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This chapter focuses on how the 9/11 attacks merged with and animated the discussion of weapons of mass destruction (WMDs). By the first anniversary of 9/11, public officials and commentators were focusing less attention on how or why the World Trade Center and Pentagon had been attacked than on the far more lethal and presumably prevalent danger posed by weapons of mass destruction. The truly terrifying danger that now faced the world, officials argued, was the likelihood that terrorists would use WMDs in order to inflict casualties on a larger scale than ever imagined. Over the next few years, concern about WMDs grew dramatically. WMDs acquired the same kind of cultural prominence as an abiding source of unease that nuclear weapons had gained during the Cold War.

This chapter examines decision making in the Bush presidency by analyzing its formal organizational processes, including the structure of the advisory process, the access of advisers to the president, the coordination and management of the advisory process, and the president's penchant for delegation, his emphasis on loyalty, and his willingness to impose organizational discipline on top advisers. On each dimension, the process is found wanting. The administration's collegial deliberation is then considered, raising troubling questions about the president's failure to press critical questions (such as the reliability of evidence regarding weapons of mass destruction in Iraq and the premises on which the administration planned for postwar Iraq) and his tendency to focus on how to accomplish something rather than whether to accomplish it. The issues of diversity of whom Bush chose to engage and the imbalance of power and influence among the principals are also addressed.

This chapter focuses on the question whether affluent liberal democracies can cope with the challenge to their survival that weapons of mass destruction, harmful climate change, and environmental destruction pose. The nations of the European Union, the United States of America, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand are affluent liberal democracies that face this challenge. A fully liberal state is a state in which every citizen has equal rights and liberties, which are as extensive as they could be consistently with all others having the same rights and liberties. In these states this equality of rights and liberties coexists with a considerable socio-economical inequality. This raises questions about the extent to which these states are just and can be called true democracies. These questions are however beyond the scope of this book.

This chapter responds to some objections to an earlier argument that proposed a theory of preventive war. This theory sought to assimilate preventive war to self-defence, but only under restricted conditions; it argued against a general rule permitting states confronting distant or immature threats to launch preventive wars, on the ground that such a permission would license too many wars; it also argued that a more restricted principle, permitting preventive wars against rogue states where the distant threat involves weapons of mass destruction (WMD), can be justified; and also it stated that the permission to launch preventive war is nonproxyable; and finally it argued that the threat a rogue state poses must be a physical threat against the homeland of the state launching a preventive war. The chapter elaborates aspects of the theory that were obscurely stated or underdeveloped in the first go-around. It focuses on the so-called ‘rights objection’ that launching preventive war is wrong because it inflicts death and destruction on people who have done nothing to forfeit their rights against such violence.

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.

This chapter explores the link between weak states and weapons of mass destruction (WMD) proliferation, examining the threat of WMD proliferation, outlining various avenues by which both state and nonstate actors might attempt to acquire WMD, and exploring ways that state weakness could facilitate each proliferation pathway. It focuses primarily on nuclear weapons, but also discusses chemical and biological weapons. It argues that weak states do have certain vulnerabilities that proliferators might attempt to exploit, including high levels of corruption, poor security, and weak law enforcement capabilities. Two fragile states in particular—North Korea and Pakistan—clearly pose a serious proliferation threat. Globally, however, state fragility does not uniformly correlate with proliferation potential. In fact the most problematic group of countries may be relatively strong “states to watch” that have or seek nuclear weapons capabilities. States in this category—unlike the weakest states—have the resources and capacity to develop WMD, which in some cases could pose a direct threat to the United States. They also are characterized by certain governance gaps that may make them deliberate or inadvertent sources of WMD materials for nonstate actors.

It is easier for us to harm each other than to benefit each other, e.g. easier to kill than to save life. The extraordinary progress of scientific technology has increased our powers of action so that we can cause ultimate harm, i.e. render worthwhile life forever impossible, by weapons of mass destruction or by deleterious climate change and environmental destruction. There is considerable risk that we shall cause such harm, since our psychology and morality have evolved for a life in small societies with primitive technology and have not developed in pace with the changes brought about by technology. Since we shall continue to depend on advanced technology to support a huge and growing human population, we are in need of moral enhancement, by traditional or novel biomedical means, to bring down the risk of ultimate harm. This chapter also surveys the following nine chapters of the book.

This chapter considers the various issues raised in the run-up to the Iraq War. It asks: How much of a problem would the development of a mass destruction capability by a regime like that of Iraq in 2002 have actually posed? Wouldn't the development of an Iraqi nuclear capability have led to mutual deterrence and thus to a relatively stable strategic relationship? To the extent that an Iraqi capability of this sort would have posed serious problems, couldn't the Iraqis have been prevented permanently from developing such forces through nonmilitary means? Couldn't an inspection regime have done the trick? And if the control regime wasn't up to the job, would it be legitimate for a country to act essentially on its own, without first getting explicit U.N. Security Council authorization? Was unilateral action impermissible under international law, and is a country that dealt with the problem in that way to be branded a law-breaker?

Chapter Five explores the policy domain of weapons of mass destruction. Conceptually distinct, though related to terrorism, weapons of mass destruction are another controversial matter for sovereignty. Some states argue that it is their sovereign right to produce weapons of mass destruction, but, at the same time, they are pressed by international obligations not to. While this raises the possibility of military intervention in Iran, these same justifications were used for the war in Iraq. The United States argued that the international community had a right to intervene to prevent Iraq's further development of weapons of mass destruction. Although such weapons were never found, the chapter investigates how this war has shaped understandings of state sovereignty by analyzing the cases of the primary interveners, the United States and the United Kingdom, and comparing them to the cases of France and Russia as non-interveners. The chapter asserts that the military intervention in Iraq provided a potential impetus for change towards contingent sovereignty. However, because of the false premises of the intervention (i.e. the failure to find WMD), the predictions of cognitive dissonance were not borne out. Rather, the evidence showed that the action reinforced absolute sovereignty in the cases of the interveners. As for the non-interveners, state culpability and self-interest were found to be important predictors of changed attitudes toward sovereignty, providing support for the desire of a state to maintain cognitive consistency.

This chapter compares and contrast two Gulf Wars, 1990–1 and 2003. It concludes that the First Gulf War, on the whole, met the just‐war criteria. It assesses the different reasons for the Second Gulf War adduced by the US and UK governments (and at different times by Mr Blair); and whether and why the governments believed Iraq had Weapons of Mass Destruction (WMD). It concludes that the Second Gulf War, although fought, in the main, for honourable motives, failed fully to meet any of the just‐war criteria. These individual failures built up cumulatively to support the conclusion that the war was unjust, undertaken without sufficient just cause and without adequate planning to ensure a just outcome. The political leaders exercised insufficient practical wisdom. Coalition forces should not, however, now be precipitately withdrawn regardless of the consequences. Those who broke the peace have a responsibility to restore it.

This chapter addresses the acquisition by terrorist groups of weapons of mass destruction. If this were to occur, the state's ultimate powers of violence would pass into private hands, either those of a terrorist internationale such as Al Qaeda, or those of a superempowered loner – a lonely citizen with a grudge and the capability to hold his entire nation hostage. These scenarios would take us into a new world, in which terrorism might transmute from an eternal but manageable challenge to liberal democracy into a potentially lethal foe. The chapter considers the worst-case scenario in order to pose, as starkly as possible, the questions with which the book began: whether our democracies are strong enough to cope with these dangers, and how to strengthen the institutions we are committed to defend.

This chapter discusses the role of the United Nations political bodies in creating, facilitating, maintaining, and enforcing international law on the subject of the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction. As the cornerstone international organization in the area of international peace and security, the United Nations has had a long history of engagement with the issue of WMD proliferation, beginning with the very first General Assembly Resolution on January 24, 1946. The UN Charter itself gives to the political bodies of the organization specific powers to participate in the creation of new international law on issues of WMD proliferation, as well as special powers of enforcement of non-proliferation law to the UN Security Council.

This chapter addresses the normative question of what should be the character of the rules and institutions of international law covering international uses of force, in the age of proliferation of weapons of mass destruction technologies. It suggests that international use of force law is currently in a state of crisis, precipitated by the proliferation of WMD technologies and the revised set of national security calculations, which determine when and why states choose to use force internationally, that have been thrust upon states as a result. It reviews a number of options which have been proposed for changing the substance of international laws and institutions which currently regulate this area, in order to make them responsive to this change in international security realities, and more effective and useful to states. However, it is argued that none of these proposals truly grasps the nettle of the problems facing states in the postproliferated age, and the challenge of designing and maintaining effective and supportable rules and institutions in this area.

This chapter discusses the information provided by the Hutton Report and the Butler Report concerning the bases of the British government's decision to join the U.S. in overturning Saddam Hussein for his alleged possession of weapons of mass destruction (WMD). It suggests that nothing revealed in the reports could bring an agreement to whether British Prime Minister Tony Blair was right in his decision, but those who have read the reports could surely conclude that the government, the intelligence services, and the BBC fell short of what have been expected of them at a time when Britain was on the brink of being taken into a war. It discusses the similarities between the Iraq War and the Suez Canal conflict.

This introductory chapter begins with a discussion of the emerging consensus that weak and failing states pose the biggest threats to the US and international security. It then sets out the purpose of the book, which is to analyze the relationship between state weakness and five of the world's most pressing transnational threats: transnational terrorism, proliferation of weapons of mass destruction, transnational crime, energy insecurity, and infectious disease. An overview of the subsequent chapters is also presented.

This chapter focuses on the Proliferation Security Initiative (PSI), an ongoing informal diplomatic program involving some fifty states at various levels of cooperation in logistic, law enforcement, and military efforts aimed at interdicting WMD-related items and technologies in transit, most often over the sea lanes. It argues that the PSI presents potentially problematic issues of legal and jurisprudential concern, from which more general lessons can be learned regarding counterproliferation-oriented pre-emptive uses of force. When viewed from a policy standpoint as well, its utility as a function of costs versus benefits, particularly in its more aggressive modes of prosecution, is also questionable. However, both legal and policy-related concerns could be substantially allayed through the operationalization of the PSI's principles in a more reserved and transparent manner.