Offensive Biological Weapons Program

Development, stockpiling, and maintenance of weaponized bacteria, virus, or toxin for military purposes. The use of biological weapons was banned by the Convention on the Prohibition of the Development, Production and Stockpiling of Bacteriological (Biological) and Toxin Weapons and on their Destruction, opened for signature in 1972. The Biological Weapons Convention was intended to augment the 1925 Geneva Protocol for the Prohibition of the Use in War of Asphyxiating, Poisonous, or other Gases, and of Bacteriological Methods of Warfare. The convention is the first international disarmament treaty to ban an entire category of weapons. Although more than 100 states have signed, the lack of any verification mechanism makes compliance almost impossible to determine.

Biological warfare is part of the history of colonization and conquest, as invaders have conquered local populations by inadvertently—and deliberately—infecting them with diseases they carry. As a military strategy, the use of biological weapons dates back to the Roman Empire and also was employed during the Middle Ages. Biological warfare was at work during the American Revolution and the Civil War, and earlier, Native Americans were devastated by the diseases brought by Europeans to the New World.

During World War II, the Nazis conducted notorious, horrific experiments on human subjects in concentration camps, involving everything from the deliberate infection of victims with disease to subjecting prisoners to extreme temperatures and other inhumane conditions to test how the human body endures. Unit 731 of the Japanese Imperial Army was also engaged in biological weapons research, including live vivisections and the manufacture of plague bacteria. Meanwhile, the British conducted anthrax experiments off the coast of Scotland, rendering the island test site uninhabitable for decades.

Biological weapons research was conducted throughout the Cold War by both the United States and the Soviet Union. Though nuclear weapons were the focus of contention and agreement, both sides also continued research programs on weaponized disease-causing agents. President Nixon officially disbanded the biological weapons program in the United States in response to public pressure and disgust over the use of chemical weapons in the Vietnam War. The Soviet Union, however, secretly continued to perfect smallpox for dissemination by aerial bombs and missiles. The collapse of the Soviet Union and all that it entailed for the scientific community, including financial hardship and unemployment, has contributed to concern for the fate of materials produced under the program.

In the post–Cold War era, the proliferation of biological weapons and their potential use by terrorists have become matters of deep concern. The past two decades have seen a marked improvement in production techniques for biological agents, resulting in more aggressive disease strains and the use of genetic engineering to turn benign organisms into harmful ones. Genetic engineering can also make disease strains more toxic and robust, thus allowing for a wider range of attack methods. Biological warfare is notoriously difficult to conduct, but scientific advances are making [Page 546]it more efficient and effective. The most important of these advances include the development of agents that are more virulent after deployment, targeting delivery to specific populations, protection for manufacturing personnel against infection, use of genetic engineering to create strains that are harder to detect, and modification of immune systems of target populations to make them more susceptible to infection.

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