontamination that were previously prepared for chemical defense. This resulted to fatal gaps and errors in military planning and training. The military struggled to deploy biological weapon detection systems and use medical countermeasures. Doctrine dating back to the 1950s implied that vaccines were readily available, but the military did not consider how to actually use them until the Gulf War, when it failed to employ vaccines fast enough or in sufficient quantities.

The progress of scientific technology means there is an increasing risk that terrorist groups, or even single individuals, will acquire a capacity to construct weapons of mass destruction. It might be possible for a well-organized terrorist group now or in the imminent future to manufacture a nuclear bomb. It is even easier to create biological weapons of mass destruction. The multi-culturalism of current liberal democracies makes it likely that they will contain groups of people hostile to their ideology. To counteract the threat of highly destructive attacks from such groups, liberal democracies have to avail themselves of the sophisticated means of surveillance that modern technology offers. Such surveillance will make these democracies less liberal, but it is possible to justify because there is no privacy right that it infringes. The xenophobia that results from a terrorist attack from some ethnic group is an even greater threat to liberalism.

This introductory chapter provides a background of biodefense and biological weapons. Biological weapons harm only living organisms because they incapacitate or kill through disease instead of causing blunt or penetrating trauma. The damage that these weapons cause can be limited through a combination of medical countermeasures, detection and identification, and physical protection—the key components of biodefense. Physical protection limits exposure to infection through face masks and filters that reduce the risk of inhaling aerosolized biological weapon agents. Detection and identification involves sensors and surveillance to help determine when a biological attack has occurred and what pathogens might be present. Lastly, medical countermeasures can prevent or treat infection through prophylactic vaccines and therapeutic drugs such as antibiotics.

When the U.S. military created a bioweapons research program at Fort Detrick, Maryland, following World War II, it enlisted microbiology in the production of modern warfare. Biological weapons magnify the potential of germs to harm humans, remaking the terms of risk to account for natures that have been engineered to be more contagious, fatal, and far-reaching. This alliance between war and science also bracketed certain ways of knowing nature by creating spaces and mechanisms to control microbes according to human desires. Beyond the weapon itself, bioweapons research promulgated knowledge of containment, designing top-secret, high-security laboratory spaces for the safe study of deadly microbes, thereby materializing the belief that microbes must (and could) be contained.

This chapter discusses how smallpox became a perfect candidate disease for an age of global terror. Nearly thirty years after its eradication, smallpox continues to strike fear into the American pysche because the nature of the disease and the global eradication program suits the anxieties of the post-Cold War, 9/11 era. With the eradication of smallpox, it became apparent that the U.S. had no more freed itself of deadly viruses than of violence and conflict, as emerging diseases like Ebola—and, earlier, AIDS—seemed to threaten American bodies and emerging terrorists threatened American borders. These abstract anxieties became tangible fears after September 11, 2001, when vulnerability to biological weapons, and especially smallpox, became terrifyingly obvious. In addition, the world's smallpox experts could not agree to destroy the last known specimens of variola, the smallpox virus. Thus, variola has lingered on in American and Russian labs, its preservation justified by the same logic of scientific mastery that had driven the global eradication effort.

This chapter discusses the political outbreaks and biological weapons connected to the 1979 anthrax outbreak in Russia. It first narrates the research team's presentation in the Brookings Institution, where they reviewed the series of interviews conducted with public health officials and physicians, and discussed the materials of Abramova and Grinberg's autopsy materials. The chapter then looks at the interviews with the victims' families, which confirmed the organized public health response that was described by officials, and also notes the reactions to the autopsy data and addresses the possibility that Russia is still stockpiling biological weapons. The conflict between Russia and the West is also discussed.

The use of biological and chemical weapons in warfare theoretically ended with the 1925 Geneva protocol, but only for those who had ratified it. In the face of such dangers, President Richard Nixon radically changed his mind about continuing to develop, produce, and stockpile biological weapons, ending an extensive decades-long program. Matthew Meselson was about to play a pivotal role in U.S. bioweapons policy in warning that the weapons could become far cheaper and easier to produce than nuclear weapons, thereby placing great mass destructive power within reach of nations not now possessing it. During World War II, Japan stood alone as the only documented large-scale user of biological weapons. The Geneva Protocol convinced Ishii that disease must be a potent weapon or biological weapons would not have been banned.

Anthrax predates back to the start of civilization and is a disease that kills livestock and affects humans with black spots. This chapter introduces a research team—including the author—which is sent to Sverdlovsk, Moscow, the location of the worst anthrax epidemic that has been recorded in a modern industrial nation, and explains how an anthrax infection starts and how humans can contract the disease. It then focuses on the possibility to use anthrax as a biological weapon, and introduces the Biological Weapons Convention, which bans the development, production, stockpiling, and retaining of biological agents or toxins.

The chapter deals with the Iraqi efforts to develop and produce weapons of mass destruction—chemical, biological and nuclear. It describes the various projects in each field, their history, the foreign assistance they got, the infrastructure the Iraqis built for them, their achievements and types of weapons the Iraqis produces and their arsenals, especially of the Chemical and Biological weapons. The efforts of the U. N. supervisory commissions (UNSCOM) and the international Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) to disarm Iraq from those weapons and capabilities to renew the development and production of them by Iraq after 1991. The use of chemical weapons by the Iraqis against the Kurds and the Iranian forces during the war between the two countries, and the possibility of using them against coalition forces during the wars in 1991 and 2003. The Iraqi efforts to achieve a nuclear device in a crash program before the war in 1991.