The Biotechnology Revolution and Biological Weapons

Practically every major new technology in history has been heavily exploited for military purposes. Considering the far reaching implications of genetic techniques, the ability to modify fundamental life processes, and their possibilities for both peaceful and hostile applications, it is crucial to avert the hostile exploitation of modern biotechnology through legal prohibitions and precautionary biosafety approaches. The strong international norm against biological weapons is increasingly deteriorating, with a prospect of opening a new biological arms race based on biotechnology. Preventing this possibility will require regulation of biotechnology and enforcement of the norm against biological warfare to work hand in hand.

Technological development has played an important role in the development of biological weapons. The expansion of microbiology at the turn of the Twentieth Century enabled the production of biological weapons during First World War, making it possible to

produce microorganisms in large quantities and deliver them in military operations. Further refining of these techniques were major activities of World War II and Cold War biological weapons programs. Advances in molecular biology in the 1970s in turn, made it possible to insert genetic material from one species to a different one, and to transfer a specific trait or characteristic. For biological weapons, this opened up the possibility of moving “military” traits between species to enhance existing agents, or even to create entirely new weapons.

By the 1980s, the military implications of genetic engineering had come more closely into focus. In a 1989 article in the (US) Naval War College Review, a US strategic thinker declared “The outlook for biological weapons is grimly interesting. Weaponeers have only just begun to explore the potential of the biotechnological revolution. It is sobering to realize that far more development lies ahead than behind.” (3) Shortly thereafter, the veil of secrecy surrounding the former Soviet Union’s offensive biological weapons program began to recede and Western researchers – particularly in the US – began to seriously explore the military potential of biotechnology in parallel (and now, increasingly in cooperation) with their commercial counterparts. Many possibilities for the abuse of genetic engineering to create weapons have emerged. Examples are provided in the following section.