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Advances in genetics may soon make possible the development of ethnic bioweapons that target specific ethnic or racial groups based upon genetic markers. While occasional published reports of such research generate public outrage, little has been written about the ethical distinction (if any) between the development of such weapons and ethnically neutral bioweapons. The purpose of this paper is to launch a debate on the subject of ethnic bioweapons before they become a scientific reality.

https://doi.org/10.1136/jme.2008.028944

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The threat posed by biological weapons, which in recent years has been overshadowed by concerns about the proliferation of nuclear technology, gained renewed public attention in the USA with a December 2008 report by the bipartisan Commission on the Prevention of Weapons of Mass Destruction Proliferation and Terrorism that found terrorists “more likely to obtain materials for a biological attack than” a radiological one. 1 Yet strikingly missing from the findings of this blue-ribbon panel was any discussion of ethnic bioweapons, genetically engineered pathogens designed to target specific racial or ethnic groups. The feasibility of developing such weaponry—first proposed in Robert Heinlein’s science-fiction thriller The Day After Tomorrow (1942)—has long been subject to dispute. 2 In an address commemorating the 80th anniversary of the Geneva Protocol of 1925, International Committee of the Red Cross vice-president Jacques Forster warned that “the potential to target a particular ethnic group with a biological agent is probably not far off” and that such scenarios were “not the product of the ICRC’s imagination” but have “been identified by countless independent and governmental experts”. 3 At various times over the past three decades, critics have accused South Africa of researching pathogens that would harm only indigenous black people, 4 5 Israel of attempting to develop an anti-Arab bomb 6 and the Soviet Union of working to alter human genes through biological agents for military purposes. 7 What is most revealing is not the allegations themselves—all vehemently denied—but the distinctive outrage that accompanied each of these claims. 8 (The New York Post , for example, denounced the charges against Israel as a “blood libel”.) 9 The response of the media suggests the existence of a consensus that ethnic bioweapons, if they could be successfully designed, are somehow more objectionable than other tools of modern warfare, possibly even other biological weapons.

HISTORY OF BIOLOGICAL WEAPONS

Biological weapons targeted at particular ethnic groups have a long and controversial history. 10 The Roman historian Cassius Dio described efforts to use a “man-made pestilence” of smallpox and bubonic plague to target previously unexposed enemy soldiers (McIsaac, p17). 10 More recently, Sir Jeffrey Amherst, commander of the British forces in North America during the French and Indian War (1754–1763), recommended the intentional use of smallpox to deplete the population of Native American tribes hostile to settlers (McIsaac, p17). 10 Some historians have argued that the future American president Andrew Jackson, when fighting the Seminole tribe in Florida, distributed smallpox-infected blankets to his Native American adversaries, knowing that they were highly susceptible to the disease. Whether this particular episode is true or apocryphal, other European and American military commanders certainly did use such tactics. It is not clear whether ethical qualms about biological weapons were raised in Roman or colonial times. However, for at least a century, military theorists and philosophers of war have debated over the ethics of developing and using bioweapons. Although the practice itself was largely outlawed internationally by the Biological Weapons Convention of 1972, many nations probably continue to stockpile such weapons. 11 Surprisingly, a broad survey of the literature of both warfare and bioethics reveals no writing at all on the question of whether the development of ethnically targeted weapons is uniquely unethical in a manner distinct from that of other biological weapons. While at present this inquiry may appear entirely academic, the possibility that rogue scientists or terrorists will eventually be tried for attempting the development of such pathogens—as well as the likelihood that non-signatory nations to the Biological Weapons Convention may pursue such technology—renders an open-minded examination of ethnic bioweapons long overdue.

POSSIBLE MECHANISMS OF BIOWEAPONS

Numerous mechanisms have been proposed for workable ethnic bioweapons. By far the most frequently discussed design would be genetic engineering of an existing pathogen, such as Ebola virus or Machupo virus, to target DNA markers specific to the cells of a particular racial or ethnic group. Alternatively, a harmless bacterium or virus could be rendered virulent. Another mechanism focuses on the distinctive proteins of the human immune system that often cluster in ethnic or racial groups. A synthetic or manipulated biological agent might inactivate the disease-fighting capabilities of the victims by knocking out cells containing particular molecular tags, much as HIV destroys helper T cells, thereby creating an entire population susceptible to opportunistic infections. While the history of human migration and genetic mixing means that individual markers rarely if ever are distributed entirely along racial or ethnic lines, even a pathogen that could kill 70% or 80% of the enemy’s soldiers, while harming only 20% or 30% of one’s own combatants, might survive the unsentimental cost–benefit comparisons of military planners. And if these proposals still seem far-fetched to some within the scientific community, the threat is being taken quite seriously by political leaders. In 2007, Russian president Vladimir Putin even ordered a ban “on the export of all human medical biological materials”, in the fear that genetic material from Russians might “enable Western scientists to make ethnic-specific biological weapons” for use against his citizenry. 12 Several Western commentators have expressed concerns that the Human Genome Project might be harnessed to achieve similar ends. 13

While most discussion of ethnic bioweapons—and biological weapons generally—has focused upon fast-acting agents, slower and more insidious agents are also possible. For example, a biological agent that damaged the reproductive capacity of certain individuals or groups would manifest itself far less rapidly than a haemorrhagic fever. Advances in genetics make it theoretically possible to create weapons that might act in the manner of gene therapy, only in reverse, making the offspring of those affected susceptible to various forms of cancer or even precocious senility. Similarly, the debate over ethnic bioweapons has tended to focus on pathogens that affect human beings. However, bioweapons might also be designed to target specific animals, or even plants, that serve the needs of a particular cultural or ethnic community. Different nations often rely upon distinct breeds of livestock—subtle differences to human consumers, but not necessarily insignificant for the purposes of focused bioweaponry. Even the development of pathogens that inhibit the efficacy of certain medications in select populations is possible. In short, the ways in which bioweapons may be targeted against specific ethnic, racial and cultural groups are as broad as humanity’s scientific imagination.

OBJECTIONS TO THE USE OF BIOWEAPONS

The ethics of developing bioweapons, or weaponry more generally, has been discussed widely and is not the subject of this essay. Instead, solely for the sake of analysis, this essay accepts as one of its premises the highly controversial principle that warfare will continue to exist and that at least some nations or non-state entities will remain steadfast in their development of non-targeted (ie, ethnically neutral) bioweapons. Assuming that to be the case, this essay then briefly outlines and analyses three sets of potential ethical objections to the development of ethnically targeted bioweapons. These concerns relate to the indiscriminate or arbitrary effects of such weapons upon innocent parties and civilians, the effects of such weapons upon intended military targets and the possibility that such weapons will be used to perpetrate or threaten “ethnic cleansing” outside the military context. A fourth set of realpolitik -driven objections—that such weaponry might alter the balance of global power, favouring ethnically heterogenous nations over homogenous ones (eg, the USA over China)—may also have validity, but these objections rely upon a second set of normative judgements regarding which geopolitical alignments are preferable, which in turn requires inquiry into political economy and governance theory that is well beyond the scope of this paper (and possibly beyond the boundaries of the discipline of bioethics). What is worth observing is that the cleverest ethnic bioweapons programs might rely upon propaganda as well as upon engineered pathogens, so that, for example, a minority decimated by such a bioweapon might blame the majority in its own culture for creating the pandemic. That many Americans continue to believe that HIV/AIDS was developed by the government to wipe out African-Americans suggests that such a propaganda program is indeed plausible. 14 However, the exploration of the relationship between propaganda and ethnic bioweaponry—itself a topic worthy of exploration—is also best left for discussion elsewhere. This paper will confine itself to the moral distinctions between the use of biological weapons generally and the use of such weapons when targeted at specific ethnic groups.

Among the most frequently voiced objections to ethnic bioweapons are that they might do significant collateral damage to civilians—unleashing a plague that could spread globally and wipe out an entire ethnic community. Unlike chemical or even tactical nuclear weapons, whose impact can be contained within a precise geographic region, a biological agent has the potential to spread rapidly between continents and across oceans. However, this ease of spread is not confined to ethnic weapons per se. All biological weapons pose such a risk. Similarly, while ethnic bioweapons may offer potential victims little opportunity to surrender—regarded by many as a cardinal tenet of “ethical” warfare—it is not clear why ethnically targeted weapons make the opportunity for surrender less than for other biological weapons. Moreover, because ethnic communities tend to cluster, the “human barriers” created by populations not susceptible to the weaponised disease might actually slow the spread of the pathogen.

A related benefit is that ethnic bioweapons may have particular value in defensive warfare, as they offer the prospect of defeating an invading army of a different ethnic background without risking significant damage to one’s own citizenry. Of course, the fallout here would be greatest against ethnic minorities in the territory being invaded who shared an ethnic background (or particular genetic marker) with the invaders. These fears are not unreasonable, considering the long and tragic history of mistreating minorities under these circumstances, such as the Canadian detention of Ukrainians during World War I and the internment of Japanese-Americans in the USA during World War II. Yet here the high rate of genetic overlap and historical genetic mixing may favour a policy of military caution: since some members of the ethnic majority may share the marker being targeted—and as long as testing for the marker is not widely available, they will be unlikely to know who they are—the majority will probably exercise considerable caution in a manner that they would not if assured that they themselves could not fall victim to the pathogen.

What critics of collateral damage are really arguing is that a pathogen that kills off a particular group of civilians based upon their ethnicity is somehow worse than a pathogen that kills off a group of civilians randomly. Yet if the number of dead and other demographic features of the populations are identical, then this preference for ethnic-neutrality is not at all intuitive. For example, taking the reduction or mitigation of human suffering as the ultimate goal, one could easily surmise that confining the deaths to a particular ethnic group would be preferable, because such a choice, assuming insular ethnic communities, probably reduces the number of grieving survivors.

The real concern with regard to civilians is not that any given weapon will do more damage, but that the ability to shield one’s own army and civilians from the effects of such weapons may actually increase the likelihood of their use. This aspect of bioweaponry takes two forms. First, ethnically neutral bioweapons have the potential to do damage to the party that unleashes them, as well as to the intended targets, and assuming rational actors, this fear of a global pandemic may serve as a check upon the military release of smallpox or enhanced plague. In contrast, this boomerang effect would be substantially limited with ethnically targeted weapons. Second, the mutually assured destruction of biological warfare that prevents either party from attacking with these unconventional weapons, for fear that their opponents will do so too and thereby unleash a holocaust that destroys both societies, may lose its deterrent effect if one party develops an ethnic bioweapon while the other side must still rely upon more traditional bioweapons with all of their concomitant shortcomings. History suggests that both of these fears may be overblown. Much as the development of tactical nuclear weapons has not resulted in a lowering of the bar with regard to radiological attack, the simple fact that biological weapons are more precise does not mean that the practical advantages of using them will overcome the moral objections to their use. Moreover, in any age when other weapons of mass destruction are widespread, a radiological deterrent would be likely to prevent military strategists from capitalising upon any strategic advantage offered by ethnic weapons.

A second set of objections to ethnic bioweapons focuses on their effects upon their intended targets: enemy soldiers. One might argue that while killing soldiers because they are working for the cause of the enemy is ethically tolerable, killing them solely on account of their race crosses an additional moral trench. What this argument essentially boils down to is the belief that there is something fundamentally more disturbing about killing soldiers based on their genetics than killing them haphazardly—even if the numbers of dead are otherwise equal. Whether or not the same ethnic or racial group is persistently targeted might play a role in answering this question. If the same group is persistently targeted, one concern might be that the use of such targeted weaponry will stamp a badge of inferiority on soldiers of a particular ethnicity, possibly even stoking racism beyond the military context. However, this potential for increased discrimination would need to be balanced against the diversifying effects of the rise of such weapons. If militaries believe that they are susceptible to ethnic weapons, they will presumably recruit as ethnically varied an army as possible to protect themselves against precisely such an attack. In other words, ethnically targeted bioweapons might actually lead to increased military opportunities for racial and ethnic minorities. Of course, the possibility also exists that ethnic bioweapons, over time, will not target one specific group more than others. In fact, sophisticated militaries might develop entire arsenals designed to target a whole host of ethnic groups. Why such weapons are more noxious than other bioweapons outside the context of existing racism is not clear. The soldiers are not being killed because they belong to a minority group, after all. They are being killed because they are enemy soldiers. This situation appears fundamentally different, for example, from massacring prisoners of a certain race while allowing those of another race to survive—because in that case, the alternative is taking all of the prisoners alive. Here, where the goal is to kill as many enemy combatants as possible, the choice is between haphazard death and targeted death, not between ending life and preserving life.

Finally, a third criticism of ethnic bioweapons emphasises their potential for misuse. Either a rogue state might use such weapons against its own citizens or a terrorist organisation might use them to destabilise the global community. This critique argues that in a world where Hutu massacre Tutsi and Serbians butcher unarmed Kosovars, one cannot risk the potential damage that might be perpetrated by ethnic bioweapons. Yet these fears are highly unlikely to be realised. In the first place, the development of ethnic bioweaponry will not be the product of “backyard invention” but will require the investment of considerable intellectual capital from the best scientific minds in the world. If these researchers do manage to achieve their goals, one can assume that their military employers will go to great lengths to secure whatever toxic agents they do develop. The history of nuclear weapons may offer a useful lesson here: despite decades of concern that the failure of nuclear states might result in such weapons falling into the wrong hands, this has not occurred. If this has not occurred with nuclear arms, it is unclear why it is likely to occur with bioweapons. Moreover, on a philosophical level, there is a meaningful distinction between something that is inherently evil and something that may be used for evil. We choose not to ban helicopters, even though they can just as easily be employed to strafe unarmed civilians from the air as to transport businessmen to offices. We accept the dual-purpose role of many inventions—and err on the side of permitting their productive use. Similarly, we tolerate all varieties of weaponry because the advantage such arms offer for national defense outweighs the danger they might pose in the hands of malevolent actors. So while ethnic bioweapons might have the potential to do great harm in the wrong hands, as long as they also serve a useful military purpose, this latter criterion seems a more reasonable standard for evaluation.

CONCLUSIONS

The goal of this essay is neither to advocate the development of ethnic bioweapons nor to argue for their legalisation. What this essay does seek to do is to question the irrational dichotomy that appears to exist in public attitudes that view ethnically targeted bioweapons as more objectionable than ethnically neutral ones. In contrast, this paper argues that there is nothing unique about “ethnic bullets” or “genetic bombs” that makes them more objectionable than other forms of biological weaponry or others means of targeting civilians in an ethnically neutral manner. While public beliefs about race may adhere to the conventional wisdom that all distinctions based upon ethnicity are inherently noxious, the irrational underpinning and pernicious consequences of racism and bigotry simply do not apply in discussions of weapons of mass destruction. With bioweapons, the purposes of the discrimination are fundamentally rational. Any harm done as a result of ethnic categorisation is dwarfed by the deaths of thousands or millions that are likely to result from biological warfare—and the primary goal ought to be minimising such deaths, even if there is a tradeoff in that the deaths fall more heavily upon one ethnic group.

The next time the media exposes efforts to develop genetic bioweapons, or speculates that advances in genetics will lead to such devices, the bioethics community and scientific punditry ought not to buy into the public outrage. Instead, such an event might serve as an excellent platform for discussion of the moral hazards of stockpiling weapons more generally, using the irrational distinction between ethnically targeted and ethnically neutral bioweapons to expose the underlying irrationality of tolerating some weapons of mass destruction while opposing others.

Mahnaimi U ,
↵ Plague war . (Transcript of PBS interview with Dr Christopher Davis. ) http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/shows/plague/interviews/davis.html (accessed 5 May 2009) .
↵ Anon . Ethnic warfare: biological weapons might not be color blind. Village Voice 26 January 1999 .
↵ Anon . Now playing: a blood libel for the 21st century. New York Post 22 November 1998 .
Rosenblum M

Competing interests: None.

Provenance and Peer review: Not commissioned; externally peer reviewed.

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The concise argument The concise argument Søren Holm Journal of Medical Ethics 2009; 35 397-397 Published Online First: 30 Jun 2009.

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Bioweapons research is banned by an international treaty – but nobody is checking for violations

Professor of the Practice of Politics and Crown Family Director of the Crown Center for Middle East Studies, Brandeis University

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Two US Marines in green hazmat suits taking part in a bioweapon defense training

Scientists are making dramatic progress with techniques for “gene splicing” – modifying the genetic makeup of organisms.

This work includes bioengineering pathogens for medical research, techniques that also can be used to create deadly biological weapons. It’s an overlap that’s helped fuel speculation that the SARS-CoV-2 coronavirus was bioengineered at China’s Wuhan Institute of Virology and that it subsequently “escaped” through a lab accident to produce the COVID-19 pandemic.

The world already has a legal foundation to prevent gene splicing for warfare: the 1972 Biological Weapons Convention . Unfortunately, nations have been unable to agree on how to strengthen the treaty. Some countries have also pursued bioweapons research and stockpiling in violation of it.

As a member of President Bill Clinton’s National Security Council from 1996 to 2001, I had a firsthand view of the failure to strengthen the convention. From 2009 to 2013, as President Barack Obama’s White House coordinator for weapons of mass destruction, I led a team that grappled with the challenges of regulating potentially dangerous biological research in the absence of strong international rules and regulations.

The history of the Biological Weapons Convention reveals the limits of international attempts to control research and development of biological agents.

1960s-1970s: International negotiations to outlaw biowarfare

The United Kingdom first proposed a global biological weapons ban in 1968.

Reasoning that bioweapons had no useful military or strategic purpose given the awesome power of nuclear weapons, the U.K. had ended its offensive bioweapons program in 1956. But the risk remained that other countries might consider developing bioweapons as a poor man’s atomic bomb .

In the original British proposal, countries would have to identify facilities and activities with potential bioweapons applications. They would also need to accept on-site inspections by an international agency to verify these facilities were being used for peaceful purposes.

These negotiations gained steam in 1969 when the Nixon administration ended America’s offensive biological weapons program and supported the British proposal. In 1971, the Soviet Union announced its support – but only with the verification provisions stripped out. Since it was essential to get the USSR on board, the U.S. and U.K. agreed to drop those requirements.

In 1972 the treaty was finalized. After gaining the required signatures, it took effect in 1975.

Under the convention , 183 nations have agreed not to “develop, produce, stockpile or otherwise acquire or retain” biological materials that could be used as weapons. They also agreed not to stockpile or develop any “means of delivery” for using them. The treaty allows “prophylactic, protective or other peaceful” research and development – including medical research.

However, the treaty lacks any mechanism to verify that countries are complying with these obligations.

1990s: Revelations of treaty violations

This absence of verification was exposed as the convention’s fundamental flaw two decades later, when it turned out that the Soviets had a great deal to hide.

In 1992, Russian President Boris Yeltsin revealed the Soviet Union’s massive biological weapons program . Some of the program’s reported experiments involved making viruses and bacteria more lethal and resistant to treatment. The Soviets also weaponized and mass-produced a number of dangerous naturally occurring viruses, including the anthrax and smallpox viruses, as well as the plague-causing Yersinia pestis bacterium.

Yeltsin in 1992 ordered the program’s end and the destruction of all its materials. But doubts remain whether this was fully carried out.

Another treaty violation came to light after the U.S. defeat of Iraq in the 1991 Gulf War. United Nations inspectors discovered an Iraqi bioweapons stockpile , including 1,560 gallons (6,000 liters) of anthrax spores and 3,120 gallons (12,000 liters) of botulinum toxin. Both had been loaded into aerial bombs, rockets and missile warheads, although Iraq never used these weapons.

In the mid-1990s, during South Africa’s transition to majority rule, evidence emerged of the former apartheid regime’s chemical and biological weapons program . As revealed by the South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission, the program focused on assassination. Techniques included infecting cigarettes and chocolates with anthrax spores, sugar with salmonella and chocolates with botulinum toxin.

In response to these revelations, as well as suspicions that North Korea, Iran, Libya and Syria were also violating the treaty, the U.S. began urging other nations to close the verification gap. But despite 24 meetings over seven years, a specially formed group of international negotiators failed to reach agreement on how to do it . The problems were both practical and political.

Monitoring biological agents

Several factors make verification of the bioweapons treaty difficult.

First, the types of facilities that research and produce biological agents, such as vaccines , antibiotics, vitamins, biological pesticides and certain foods , can also produce biological weapons. Some pathogens with legitimate medical and industrial uses can also be used for bioweapons.

A hand holds a petri dish containing sprouts

Further, large quantities of certain biological weapons can be produced quickly, by few personnel and in relatively small facilities. Hence, biological weapons programs are more difficult for international inspectors to detect than nuclear or chemical programs, which typically require large facilities, numerous personnel and years of operation.

So an effective bioweapons verification process would require nations to identify a large number of civilian facilities. Inspectors would need to monitor them regularly. The monitoring would need to be intrusive, allowing inspectors to demand “challenge inspections,” meaning access on short notice to both known and suspected facilities.

Finally, developing bioweapons defenses – as permitted under the treaty – typically requires working with dangerous pathogens and toxins, and even delivery systems. So distinguishing legitimate biodefense programs from illegal bioweapons activities often comes down to intent – and intent is hard to verify.

Because of these inherent difficulties, verification faced stiff opposition.

Political opposition to bioweapons verification

As the White House official responsible for coordinating the U.S. negotiating position, I often heard concerns and objections from important government agencies.

The Pentagon expressed fears that inspections of biodefense installations would compromise national security or lead to false accusations of treaty violations. The Commerce Department opposed intrusive international inspections on behalf of the pharmaceutical and biotechnology industries. Such inspections might compromise trade secrets, officials contended, or interfere with medical research or industrial production.

Germany and Japan, which also have large pharmaceutical and biotechnology industries, raised similar objections. China, Pakistan, Russia and others opposed nearly all on-site inspections. Since the rules under which the negotiation group operated required consensus, any single country could block agreement.

[ Like what you’ve read? Want more? Sign up for The Conversation’s daily newsletter .]

In January 1998, seeking to break the deadlock, the Clinton administration proposed reduced verification requirements. Nations could limit their declarations to facilities “especially suitable” for bioweapons uses, such as vaccine production facilities. Random or routine inspections of these facilities would instead be “voluntary” visits or limited challenge inspections – but only if approved by the executive council of a to-be-created international agency monitoring the bioweapons treaty.

But even this failed to achieve consensus among the international negotiators.

Finally, in July 2001, the George W. Bush administration rejected the Clinton proposal – ironically, on the grounds that it was not strong enough to detect cheating. With that, the negotiations collapsed .

Since then, nations have made no serious effort to establish a verification system for the Biological Weapons Convention.

Even with the amazing advances scientists have made in genetic engineering since the 1970s, there are few signs that countries are interested in taking up the problem again.

This is especially true in today’s climate of accusations against China, and China’s refusal to fully cooperate to determine the origins of the COVID-19 pandemic.

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30 Bioethics and Bioterrorism

Jonathan D. Moreno is the David and Lyn Silfen University Professor of Ethics and Professor of Medical Ethics and of History and Sociology of Science at the University of Pennsylvania. His books include Mind Wars: Brain Research and National Defense (2006), and Undue Risk: Secret State Experiments on Humans (1999).

Published: 02 September 2009
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The term ‘bioterrorism’ seems to have become a kind of shorthand for sowing terror through the use of other ‘unconventional’ weapons, especially chemical, nuclear, and radiological weapons, or ‘dirty bombs’. The ethical problems associated with these other threats are closely associated with those raised by biological agents. Therefore, this article necessarily refers to these related potential terrorist technologies, all of them made more available to militant organizations through the spread of knowledge and material in the post-cold war era.

Until the terrorist attacks of 11 September 2001, and the subsequent anthrax scare, modern bioethics paid little attention to issues concerning preparation for and response to bioterrorism (Moreno 2002) . Yet a number of foundational bioethical problems are engaged or given a new twist by this topic, including the rights of human research subjects, resource allocation, the appropriate balance of human rights and public health, and special responsibilities of emergency health care workers. Bioterrorism also takes bioethics into novel territory, such as the social obligations of private industry and the uses of genetics both in developing terror weapons and in defending against them.

Although the term ‘bioterrorism’ has only recently come into widespread use, the tactical notion of using biological or chemical agents to spread terror among enemy forces reaches back to the First World War. The psychological impact of waging terror campaigns against civilians using various destructive means was first evident in the American Civil War, especially during Union General William T. Sherman's infamous march through Georgia. In the Second World War both sides attempted to terrorize non‐combatants, the Nazis by bombing the British mainland, and the Americans with firebombs in Germany and Japan and, of course, the first atomic weapons. Terror campaigns by radical political movements, rather than nation‐states, took place in the 1960s in Europe and the United States, mainly in the form of attacks on financial institutions and the air transportation system. The novelty of twenty‐first century bioterrorism lies in the prospect that it will combine political radicalism with techniques that were once largely the province of state military establishments.

The term ‘bioterrorism’ seems to have become a kind of shorthand for sowing terror through the use of other ‘unconventional’ weapons, especially chemical, nuclear, and radiological weapons, or ‘dirty bombs’. The ethical problems associated with these other threats are closely associated with those raised by biological agents. Therefore, this chapter will necessarily refer to these related potential terrorist technologies, all of them made more available to militant organizations through the spread of knowledge and material in the post‐cold war era.

Biological Weapons and the Ethics of Human Experiments

Following the anthrax attacks in the fall of 2001, the US government made efforts to expedite the restocking of smallpox vaccine supplies and to develop safer and more effective medical responses to biological weapons generally. The smallpox vaccine trials in particular demonstrated that the general public is enthusiastic about volunteering for clinical trials when fears of a bioterrorism attack are widespread. Although the initial phase of the clinical research on the viability of the vaccine had taken place well before 11 September 2001, the project generated little public interest until after the anthrax attacks.

The smallpox vaccine studies were conducted mainly to determine whether vaccine derived from dilutions of stocks ‘on the shelf’ since the 1970s could register a ‘take’ in a human being. It would have been unethical to expose a human being deliberately to smallpox in order to determine the efficacy of the vaccination. This ethical obstacle to efficacy studies in humans has been a matter of concern to governmental authorities for some years. An alternative to human efficacy testing was exemplified in July 2000, when the US Food and Drug Administration approved ciproflaxicin (Cipro) for use as post‐exposure therapy for inhalational anthrax based on laboratory data, animal studies, clinical trials for other diseases, and experience with the drug in routine clinical use. This model essentially became law in 2002, when the FDA adopted the ‘animal rule’, which allows certain important therapies that could be used in the case of a terror attack to be approved based on animal rather than human efficacy testing (Moreno 2003) .

Although bioethics has only recently discovered issues associated with bioterrorism (ACHRE 1996; Moreno 2003 ), the history of medicine and warfare is replete with examples of attempts to use disease as a weapon, even before the mechanism of bacterial infection was understood. In one famous example, blankets used by soldiers dying of smallpox during the French and Indian wars are said to have been given to Indians in the hopes of spurring an epidemic. In the twentieth century a number of governments tried to enlist medical science, including human experimentation, in an effort both to produce and to defend against biological weapons that could create terror. Discussions of medical ethics and policy concerning such experiments took place at high governmental levels, especially following the trials of Nazi experimenters at Nuremberg, West Germany, in 1946–7. The imperial Japanese military pursued a massive research and development program on biological and chemical weapons in occupied Manchuria. Though thousands died, none of the scientists involved was subjected to prosecution by the American administrative authority (Moreno 2001) .

During the early 1950s, while the US Department of Defense was trying to assess the utility of biological and chemical weapons, Pentagon officials determined that there was no policy governing the use of human subjects in atomic, biological, and chemical (ABC) weapons research. At the time there was suspicion that both the Soviets and the Communist Chinese were surpassing the United States and its allies in developing these technologies. Reports from the Korean War suggested that psychoactive drugs were being used on American prisoners of war in an attempt to ‘brainwash’ them into providing sensitive information or even to program them to become Communist agents. Following a highly contentious secret internal debate, in 1953 the Secretary of Defense established the Nuremberg Code as the official policy of the Department for defensive ABC warfare research, including a requirement for written consent (Moreno 2001) .

One specific issue that arose repeatedly in these discussions was who would be appropriate candidates for human experiments. Military personnel were an obvious possibility, for exposure to elevated risk is part of what it is to serve in the military. On the other hand, the use of service members as ‘human guinea pigs’ seemed to be both an affront to their dignity and a threat to morale. Both positions were taken before, during, and after the Second World War. Another option was the use of long‐term prisoners. Their captivity made them attractive subjects in any case, and various inducements could be employed to obtain ‘volunteers’. But the Nuremberg Nazi doctors' trial rendered this option potentially embarrassing. Hospitalized patients were another possibility, but studies with these individuals would mainly be limited to addenda to their regular treatment (as in the case of cancer patients undergoing radiation therapy); and sick patients were not necessarily the best model for a general population, let alone for healthy young military personnel. By the early 1950s there was no entirely satisfactory solution to this problem and instead a mix of subjects was utilized, sometimes with consequences that became scandals when publicly revealed years later (Moreno 2001) .

There are at least two striking aspects of this concern about human experiment policies in the allied defense establishment in the early cold war era. First, these discussions presaged the academic debate about research ethics that began in the mid‐1960s following several scandals; in fact, there was virtually no conversation on these issues in the early 1950s outside the military, and even the World Medical Association's Helsinki Declaration took until the mid‐1960s to become final. Second, the effects of these early policies were, at best, modest. Although there is evidence that attempts were made to disseminate the conditions intended to govern human experiments funded or sponsored by national security agencies, in many instances the rules were not applied.

The US Army Inspector General reached this conclusion in 1975, following the revelations of LSD experiments on thousands of soldiers in the 1960s (Moreno 2001) .

Other activities that possess characteristics of medical experiments have not been classified as such, and therefore have not been subject to informed consent requirements. One prominent example is the deployment of thousands of soldiers, sailors, and airmen to atomic bomb test shots from the late 1940s to the early 1960s. Another example, about which more was learned only in 2002, is a program of aerosolized nerve gas field tests over ships at sea and in proximity of soldiers on the ground in the late 1960s. The rationale for excluding some experimental activities from informed consent procedures is mainly the need to develop force protection methods as new threats become known. This problem has become especially salient in the war on terror, in which it is assumed that soldiers are among the most likely victims of biological or chemical attacks. In the civilian context there is an analogous justification in public health, a subject I will address in the next section.

Among the unsettled ethical issues concerning human experiments in an era of bioterrorism is whether special rules should apply to classified research studies undertaken by governments. Some would argue that there is no justification for classified human experiments, others that information must be denied to an adversary, such as which strains of a certain biological agent can and cannot be defeated by available therapy. In any event, if classified human experiments are to be undertaken as part of the war on terror, as was the case during the cold war, then ethical principles of respect for persons and beneficence appear to require both prior review by a research ethics board and informed consent on the part of potential subjects. In turn, all involved parties will require the appropriate level of security clearance so that they can receive relevant information. More difficult to implement under classified conditions will be an appeals procedure in which complaints about secret research can be reviewed.

Observational studies are another sort of human experiment that may follow a catastrophic event. These projects may be undertaken by life scientists, as in the case of the long‐term study of survivors of the atomic bombs at Hiroshima and Nagasaki, or behavioral scientists, such as those who interviewed persons exposed to the collapse of the World Trade Center. Protection of potential human subjects is especially difficult because there is no confidentiality for those who have been affected by the event. They are easily identified, perhaps even named in newspaper stories or interviewed by the broadcast media. Traumatized survivors may welcome the opportunity to talk to authority figures like physicians and psychologists, but may not in the acute period appreciate the scientific rather than therapeutic purpose of the study (Fleischman and Wood 2003) .

Besides the standard requirements of prior review by a research ethics committee and informed consent there are no well‐established special protections for the survivors of a terrorist event. It is not clear that any further conditions are warranted, but at the very least the visibility of victims suggests that they may be subject to repeated contacts by multiple teams of well‐meaning investigators, a problem that is largely unique to this population of potential subjects.

Public Health and Civil Liberties

In the fall of 2001 the deliberate contamination of letters with anthrax and their subsequent distribution through the US mail system resulted in five deaths, thousands of exposures, and hundreds of persons treated. As no one could know the extent of the threat while it unfolded, the ensuing public health crisis called attention to what many regarded as weaknesses not only in bioterrorism preparedness but also in the legal framework that empowers public health authorities to act in an emergency.

In response to a request by the federal Centers for Disease Control and a number of national organizations, a group of public health law scholars developed the Model State Emergency Health Powers Act (MSEHPA). The MSEHPA is intended to provide a comprehensive set of legal standards for the response to catastrophe while also respecting civil liberties. At the time of writing more than twenty states have adopted versions of the model act (Center for Law and the Public's Health 2003). The ink had barely dried on the MSEHPA, however, when critics charged that its provisions represented infringements on freedoms that were unjustifiable on ethical or public health grounds.

State law is the traditional repository of public health authority, but the MSEHPA authors believed that they were inadequate, obsolete, and therefore sufficiently variable from one jurisdiction to another to hamper efficient emergency response, as such events do not respect state borders. At the time, many states did not require that a strategic plan be in place for a public health emergency or ensure that channels of communication among responsible officials in neighboring states can be kept open. As well, there was significant variation in state laws concerning surveillance for early detection of pathogens so that containment and treatment plans could be triggered. Reporting systems for dangerous potential bioterrorism agents were varied or altogether absent, nor was it legally possible in some states for public health agencies to monitor data acquired from the health system, which might provide signals of unusual disease patterns (Hodge and Gostin 2003) .

These and other perceived deficiencies in the status quo were partly due to concerns about infringements on civil liberties. Adequate emergency planning and response may require such extreme actions as the seizure of property for decontamination and the imposition of medical treatment such as vaccination or quarantine. Individuals may be required to sacrifice some of their freedom for the common good. Yet the MSEHPA authors argued that such sacrifices both are justifiable and, with proper safeguards in place, present acceptable and temporary limits on individual rights.

The MSEHPA therefore authorizes the governor to declare a public health emergency that continues until the threat is eliminated or after thirty days, except when reinstated by the governor or annulled by the legislature or a court. An emergency is defined as an imminent threat caused by bioterrorism, or a fatal biological toxin, or a new or previously controlled infectious agent that presents a high probability of numerous deaths or disabilities. Thus action by a state's chief executive is authorized regardless of whether the public health emergency is the result of intentional human action, as in terrorism, or not (Hodge and Gostin 2003) .

The model statute also requires, within twenty‐four hours, reporting by doctors of cases of disease that may be caused by infectious agents, by coroners of deaths from such diseases, by pharmacists of unusual prescription patterns, and by veterinarians of deaths of animals that may have had diseases that present potential danger to humans. Besides the cooperation with government of these various professional groups, the MSEHPA encourages data‐sharing among health agencies at all levels of government, with restricted access to medical records of quarantined persons in order to protect their privacy.

Under the Act property may be seized as needed to respond to a threat once the emergency has been declared. Assets needed to eliminate infectious waste, dispose of human remains safely, or otherwise to control the situation may be procured, with just compensation to any property owners who are deprived of their use. Measures may be taken to prevent or halt exploitive commercial practices like price gouging, for scarce public health services to be rationed, and for health care providers to be pressed into service.

During the emergency persons may be asked to submit to physical examinations and vaccinations, with the alternative their quarantine or isolation. These latter measures are thought to be rarely required and then are to be governed by a ‘least restrictive’ standard, consistent with the public health goal. Except for extreme cases, health officials must obtain a court order under the MSEHPA for the imposition of physical restrictions on individuals. If individuals are restricted without such an order, they are entitled to receive information and be represented by legal counsel if they wish to challenge the order or any of the conditions of isolation (Hodge and Gostin 2003) .

The model statute's critics found it based on a post‐11 September hysteria that neither improved existing public health protections nor squared with traditional civil liberties. It granted public health professionals the power to order citizens to undergo medical examinations and interventions and to force physicians and hospitals to do their bidding, all under the threat of prosecution. Such provisions, it was argued, are contrary to both constitutional law and medical ethics (Annas 2003 a ). They are also are said to be far too broad, applying not only to a smallpox outbut also to many kinds of non‐emergency conditions such as the annual flu epidemic (Annas 2003 b ) .

Critics of the MSEHPA objected particularly to its provisions for the use of force in public health emergencies. Not only has large‐scale quarantine been of dubious efficacy as compared with less restrictive alternatives but it may also create difficulties with public compliance. Public trust, it is argued, is the most important factor in effective public health interventions and should not be jeopardized by overreaction. Indeed, the fall 2001 anthrax attacks resulted in demands for screening and treatment by those potentially exposed, though many believed that trust in the offered anthrax vaccine was compromised by the refusal of the Department of Health and Human Services to make a recommendation on vaccination, or on which groups should be vaccinated (Annas 2003 b ) .

Besides objections to the model statute's details, a more general issue is the investment of public health resources in bioterrorism preparedness rather than those more familiar sources of morbidity and mortality—current infectious diseases, chemical accidents, food‐borne illness, drug and alcohol abuse—for which prevention or treatment is available but under‐utilized. The rationality of this critique runs afoul of the powerful symbolism of national security as somehow transformative of what might otherwise be a straightforward allocation question.

Triage in a Bioterror Attack

The Napoleonic armies were the first to practice a system of sorting casualties of war in order to maximize the good for the greatest number of injured combatants. This utilitarian approach is also thought to satisfy the formal requirement of justice: equity or the treatment of similar cases similarly. Equitable treatment will vary in its detail depending on the situation, but in any case should be guided by the greater likelihood that some individuals will benefit from treatment more than others, both in quality and duration, and in the urgency of treatment.

There are at least two senses of utility operative in triage for military and civilian disasters: the medical utility already described, and social utility. The latter refers to the value for the entire fighting force of returning wounded soldiers to duty. But it may also apply to a larger sense of common good that could justify an expanded form of triage in which egalitarian principles are modified to take into account the exceptional value of certain individuals to society, such as political leaders or those with rare technical expertise. A difficulty with a broad version of social utility is that it provides little guidance for specific judgments in the event of a terrorist attack or similar catastrophic event. A narrower version that provides more guidance is combined with medical utility, namely the multiplier effect of salvaging medical personnel so that they can in turn provide medical care to others (Childress 2003) .

Although triage may justifiably compromise human equality, egalitarian ap‐proaches could be applied within sorted groups. Once those who offer exceptional services to society are identified, a weighted lottery could be employed so that they are exposed to some risk, albeit less than others. In this way the principle of equal human worth is honored while social utility is recognized.

Any triage arrangements that are part of planning for a terrorist attack should be publicly justifiable. Public confidence is a necessary condition for the social cooperation that will be critical in such an event, and in any case the nature of health care activities is such that they will be open to the scrutiny of many individuals. Individual physicians and other health care professionals should not be the only ones to bear the burden of developing triage criteria; the institutions of which they are a part, professional organizations, and government acting through appropriate agencies should all be partners in planning for allocating scarce resources. These entities must share in the accountability that should accompany decisions that will result in the death or suffering of some rather than others. Depending on the nature of the threat and the available resources, care may have to be provided in homes and civic institutions such as schools and houses of worship. To help ensure the trust and cooperation needed to execute plans that may bring the sick and dying into the heart of the community, some form of public participation should also be integrated into the planning process.

Community acceptability of triage arrangements will, as indicated, be especially important if an incident is of such magnitude that the infrastructure of health care institutions themselves are compromised by the scale of the attack and the subsequent number of injured, or by the infliction of massive casualties upon health care workers themselves, or by the nature of the attack that causes some patients to be a danger to many others. In catastrophic cases, illustrated by the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945 or widespread biological exposures that create a severe risk of further contamination if the victims are collected near those not exposed, medical care will have to be provided outside hospitals. Planning for this sort of emergency must be far‐sighted as it entails decentralizing health resources in various community settings rather than in hospitals. These arrangements, too, involve allocation decisions that entail public participation and accountability (Kipnis 2003) .

Responsibilities of Emergency Health Care Professionals

Emergency health workers implicitly accept a higher level of risk than other persons, and even other health care workers, in the course of their professional activities. Not only in terms of their commitment but also as a result of their training, they are better prepared than most to confront danger, as well as to know how to act in ways that may allow life and limb to be salvaged. But what sorts of responsibilities and risks must these individuals assume? And even the most skilled emergency worker cannot be effective without the cooperation of others. What sort of infrastructure should be in place to support the extraordinary efforts of a few?

Those who assume the responsibilities of emergency medical personnel are often supposed to be prepared to provide their services in an egalitarian fashion to all in need. Yet universal beneficence is never plausible as some distinctions must always be drawn. One basis for distinguishing between levels of obligation that is so common it is rarely questioned is that of geographic distance: it is generally thought to be acceptable to minister first to those nearby rather than those suffering far away. But virtually all of those who present themselves for emergency care are moral strangers. Yet there can be grievous social consequences to the failure to confront a distant crisis with the same degree of moral seriousness that one would a local one, even though practicalities may justify tragic choices.

After the determination of the commitment emergency workers must assess the nature of the threat following the initial incident. Security agencies in particular are in a position to support or hinder the free flow of information necessary to threat assessment. Their decision making must take into account not only the public health implications of withholding sensitive information but also the social implications if, for example, the incident has especially affected members of minority groups who may already harbor skepticism about government and health care institutions based on historic experience. Thus the broader implications of decisions by national security agencies can compromise not only threat assessment but also the public cooperation that makes emergency intervention more effective (Eckenwiler 2003) .

Following threat assessment, the emergency response should follow from the advance planning, perhaps involving triage. As discussed above, in this phase the most effective response will be that which has included the broadest possible public participation, transparency, and accountability, relieving health care workers of any unfair burden of determining allocation criteria on their own.

When interventions are to be provided, health care personnel will often need to make rapid decisions on behalf of patients who are unable to consent to treatment. In these cases medical best interests can form a legitimate basis for intervening. If the injuries are such that there is no validated medical therapy, then emergency workers may find themselves in a state of equipoise, in which an innovative, albeit theoretically plausible, approach may be no less promising than the standard care. If such approaches are anticipated in the event of an emergency, they should arguably be presented to the public as part of the planning process, similar to the ‘community consultation’ requirement in advance of clinical trials in the emergency department (Eckenwiler 2003) . Finally, health care workers may also be obligated to impose medical treatment or isolation on individuals who pose a threat to the public. Once again, appropriate legal and institutional structures should be in place so that emergency workers do not shoulder an unfair burden of responsibility for potentially controversial decisions.

We have seen that considerations of national security assume unique relevance in communicating information that has public health consequences when the source of the threat is thought to be a terrorist attack. Problems of information management arise not only in threat assessment at the outset, but also in the maintenance of conventions of privacy and confidentiality. Justifiable expectations about the privacy of health information records both honor respect for persons and also give individuals the confidence that presenting themselves for medical care will not expose them to stigmatization or other social risks. These expectations may be overridden when the implications of personal health information are relevant to actions that can preserve public health, as in the case of highly infectious disease. Arguably, considerations of national security may also justify the release of personal health information as needed, to help identify the source of an outbreak, for example. Conversely, national security authorities may determine that the health status of certain groups that would normally be available to health officials should be specially safeguarded, at least for some time (Eckenwiler 2003) . Again, emergency health care personnel should not be solely responsible for interpreting the circumstances under which the release of information is desirable or not, nor should the rules under which these decisions are made be imposed upon the public without prior consultation.

Emergency physicians are accustomed to finding themselves implicitly in the position of agents of law enforcement, as when they care for individuals whose injuries may have been incurred in the course of a crime. Systematic ties to national security agencies in preparation for a terrorist attack may be viewed by some as likely to compromise the ideals of independence of medical practice and transparency of public health practice. Similarly, concentration on bioterrorism preparedness can take time away from other and arguably more pressing health initiatives in response to current rather than potential threats to public health. Particularly when contemplating extreme conditions, emergency health care personnel face unique conflicts of professional responsibility that should not be theirs to bear alone (Eckenwiler 2003) .

An example of the way these conflicts can emerge is the decontamination of an individual who has been exposed to a dangerous chemical agent. Unlike bacterial or viral exposures, which generally require a longer‐term response, there is a brief window of treatment for victims of a chemical attack. That window requires them to disrobe and be flushed with water. In the acute period victims may not feel terribly ill and may resist public nudity. Personal decontamination kits or even large trash bags can be slipped over the outer garments so that the individual can disrobe; in some cases underwear can be kept on. These measures require a degree of expertise and planning to avoid overt conflicts between patient autonomy and the emergency worker's beneficence‐based duties in a crisis (Trotter 2004) .

Organization Ethics

Organizations engaged in the delivery of services or production of goods for health care purposes incur special moral obligations. These moral obligations are sharpened in the event of a dire emergency. Yet non‐governmental entities, whether technically ‘for profit’ or not, have a more tenuous relationship to the public good than government agencies. What is the relationship between their social obligations and their legitimate business interests? Under extreme conditions such as those that may be associated with a bioterror attack, privately held resources like pharmaceuticals or the time and skills of physicians that are normally strictly controlled by corporate interests could be needed for the public good (Mills and Werhane 2003) .

A standard approach to the obligations of business entities is stakeholder theory, which states that corporate moral obligations are determined by the direct interests of shareholders. Yet a strict construal of stakeholder theory sanctions highly profitable products like child pornography that exploit the vulnerable and corrupt social life. Surely the narrow construction is unacceptable. Further, in the case of health care‐related services and products, and especially in emergent circumstances, the stakeholders must be construed more broadly as including health care consumers. This broadened view of corporate stakeholders is incompatible with the notion that profit is the sole end of a business, but compatible with the view that profit is, and under ordinary conditions must be, an appropriate goal of business activity.

When extraordinary conditions prevail, then, private interests may be required to serve pressing social needs. Drug manufacturers, for example, should plan for special pricing strategies in the event of a widespread public health threat, a prudent step in any case as they risk losing control over a product if government chooses to assert its prerogatives for the greater good and withdraw patent protection. Similarly, although proprietary interests concerning sensitive product information should be protected, secrecy practices may extend beyond necessity and impinge on the public's need to know. Industry‐wide secrecy standards could eliminate concerns about competitive advantage while preserving the free flow of socially valuable information (DeRenzo 2003) .

Corporations engaged in the production and distribution of substances that could be turned to terrorist advantage also have an obligation to put adequate security measures in place and to provide educational programs for their employees. Cooperation with local, regional, and, depending on the nature of the business, even national authorities may be required, especially if the company's facilities could be directly exploited and toxic substances released (DeRenzo 2003) .

Genetics and Bioterrorism

Finally, new scientific developments can become objects of interest for technically sophisticated groups bent on terror. In the late 1990s several government advisory groups warned that the conclusion of the human genome project and subsequent advances in genetics created risks for the United States concerning genetically modified bioterror organisms. In its extreme form, attempts might even be made to engineer bioweapons that target specific racial groups, though the scientific feasibility of such weapons is in grave doubt considering the genetic diversity within racial groups. More plausible are efforts to modify viruses so that they will elude currently available vaccines, or perhaps agents that could act on agriculture (Meslin 2003) .

Fortunately, these worries are highly speculative. More immediate are the consequences of scientific security concerns for academic freedom and, in the long run, improved prevention and treatment of the ills that accompany bioterrorism. These improvements are most likely to occur rapidly in an atmosphere in which scientific cooperation flourishes, and the free flow of information is critical to that process. To help ensure that scientific progress for the public good is not stifled, the self‐regulation of scientists with guidance from government seems preferable to heavy‐handed restrictions on scientific exchange that, paradoxically, exacerbate the threat by preventing many groups of scientists from attempting to develop novel approaches.

In the era of bioterrorism a scientific event that would normally be a cause of unalloyed celebration, the publication on the World Wide Web of the ‘map’ of the human genome, raises concerns about the openness of science and the role of government in both utilizing and constraining scientific activity (Meslin 2003) . This problem illustrates how far bioethics has traveled from its original concerns with the rights of patients and research subjects, the allocation of life‐saving technology, and the implications of genetics for the future of humanity. Yet the bioethical issues stimulated by bioterrorism also revive each of these topics in a new light while they create new ones, challenging the creativity and resourcefulness of those interested in the life sciences and human values.

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Published: 22 October 2001

Genomics and future biological weapons: the need for preventive action by the biomedical community

Claire M. Fraser 1 &
Malcolm R. Dando 2

Nature Genetics volume 29 , pages 253–256 ( 2001 ) Cite this article

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There is an increasing concern within both the scientific and security communities that the ongoing revolution in biology has great potential to be misused in offensive biological weapons programs. In light of the 11 September tragedy, we can no longer afford to be complacent about the possibility of biological terrorism. Here we review the major relevant trends in genomics research and development, and discuss how these capabilities might be misused in the design of new bioweapons. We also discuss how the breakthroughs that have come from the genomics revolution may be used to enhance detection, protection and treatment so that biological warfare agents are never used.

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Future Perfect

Can a 50-year-old treaty still keep the world safe from the changing threat of bioweapons?

How geopolitics and technological advances are making this a riskier world for bioweapons.

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GENEVA — Venomous Agent X is a deadly nerve agent , though you likely know it by another name: VX. It’s an amber, oil-like liquid that targets the body’s nervous system. A single drop on the skin can kill within minutes. In 2017, North Korea is believed to have used VX to assassinate Kim Jong Un’s estranged half-brother in a Malaysian airport. Kim Jong Nam suffered severe paralysis , dead in about 20 minutes from a weapon of mass destruction.

Sean Ekins and his team thought of the toxin for a possible experiment, one he needed to meet a last-minute deadline for a presentation at the Spiez Laboratory in Switzerland, at a conference examining how developments in science and technology might affect chemical and biological weapons regimes. Ekins is a scientist and CEO of Collaborations Pharmaceuticals, a lab that uses machine-learning platforms to seek therapeutic treatments for rare and neglected diseases. He and his colleague Fabio Urbina wanted to see if they could flip their AI software, MegaSyn. Instead of steering the software away from toxicity, they wanted to see if they could guide the model toward it.

The scientists trained the software with some 2 million molecules from a public database , and then modeled for specific, toxic traits.

In just six hours , the AI generated some 40,000 molecules that met the scientists’ criteria, meaning that, based on their molecular structure, they all looked quite a lot like toxic chemical agents. The AI designed VX. It designed other known toxic agents. It even designed entirely new molecules that the scientists hadn’t programmed for, creating a sketch for potentially lethal and novel chemical compounds.

The experiment was computational — a digital recipe for molecules like VX, not a physical creation of it or any other substance. But Ekins and his team used open source, publicly available data. The AI they used was also largely open source as well; they just tweaked the models a little bit.

Ekins was horrified. What he and his colleague had thought was a banal experiment ended up creating a cookbook for chemical agents. “If we could do this,” Ekins said, “what’s to stop anyone else doing it?”

VX, after all, is a banned substance under the Chemical Weapons Convention. A lab can’t just produce or go out and order up VX; countries face inspections to make sure they don’t have the stuff, or something like it, hanging around. VX doesn’t exist in nature, and it has no dual uses; that is, it has no therapeutic value or positive benefit. The only reason to have VX is to kill.

That isn’t the case for many things found in nature, like a virus or, well, your own DNA. Which is why this experiment got so much attention, not just among chemical warfare experts but among those who worry, specifically, about biological weapons. It showed just how simple it might be to apply it to the things that exist all around us, that can’t be tightly controlled, and that very likely have dual uses. Machine learning could be used to find ways to tweak a virus to make it less virulent, or more treatable. Or it could be used to make that virus more difficult to detect, or more deadly. And, if you or a nation-state are so inclined, wield it as a biological weapon.

Biological weapons, of course, are outlawed, too. The Biological Weapons Convention (BWC) prohibits the production, use, development, stockpiling, or transfer of biological toxins or disease-causing organisms against humans, animals, or plants. More than 180 countries are party to the pact, which came into force in 1975 as the first multilateral treaty to ban an entire class of weapon. And in the years since, the taboo against state use of biological weapons has largely held.

Yet a volatile geopolitical environment, combined with the rapid advance and increased access in the ability to edit and engineer pathogens, is straining and testing the nearly 50-year-old BWC as never before.

“It’s like a race between the technology being developed really quickly and the biosecurity community racing to put the safeguards around it,” said Jaime Yassif, vice president of global biological policy and programs at the Nuclear Threat Initiative.

No treaty is perfect, but from the BWC’s beginnings, critics have said it lacked vital elements, like a verification mechanism to make sure everyone is following it. Global tensions, scientific advances, and the ever-expanding repertoire of what is possible with both biology and chemistry are making those flaws and cracks ever more visible.

Late last year, at the Ninth Review Conference for the Biological Weapons Convention at United Nations Headquarters in Geneva, Switzerland, countries broadly agreed that they needed to find ways to strengthen the pact, to make it fit for purpose in a more chaotic, unpredictable world.

As is often the case in arms control, agreement is one thing, action another. The same forces buffeting the treaty are also making it nearly impossible to update it for a different age, or even agree on what it means now. The longer the BWC stands still, the faster barriers against a deliberate biological attack begin to fall away. That makes the world more vulnerable than ever to a threat the international community tried to eradicate 50 years ago.

Illness, weaponized

Biological weapons are the “poor man’s atom bomb,” said Yong-Bee Lim, the deputy director of the Converging Risks Lab and Biosecurity Projects Manager at the Council on Strategic Risks. They are weapons that can often be built on the cheap, using materials found in nature. Even before the world understood what caused disease, countries used things against their enemies they knew carried contagion: catapulting plague-infested corpses over fortified walls , or giving or selling clothes or blankets from smallpox patients.

But biological weapons were always held in a separate category in warfare. They are inherently risky: Contagions are hard to control and contain, and the same pathogens that can infect your target can also sicken you and your population. This is also why they tend to be used as a stealth agent of war; humanity has a general repugnance toward disease and poison that doesn’t extend to other armaments. “It has always been seen as an ungentlemanly weapon,” said Filippa Lentzos, a biosecurity expert and associate professor at King’s College London. “It’s never an element of your arsenal that you are proud to display. It’s always an underhand thing.”

A sign reading United States Army Fort Detrick Veterans Gate.

Those factors helped bolster a taboo against biological weapons, which the international community first tried to prohibit with the 1925 Geneva Protocol against chemical and biological methods of warfare. That pact didn’t stop many countries from building biological weapons programs through World War II, with germs used most notoriously by Japan in China . Well into the Cold War, the United States had a program of its own housed outside Washington, DC, at Fort Detrick , along with a chemical and biological weapons testing base in Utah.

The US wasn’t alone. The Soviet Union also had an offensive biological weapons project, as the two superpowers raced to match each other in armaments. But in the late 1960s, some high-profile mishaps linked to the US chemical and biological weapons programs — including a toxic cloud from a test of VX that killed or injured 6,000 sheep — along with public anger over the use of herbicides like Agent Orange during the Vietnam War, prompted Congress to pressure the Nixon administration to review the biological and chemical weapons programs. “Biological weapons have massive, unpredictable and potentially uncontrollable consequences,” President Richard Nixon said in 1969 after the release of the review, which essentially concluded that these kinds of offensive programs weren’t worth the risks.

The US would ultimately renounce the use of biological warfare, instead focusing its research on defense and safety measures. The American decision, which came after other allies turned away from their biological weapons programs , seeded the conditions for the creation of the BWC.

States have not engaged in known biological weapons attacks since — which is not the same thing as saying the treaty hasn’t been violated. The Soviet Union continued to build a big and sophisticated biological weapons program in the decades after it signed the BWC. That became clear after the fall of the USSR in 1991 . Other signatories have been suspected of maintaining offensive weapons programs at different points post-1975, including South Africa and Iraq . Today, US intelligence assesses that Russia and North Korea maintain active offensive programs, both in violation of the BWC.

The good and the bad of the BWC

The BWC calls the deliberate use of biological weapons “repugnant to the conscience of mankind.” The document itself is short , just 15 articles, with the first explicitly banning the development, production, stockpile, and transfer of microbial or biological agents or toxins, “whatever their origin or method of production.”

It is broad and not particularly specific, but given the dual-purpose and rapidly changing nature of biological research, that is also its strength: “It does make the convention quite future-proof,” said Daniel Feakes, chief of the BWC Implementation Support Unit (ISU), the main body overseeing the convention.

The BWC is designed to be adaptable, but that also comes with a problem: It makes it difficult to ensure everyone who says they are following the BWC really is. Or, in arms control treaty-speak: It has no legally binding verification regime.

The Chemical Weapons Convention is arguably narrower, banning specific agents. It also has an enforcement body that carries out inspections. Nuclear treaties between the US and Russia, though they’re almost all but officially dead , included robust data-sharing and inspection. “Verification is a pretty standard element of most disarmament conventions, and that’s why people keep on coming back to the issue in the BWC,” Feakes said.

The BWC has none of that. Some of it has to do with the unique nature of biological weapons, which are distinct from things like chemical agents or nukes. But that has left the BWC with a huge gap since its inception.

From left to right, Nikolai Lunkov, the Russian ambassador, David Ennals, the British Minister for Foreign and Commonwealth Affairs, and Ronald I. Spiers, Minister at the American Embassy, sign the certificates of deposit for the Biological Weapons Convention at Lancaster House in London, 26th March 1975.

“The holy grail that we’ve struggled with with the Biological Weapons Convention is how do you verify that the countries that have signed up to the treaty are not making biological weapons?” said Kenneth Ward, US special representative to the Biological Weapons Convention.

The closest thing that BWC has to a verification are Confidence Building Measures (CBMs), essentially a book report on a country’s bio activities. Not every country participates, or makes the documents public, and there is no way to fact-check what any country says.

And even if there were, the BWC is currently ill-equipped for such a task. The annual budget for the BWC is currently about $1.8 million , which in the past has come out to less than most McDonald’s franchise restaurants, according to one estimate in a 2020 book . About two-thirds of countries pay less than $1,000 into the BWC, including about 50 that pay around $100 . That is considerably less than the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW), which has an estimated 2023 budget of more than $80 million to implement the Chemical Weapons Convention.

The Implementation Support Unit (ISU) that oversees the BWC just had its staff grow by a quarter — from three to four people. Compare that, again, to the OPCW, which has about 500 staff members . According to Feakes, what resources the ISU has mostly end up going toward the organizing and managing big meetings, like the Ninth Annual Review Conference. Even then, it’s barely enough: By the Friday morning session of the first week of the Review Conference in Geneva last year, the UN Web TV broadcast of the BWC negotiations had to be cut off because of cost concerns . If you can’t keep the live feed running, good luck preventing the potential proliferation of biological weapons.

That means the actual implementation of the BWC looks something akin to matchmaking, where a state may ask for technical or assistance or training, and the ISU seeks out another country or partner that might have the ability to actually do it, because the ISU definitely doesn’t.

But trying to fit BWC into the mold of other disarmament treaties is a lot trickier than you might think, largely because of the dual-use nature of biology. A nuclear warhead or VX gas has one purpose: warfare. But something like anthrax can and has been used as a biological weapon, and a legitimate lab may need to have anthrax on hand to make a vaccine. The same equipment you might use to try to find a cure to a virus or disease is much the same equipment you’d need to replicate or manipulate a virus for a biological attack. Germs are self-replicating which means countries don’t have to keep huge stockpiles of dangerous viruses.

Life science itself is far more decentralized than nuclear research, for example. Labs are spread out, and with materials fairly accessible. You can buy DNA online , and with technologies like benchtop DNA synthesis , you can print DNA in your lab with a tool that’s about the size of a microwave. There are far more people with expertise in the biological sciences, from geneticists to lab techs, around the world than there are nuclear scientists. A terror group getting ahold of weapons of mass destruction is always a risk, but the diffusion of biology means it’s probably easier to weaponize a virus — and certainly harder to detect — than it is to make a nuke. And, of course, the BWC only deals with nation-states anyway.

“You don’t want to create false confidence in a verification regime,” Ward, of the US State Department, said. “You have to be clear: What can we verify? What can we not verify? And we’re never going to be able to verify on a daily basis, is every biological facility in the world doing good things instead of bad things? It’s impossible to know.”

It’s also not like anyone hasn’t tried, either. Across decades, countries have attempted to figure out some way to create a verification mechanism. Perhaps the closest the BWC came was in 2001, but US opposition effectively sidelined efforts to create a more formal and transparent mechanism for verification for 20 years.

A lot has happened in those 20 years, including dramatic advances in life sciences — the mapping of the human genome, CRISPR gene-editing technology, mRNA vaccines, and more — which means the nature of biological threats is changing, too. Some verification is better than nothing, and almost certainly better than an absolute free-for-all — as the pandemic itself showed.

What is a bioweapon today — and tomorrow?

In a city, in one corner of the world, people start showing up to the hospital. They have some sort of respiratory illness, but it’s not clear what. The cases range in their severity: It is often fatal in older or immunocompromised people; for others, a mild to severe illness. Others still are asymptomatic, a virus in their bodies, spreading without any outward sign.

A person wearing a hazmat suit and a protective mask and goggles.

From there, the virus spreads, and spreads, and spreads. It shuts down economies, upends politics. Millions die; millions more get sick . A vaccine is developed quickly, so are treatments, but none are a perfect shield, especially as the virus, now out in the world, changes.

This is not a bioweapon but the Covid-19 pandemic. (Which, it’s worth emphasizing, is not a bioweapon , even if debates on its origins continue.) But what Covid-19 did do was show just how disruptive an entirely unintentional biological event can be. A deliberate one, or even the accidental release of a virus from a legitimate lab, could be far worse. (A 2018 pandemic tabletop exercise by the Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security modeled for a release of an engineered bioweapon and ended with 150 million people dead .) It’s still not easy to create such a deadly bioweapon, “but barriers are coming down, and risks are increasing,” Lentzos said.

Barriers are coming down because of the expansion and advancement in the life sciences. There is gene editing, which has been made easier and more powerful with tools like CRISPR . A bad actor could use it to make a virus more transmissible, or more fatal, or more resistant to treatment. There is synthetic biology, which enables scientists to manipulate or even design entirely new organisms — maybe tailor-made to infect livestock, or a country’s wheat supply, or even a specific person . Then there are the computational tools, like the artificial intelligence used by Ekins where huge databases and the power of computing let scientists rapidly sift through potential pathogens much faster , or find new combinations of molecules to create entirely novel viruses.

Scientists also better understand how the body works; what regulates our hormones, immune systems, and neurotransmitters. Many experts I spoke to talked about bioregulators — systems that regulate our normal bodily functions — as a possible tool of manipulation. This knowledge has plenty of benign applications, and potentially revolutionary ones, but could also be applied for military or political manipulation : speeding up someone’s heart rate, or causing organ failure, or even altering moods, so all of a sudden an even-keeled president is an erratic one.

There isn’t really a question as to whether such an attack would fit under the BWC. Even though we were decades away from decoding the human genome when the convention was signed, its Article 1 prohibition against any deliberate use of biological material or a toxin fits under the definition.

But the larger question is whether the spread and development of these technologies incentivizes their malign use. That depends a lot on the political environment — on why a country would take the risk of breaking international law and norms. In a world where other disarmament treaties are falling away, great power competition is rising, and hybrid threats from cyber to information warfare offer the plausible deniability some governments seek, countries may start to see it as a risk worth taking.

Russia’s war in Ukraine is an example of how these dynamics are playing out. Moscow has very deliberately spread misinformation — amplified by everyone from the Chinese government to right-wingers in the US — alleging that the US has been funding bioweapons labs in Ukraine, including claiming that Washington and Kyiv have collaborated on an infection that is targeting certain groups, delivered by bats and birds. The claims have been disproven, and rejected by the United Nations Security Council , but some experts and officials fear it could serve as the basis for a false flag attack.

Biological attacks can also be difficult to verify because pathogens are naturally occurring, and even if scientists detect a new one, it’s difficult — if not impossible — to know if it’s something that has been deliberately created or something that emerged accidentally from nature or a lab. And given what Covid-19 demonstrated about the cracks in our defense against biological threats — and how little has been done to fix them over the past few years — a future bioweapon might “prey upon those existing vulnerabilities that haven’t been addressed,” said Saskia Popescu, a biodefense expert at George Mason University.

Decentralization further complicates matters, especially as the bioeconomy and biomanufacturing expands. The BWC is focused on nation-states, but this diffusion and access — again, you can buy DNA online and have it shipped to your lab — opens up opportunities for bad actors. “It’s easier for more and more people with less and less skills coming in the door to either make a pathogen from scratch or tinker with it to make it more dangerous,” said Yassif. “And that’s not contained within a few high-level labs, in a world-class lab with lots of resources. It’s increasingly democratized and distributed.”

Together, this creates a dangerous dynamic: The international bioweapons regime is basically standing still, as technology and geopolitics race ahead of it.

Can the BWC keep up?

All of this tumult spilled over at the Palais des Nations, United Nations headquarters in Geneva, this past December. There, states-parties to the Biological Weapons Convention gathered for the Ninth Annual Review Conference, or “RevCon,” as it’s known. These happen every five years, although the Covid-19 pandemic had delayed the scheduled meeting. It would ultimately complicate this one as well, as diplomats and delegates started testing positive. By week’s end, the officials presiding over the conference did so in KN95 masks — an outcome that felt a little too on-the-nose for a conference designed to shore up protections against biological threats.

Nurses in protective gear tend to a patient in a hospital bed, surrounded by medical equipment.

In the Palais des Nations, a strange combination existed of low expectations and high hopes. The low expectations were mainly a hangover from the ghosts of BWC RevCon past, where states struggled to reach consensus. The war in Ukraine had also increased tensions, with Russia, in particular, playing spoiler because no one would give credence to their Ukraine bioweapons claims.

Yet many officials and experts hoped the disruptive power of Covid-19 would focus minds, providing a reminder of the threat of any kind of biological risks. New initiatives buzzed about, including ethical guidelines for scientists working in technologies that could be manipulated or misused. The Tianjin Biosecurity Guidelines for Codes of Conduct for Scientists included 10 principles for those practicing in the life sciences, an effort to raise awareness and accountability to mitigate biorisks. China, in particular, had championed these guidelines , which lots of other countries supported, too, including the United States. There were also discussions about creating a scientific or technical body, one that could review and advise on the latest biological and life science developments.

And, at long last, the United States cracked open the door to verification discussions. Ward said it was partly an acknowledgment from the Biden administration of the disruptive nature of Covid-19, but it was also an effort to move past two decades of ill will.

But that is always a tough task within international forums. The reality within the Palais was both slightly more boring and slightly more complicated. Politics played a big role in this. Russia, and some other familiar faces, including Iran used the forum to air their particular grievances — Moscow on Ukraine, Tehran on sanctions. The BWC is built on consensus — all the states-parties have to agree — so just one country can spoil the mood, and the progress.

Most of the intense discussions happened behind closed doors; out in the brightly lit conference room, the delegations discussed, line by line, exactly what should be in the RevCon text, in the most passive-aggressive public edit of all time. Countries went back and forth on word selection, striking this or seeking to add that — respectively, of course — until slowly all the add-ons and enhancements to the BWC fell away.

But, in the end, there was some progress, or as the line went: “ modest success .” The hopes for adopting those ethical guidelines for scientists or even bare-bones verification measures failed. But the states-parties at the BWC agreed to establish a working group — meeting for about two weeks or so — to examine a long list of priorities, like advances in science and technology, and a possible road map for bioweapons verification.

“Issues like verification, it’s now formally in the agenda or the work plan of the intersessional program, the first time in two decades,” said Izumi Nakamitsu, the United Nations high representative for disarmament affairs.

This is what counts for progress in the world of bioweapons governance: no substantive changes yet, but at least everyone is talking. The group will meet this August for the first time, after setting its agenda last month, with the goal of transforming the BWC by the time of the next RevCon about five years from now. Which is better than nothing when it comes to weapons of mass destruction.

In the meantime, the threats to the BWC are accelerating. The world is a more dangerous and tense place. Disinformation around bioweapons is also eroding the taboo against the use. This includes Russia’s playbook of continued accusations about bioweapons in Ukraine and elsewhere. But a top Republican recently claimed, with zero evidence, that the Chinese spy balloon shot down over the Atlantic Ocean in February was equipped with bioweapons .

And maybe it doesn’t sound so crazy, as science speeds ahead. ChatGPT has amplified concerns around artificial intelligence and what it is capable of. Ekins’s software designed VX and thousands of other molecules in six hours, after all. “We’re just a small piece of the pie,” Ekins said, of the VX experiment. “But what else is happening out there?”

This reporting was made possible by a grant from Founders Pledge .

Correction, May 1, 11:11am: This story originally misidentified the affiliation for Saskia Popescu. She is affiliated with George Mason University.

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Ethical issues in military bioscience

Published: 09 June 2023
Volume 41 , pages 1–5, ( 2023 )

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Rain Liivoja 1 &
Ned Dobos 2

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1 Introduction

Armed forces have a long and complicated relationship with bioscientific innovation. It may well be the case that military-sponsored research and development in the life sciences have yielded important benefits for the society at large, for example when it comes to public health (e.g. Dasey 1990 ). At the same time, the militaries’ penchant for secrecy and occasionally cavalier attitude towards risk (e.g. Moreno 2001 ) have made the notion of military bioscience rather eerie in the public imagination. So much so that botched military biomedical experiments have become a favoured trope of screenwriters looking for unnerving material.

Bioscientific knowledge and biotechnology have, of course, a wide range of military uses. They map onto an equally broad spectrum on ethical and legal implications. At one end are applications that are so clearly objectionable as to give rise to minimal ethical or legal debate. For example, the aversion to the use of biological warfare agents to harm the adversary has become entrenched. Interestingly, biological warfare has drawn more moral scorn than chemical warfare (e.g. Krickus 1965 ). Along with the practical difficulties of using biological warfare agents, this may have helped pave the way for the blanket ban on biological warfare in the 1972 Biological Weapons Convention (BWC), whereas the comprehensive prohibition of chemical weapons took another twenty years to achieve. Also, aside from the industrial scale violation of the BWC by the Soviet Union (and possibly Russia) (e.g. Leitenberg, Zilinskas, and Kuhn 2012 ), the prohibition of biological warfare agents has been rather well adhered to.

At the other end of the spectrum of military biotechnology and bioscience one finds some relatively uncontroversial practices, such as the use of biomaterials in military medicine. Similarly, attempting to improve the nutrition or training programs of military personnel by drawing on latest bioscientific insight does not appear to be problematic. This seems to be the case, at least, if service members are not subjected to experimental practices involuntarily or given an unfair advantage compared to the rest of the population.

In the middle of the spectrum, however, lie interventions that are not objectionable on their face but nevertheless create significant ethical conundrums. Some of these are precisely the focus of this symposium.

2 Human enhancement

Most of the following papers address, in one way or another, human enhancement in the military. Human enhancement broadly refers to biomedical interventions undertaken to make a person “better than well”, that is, to improve some aspect of their performance beyond what is regarded as “normal” (see generally Juengst and Moseley 2019 ). But matters quickly become contested: in particular, it is by no means obvious what “well” or “normal” mean. Also, the ability to distinguish in a principled manner between enhancement and treatment remains debatable (e.g. Erler 2017 ),

As Adam Henschke ( 2023 , Sect. 1) demonstrates, the matter is further complicated by enhancement and disenhancement being context-dependent notions. Thus, a particular change in a person’s cognitive or physical functioning may be unequivocally beneficial at a certain point in time or in some context but just as unequivocally detrimental at another time or in another context. Accordingly, what might amount to a desirable enhancement during military service could become an undesirable disenhancement in civilian life (ibid., Sect. 1), or otherwise complicate demobilisation and reintegration (Walsh and Van de Ven 2023 , Sect. 3).

Even though distinguishing between enhancement and therapy seems to be fraught with difficulty, the distinction does have significant practical implications for law and policy (e.g. McGee 2020 ). Adrian Walsh and Katina van de Ven (2023) suggest, however, that the ethical evaluation of enhancement depends on the context, and thus applying the enhancement-therapy distinction does not always have similar law and policy implications. In particular, they argue that the considerations that support prohibiting enhancement (“doping”) in professional sport are inapplicable to the conduct of warfare, such that the adoption by the Australian Defence Force of parts of the World Anti-Doping Code becomes difficult to defend on ethical grounds (ibid., Sects. 2–3).

3 Duty of care

Aside from problems with conceptual delimitation and overall acceptability, human enhancement in the military also raises questions about the associated duty of care. Clearly, military personnel have some rights vis-à-vis the armed forces, and/or the military has certain obligations towards the service members; some of these are relevant to enhancement (Henschke 2023 , Sect. 2; Walsh and Van de Ven 2023 , Sect. 4; see also Dobos 2023 ).

What complicates the exercise of the duty of care in this context is that it may pull in different directions. Henschke ( 2023 , Sect. 2) shows that an enhancement ( in casu , increased vigilance as a result of brain stimulation) may benefit the service member while on active duty, but amount to a debilitating anxiety disorder in civilian life. Likewise, Walsh and Van de Ven ( 2023 , Sect. 5) point out that service members who becomes accustomed to an enhancement (in their example, the use of anabolic-androgenic steroids to increase muscle mass and strength, and improve endurance) may find it difficult to reintegrate into civilian society where the use of this enhancement is illegal or frowned upon. Ned Dobos ( 2023 , Sect. 3) notes a risk related to moral injury: a pharmacological intervention that protects the service member against a debilitating sense of wrongdoing or guilt (i.e. moral trauma) may expose them to a corrosion of moral emotions and induce a sense of indifference (i.e. moral degradation).

As a consequence, a complicated balancing of the short- and long-term interests of service members must take place, all against the background of the broader military benefit arising from the use of the enhancement. Thus, even if we accept that the armed forces or the government owe a duty of care to military personnel, it is far from obvious what exactly that requires in practice when it comes to enhancements.

4 Accountability

Human enhancement may also make it more difficult to establish accountability for undesirable actions. Walsh and Van de Ven ( 2023 , Sect. 3) give the example of fighter pilots who, having ingested amphetamines as an approved fatigue countermeasure on a long mission, mistakenly fire on friendly forces. They query whether the use of such drugs might lessen the responsibility of the individuals involved, and thereby also cast doubt on the acceptability of the intervention in question from the perspective of the just war theory (ibid.). The same questions also arise under the rules and principles of international law that apply in armed conflicts (Liivoja 2022 , sec. IV(A); Harrison Dinniss and Kleffner 2016 , sec. VI(B)).

Sahar Latheef ( 2023 ) considers individual responsibility in the context of brain-to-brain interfaces (BBIs), which would allow direct communication between two or more human brains. She argues that an individual connected to a BBI ought not be held fully responsible for their actions due to the adverse impact this technology can have on their ability to act freely, coupled with a diminished sense of self-agency, and a lack of authenticity of thoughts and memories (ibid.). She notes, among other things, that the absence of language in communication erodes a sense of agency—a problem that also manifests itself in the legal context (e.g. Noll 2014 ).

5 Dual loyalties

Finally, human enhancement may increase the tension between military ethics and medical ethics, and exacerbate the problem of dual loyalties of persons who are simultaneously members of the medical profession and the profession of arms.

Michael Reade ( 2023 ) considers in detail how conflicting duties may arise out of these loyalties, and how a balance between the requirements of military and medical ethics could be maintained in practice. He explains how armed conflict accentuates the problem of dual loyalties, noting that the military medical practitioner may face a dilemma when, for example, asked to prescribe medications to enhance combat ability, in the knowledge that this might have an adverse effect on the individuals (ibid., Sect. 6). In this context, questions can also arise about the bounds of the activities that military medical personnel can carry out while retaining their special protection under international law (see Liivoja 2018 ).

6 By way of a conclusion

The papers in this special issue take distinctly different approaches to ethical issues in military bioscience. But, when read together, several common themes emerge. First, the papers highlight the ambiguities in the concept of human enhancement, and perhaps give us reason to be wary of that concept. Second, they implicitly suggest that biomedical interventions in the military cannot be evaluated based on purely civilian conceptions of bioethics or medical ethics but require an approach that factors in uniquely military considerations (cf. Mehlman and Corley 2014 ). Third, the papers identify challenges for accountability—both in terms of the way in which the service member’s individual responsibility may be eroded as a result of human enhancement, as well as the additional demands placed on the ethical compass of the military medical professional.

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Acknowledgements

We gratefully acknowledge that the workshop where the papers in this special issue were first presented and discussed was made possible by a Branco Weiss Fellowship, administered by ETH Zurich.

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Liivoja, R., Dobos, N. Ethical issues in military bioscience. Monash Bioeth. Rev. 41 , 1–5 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1007/s40592-023-00176-w

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Introduction

Sohail H. Hashmi and Steven P. Lee

The term “weapons of mass destruction” (WMD) entered popular parlance some fifty years ago. By convention, though not always without controversy, it has been understood to include not only nuclear weapons – the weapon of mass destruction par excellence – but also biological and chemical weapons. If indeed the last two types are included in the category of WMD, then ethical debates on such weapons date back much further in time, to the late nineteenth century, when chemical weapons became enough of a concern to European states that they moved to delegitimize them even before they were fully developed. 1 Yet attention to the ethics of WMD as a category of weapons distinct from others has been extremely sparse, whether it is among policy makers, the media, or scholars – that is, until recently. The September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks on the United States demonstrated quite clearly the vulnerability of even the most powerful states to large-scale death and destruction perpetrated by a group of committed insurgents. The weapons employed on that day were unconventional weapons of the crudest sort: box cutters and civilian airplanes. After the attacks, however, no one can remain complacent that future terrorism will not involve chemical, biological, or nuclear weapons. The George W. Bush administration argues that the prevention of such an event requires preemptive action, not just against nonstate actors, such as the al-Qa‘ida network, but also against alleged state sponsors of terrorism, the regime of Saddam Hussein in Iraq being the first target. The terrorists’ war on America and the American war on terrorism have propelled questions about the nature and morality of weapons of mass destruction and about the morality of different means to control their proliferation out of specialized seminars and books into the forefront of public discourse around the world.

This book began to take shape several months before WMD acquired the central place in policy debates that they now occupy. Our challenge has been to keep up with the rapid pace of international developments. Still, we are confident that the two objectives with which this book was conceived are as timely today as when we began, and that they will remain so for many years to come. First, we have sought to broaden the range of participants in the ethical debates on WMD. We begin by canvassing ethical perspectives familiar to Western readers, the traditional voices heard in discussions of military policy, namely, realism, natural law theory, liberalism, and Christianity. We then bring into the conversation voices not often heard in Western discussions, specifically, Buddhism, Confucianism, Hinduism, Islam, and Judaism. Finally, we consider the critical perspectives offered by feminism and pacifism.

Second, we have sought to update and broaden the content of the ethical discourse on WMD. The end of the cold war requires the reevaluation of many moral issues pertaining to nuclear weapons in light of the dramatic changes in the international system. The ethics of biological and chemical weapons has been largely ignored, in part due to the cold war emphasis on nuclear weapons. The ethical discussion needs to extend beyond nuclear weapons to include chemical and biological weapons.

The comparative method we have used in this volume is to bring scholars from a broad range of ethical traditions, both religious and secular, into structured conversation on a defined set of moral concerns created by WMD. The search for moral truths on as complex a subject as the development, deployment, threat to use, and actual use in war of such weapons is inherently multifaceted. One supposition of a comparative approach is that no one ethical tradition or perspective is likely to have all the pieces. Consistent with other volumes in the Ethikon Series, we have sought to realize the comparative approach by asking our authors to address a set of six specific questions, in the belief that comparison can best be achieved by having the contributors address the same set of topics. We have included a comparative essay at the end, which seeks to make the similarities and differences among the authors more explicit. In addition, we begin the volume with two essays that provide some of the background necessary for the study, an essay on the nature of WMD and an essay on the way WMD have been treated in international law.

Another justification for a comparative approach is that, historically, the traditions themselves have developed as much through interaction with other perspectives as through internal revisions. 2 Our ethical understanding of practical issues can be expanded, refined, qualified, and, in general, improved by an effort to engage the insights of ethical perspectives other than the one in which we are situated. A comparative approach allows us to identify hidden assumptions behind a particular tradition’s discourse, assumptions whose validity is questioned only when examined in light of other discourses, other ways of looking at the problem. 3 Alternatively, the process of comparison may allow us to discover an overlapping consensus on the issue in question among different perspectives.

At the same time, caution needs to be observed in applying a comparative approach. A comparative approach can be misleading because it may suggest that the traditions are more sharply drawn and more in conflict than is in fact the case. 4 When we divide human thinking into a set of traditions, we invite a clear characterization of each of them, and this may tend to ignore the fluidity of the development of human thought. There may be more overlap and blurred borders than the divisions suggest. In addition, the divisions may tend to suppress conflicts within traditions, and the conflicts within traditions may be as important for our thinking about an issue as the differences among them. We have tried to minimize these dangers by including two chapters for each tradition, one that provides a broad overview of moral reasoning on six basic questions relating to WMD and a second that focuses on alternative understandings or controversial points within the tradition.

The traditional debate on the ethics of military policy in the West, the debate with which our readers are probably most familiar, is that among proponents of the ethical perspectives of realism, natural law, liberalism, and Christianity. Realism, which would be seen by many of its proponents as well as its critics as more an antiethical than an ethical tradition, poses the traditional challenge to efforts to think about military matters in moral terms. In international relations, all there is, and perhaps all there should be, is self-interest. The other three traditions have in different ways taken up the challenge posed by realism, seeking to show that war by its nature is or should be a morally limited enterprise. Much of the thinking in these traditions has focused on just war theory, a systematic effort to set limits on when it is acceptable to go to war and what it is acceptable to do in war.

To complement the traditional debate, we have included perspectives drawn from the Buddhist, Confucian, Hindu, Islamic, and Jewish traditions. Exponents of two of these traditions, Hinduism and Islam, have been quite vocal in appealing to them to justify state policies regarding WMD. For example, during India’s and Pakistan’s flurry of nuclear testing in 1998, various Hindu militants proclaimed the end of Gandhian pacifism, while Islamic groups in Pakistan paraded cardboard missiles with the words “Islamic bomb” scrawled down their side. 5 Jewish intellectuals and organizations in the United States have been outspoken about many aspects of American nuclear policy, but as both Reuven Kimelman and Joseph David write, a societal consensus exists in Israel that its weapons of mass destruction are off-limits to public discourse. Thus, we find very limited application of Jewish ethics to Israel’s WMD arsenal. 6 Buddhists have preferred to act on a more international rather than state-specific level, commenting on broad concerns relating to WMD through various religious associations. Because of the official communist ideology of the People’s Republic of China, Confucianism has not figured prominently in whatever little public information we have of that country’s security discussions. Confucian ethics on most issues relating to international relations has been elaborated mainly by individual scholars living outside China.

None of these traditions has a record of ethical discourse on WMD as sustained or systematic as that found in the perspectives in the traditional debate. Each is a relatively recent and sometimes reluctant participant in the conversation. All of the writers on these traditions acknowledge that their challenge is as much to construct moral positions on the questions of this book as it is to describe well-articulated existing positions. Nevertheless, all would agree that each of the traditions has sufficient moral resources to respond to WMD in a manner that is not contrived or arbitrary. Donald Swearer, for example, argues for what he calls an ethics of retrieval. 7 Instead of placing the ethics of the traditions beyond history, we should, he argues, seek to find it in norms formulated in a time different from our own prescriptions that can be applied today. There is an important difference between a tradition’s lacking resources to handle a new problem and its simply having untapped resources that would do the job. In either case, the resources may appear to be lacking, as they perhaps were regarding nuclear weapons to many Christians at the onset of the cold war. But we cannot assume a lack from the appearance of a lack. It is our job, in carrying out this comparative study of the ethics of WMD, to prospect for those untapped resources, while keeping open the possibility that they may in fact be lacking.

Finally, serving as a counterpoint to the other perspectives, we include the critical standpoints of pacifism and feminism. Pacifism and feminism tend to call into question assumptions the other perspectives take for granted, including the very moral relevance of the distinction between conventional weapons and WMD.

MORAL ISSUES

Now we consider the second of the objectives mentioned above, our effort to update and expand the moral discussion of WMD.

Human beings have moralized about war and the means to conduct it for millennia. All major world civilizations have evolved traditions of moral inquiry that reflect on similar concerns: When is war a legitimate option? Who are legitimate targets? What weapons may be used to attack and possibly kill them? Ethical evaluations of WMD are naturally grounded in the answers that the traditions have provided to these questions. What the traditions have to say about the morality of war in general will be the basis – adequate or inadequate – for what the traditions imply about the ethics of WMD. Thus, the first of the six questions the authors were asked to address is: What are the general norms that govern the use of weapons in the conduct of war, and what are the sources from which the tradition derives these norms? 8

But the advent of particularly lethal forms of weaponry during the past two hundred years strains to the limit the familiar patterns of moral reflection. Are WMD, in a moral sense, so different from conventional weapons that the traditions may have little or nothing relevant to say about their acceptability? Michael Walzer suggests as much with respect to nuclear weapons: “Nuclear weapons explode the theory of just war. They are the first of mankind’s technological innovations that are simply not encompassable within the familiar moral world.” 9

And yet throughout the long years of the cold war, nuclear weapons and, to a lesser extent, chemical and biological weapons were in fact the subject of moral analysis. The cold war debates pitted the consequentialist arguments of realists and others who defended U.S. and NATO strategic doctrine against critics drawn from various ethical perspectives, including natural law deontologists and liberal social contract theorists and utilitarians influenced by just war criteria. These positions in turn were subjected to more fundamental criticism of the “war system,” first by pacifists influenced by secular as well as Christian or Jewish ethics and second, during the 1970s and 1980s, by feminists. None of these ethical perspectives offered a single view on the difficult moral issues raised by nuclear deterrence, as evinced, for example, by the disagreements among Christian proponents of outright disarmament and Christian defenders of deterrence. 10 And almost always, even those who argued for evaluating WMD according to the familiar categories of just grounds ( jus ad bellum ) and just means ( jus in bello ) did so guardedly and with appeals to the coercive power of necessity. 11

The end of the cold war shifted public discussion in the United States and Western Europe away from the morality of superpower nuclear strategy to the dilemmas of controlling WMD proliferation. Some developments during the 1990s provided hope that the nonproliferation regime might be gaining strength: Both China and France acceded to the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty in 1992, and the treaty was renewed indefinitely in 1995 following its twenty-five-year review; several important nuclear-threshold states renounced their nuclear weapon option, including Argentina, Brazil, and South Africa; the Chemical Weapons Convention entered into force in 1997 following its ratification by the requisite sixty-five states. Yet there have also been a number of developments in the opposite direction, most importantly the nuclear tests conducted by India and Pakistan in May 1998 and the subsequent testing by both countries of ballistic missiles that have progressively increased the range and reduced the time required to deliver nuclear payloads to their targets. Two other states, Iran and North Korea, are known to have active research programs that could lead to the production of nuclear weapons. In addition, at least eleven countries are believed to have ongoing research programs or existing stockpiles of both chemical and biological weapons. 12 Finally, the rise of international terrorist networks and the prospect of “loose nukes” or poorly protected radioactive, chemical, or biological agents created by the collapse of the Soviet Union raise serious concerns about WMD in the hands of nonstate actors.

All of these developments underscore the truly global nature of WMD proliferation and the need for global responses if we are to deal effectively with it. The cold war ethical discourse seems in light of today’s concerns to be too circumscribed in terms of its participants (limited largely to American and West European policy makers and ethicists) and its scope (limited largely to nuclear deterrence). This book is a step, we hope, toward broadening the parameters of the cold war debates.

All of the core issues involved in the superpower standoff during the cold war are still salient: the morality of developing nuclear weapons and the diversion of resources to “nonusable” weapons, a deterrence strategy that relies primarily on the explicit or implicit threat of nuclear war, the possibility that a conventional war might quickly escalate into a nuclear war, the threat of rogue elements in the military using nuclear weapons without proper authority, and the fear of WMD falling into the hands of nonstate actors who cannot be deterred by threats of retaliation in kind. What is different in the twenty-first century is that these concerns have moved from the superpower level to the regional level. Regional conflicts, where belligerents are not separated by thousands of miles, where there is a long history of conventional wars, and where checks on the unauthorized use of nuclear weapons are not fully developed, pose greater risks for the escalation of wars to the nuclear level. In addition, the threat posed by chemical and biological weapons needs to be given much more attention than it received during the cold war. Such weapons are far easier and cheaper to manufacture than nuclear weapons, and they may well be the WMD of first resort by states and terrorist groups. We must also consider the morality of multilateral and unilateral preemptive action to disarm or to prevent the acquisition of WMD by so-called rogue states. The first consideration here must be the criteria by which some states are permitted to maintain WMD while others are denied them.

Five of the six questions we have asked our authors to address seek to elicit their traditions’ perspectives on these and other old and new concerns raised by WMD. First, is there any circumstance under which it is morally permissible for any agent to use weapons of mass destruction in war? Second, is the development or deployment of weapons of mass destruction for the sake of deterrence a licit option? We pose here the familiar question: Is one justified in threatening to do something that one considers evil to do? Third, with respect to proliferation, if some nations possess weapons of mass destruction (either licitly or illicitly), is it proper to deny such possession to others? Fourth, is WMD disarmament a moral imperative, morally objectionable, or morally neutral? Does the answer to this question differ for universal versus unilateral, voluntary versus forcible disarmament? And finally, we asked what, if any, policy options the ethical traditions advocate given the moral positions they espouse. For example, what attitudes do the traditions’ spokespersons express on current or proposed international agreements, such as the Chemical Weapons Convention, the Biological Weapons Convention, the Nonproliferation Treaty, and the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty? If they find them objectionable, what concrete policy alternatives do they prefer?

Before we can address the moral issues raised by weapons of mass destruction, we need to consider briefly two questions having to do with relevance: the relevance of the very category “weapons of mass destruction” and the relevance of ethics to public policy on the development and use of such weapons.

When Albert Einstein and Bertrand Russell, among others, used the phrase “weapons of mass destruction” in the Pugwash Manifesto, issued on July 9, 1955, they had in mind nuclear weapons. In Chapters 1 and 2 below, Susan Martin and Paul Szasz discuss some historical and legal reasons that the label “weapons of mass destruction” came to be applied also to biological and chemical weapons, and only these three classes of weapons. 13 But, as Martin, Szasz, and others suggest, the label may not be descriptively accurate. 14 From the perspective of this book, the interesting question is whether – given the qualitative differences among them – there is a morally relevant reason to consider all three classes of weapons together and to distinguish them from “conventional” weapons.

Two questions arise: First, should all nuclear, chemical, and biological weapons be included in the category of WMD? Is the category, as conventionally understood, too broad? Second, should other kinds of weapons be included in the category as well? Is the category, as conventionally understood, too narrow? In discussing these two questions, we will find that a third arises: What counts as “mass destruction”?

On the suggestion that the conventional understanding of WMD is too broad, consider first chemical weapons. Martin points out that they are the least destructive of the three classes of WMD. 15 Their harmful effects depend on environmental factors such as atmospheric conditions, and people can protect themselves from their effects with proper clothing and breathing apparatus. Moreover, some chemical weapons may be designed only to incapacitate temporarily, thereby serving a military purpose without causing long-term destruction. 16 Some of these points may be made as well about biological weapons. Active measures may be taken to minimize the threat from biological weapons, including inoculation against the most likely threats and rapid quarantining of the affected population.

So, why put chemical and biological weapons into the category of WMD? Nuclear weapons are so manifestly more destructive that chemical and biological weapons seem out of place in the same category. A single label encompassing all three weapon types seems too broad.

One response is that some chemical and biological weapons, if used effectively and under the proper environmental circumstances, would probably kill or maim on a level close to that of a small fission bomb. Moreover, the effects of the initial strike would be felt by people who were not present or even born at the time, through transmission, genetic mutation, and environmental pollution. 17 So, even though chemical and biological weapons may not be comparable to nuclear weapons in the rate and extent of damage that they can immediately cause, they are, in some cases at least, descriptively closer to nuclear weapons in the total damage they have the potential of causing over time than they are to conventional weapons.

In addition, including nonlethal forms of biological and chemical weapons in the WMD category, despite that crucial point of dissimilarity, serves valuable pragmatic purposes and may be justified morally on those grounds. If some chemical and biological weapons can cause mass destruction, then we have good reason to develop practical policies that avoid their development and use. Such policies may be more effective if they ban all chemical or biological weapons, rather than seek to draw complicated distinctions among different types of them. As we know, in all areas of social life, a simple rule is easier to understand and enforce than a complicated one. A complicated rule may be difficult to understand, and it can generate borderline cases and encourage legalistic challenges on the part of those whose intention is to skirt the rule. There is practical value in rules that draw clear and bright lines of weapon prohibition, even when the result may be to ban some weapons that are, considered in themselves, no more objectionable than conventional weapons. Some of the authors in this volume make this point about WMD. Here then we have a pragmatic argument against the charge that the conventional category of WMD is too broad. The justification for including nonlethal forms of chemical and biological weapons in the category of WMD is that doing so facilitates simple rules and clear line drawing in our arms control and disarmament policies.

The second question is whether the traditional understanding of WMD is too narrow. Does it exclude weapons that it should include? Many conventional weapons also have the capacity to bring about mass destruction. One only needs to recall that the conventional bombings of several German and Japanese cities in World War Ⅱ caused casualties greater than those resulting from the atomic bombings of Hiroshima or Nagasaki. Carol Cohn and Sara Ruddick point out that, given their ubiquity, small arms – perhaps the most typical conventional weapon – have had devastating consequences in the fabric of society, especially on the lives of women, in many parts of the world, bringing about mass destruction of their own. 18 The perpetrators of genocide in Rwanda killed hundreds of thousands with machetes. And Duane Cady suggests that given the extensive civilian harm and deaths caused by economic sanctions, such as those imposed on Iraq in the 1990s, such sanctions could themselves be seen as a weapon that causes mass destruction. 19

Given these facts, why limit the members of the class of WMD to nuclear, chemical, and biological weapons? If the label were extended to include all weapons (and possibly even instruments not designed to be weapons) that have the potential for causing mass destruction, the distinction between WMD and conventional weapons would be largely or completely lost. As the Rwandan example sadly shows, even agricultural implements can be used to cause mass destruction. Perhaps the distinction should be lost. As the pacifist and feminist authors in this volume argue, if all weapons can cause mass destruction, there is no use in classifying some weapons as “conventional” and others as WMD.

If we grant that conventional weapons and methods of war can also cause mass destruction, is there any morally relevant way to distinguish WMD from them? One way is to focus not on how many are killed or on how they are killed, but on who are killed. This raises our third question: What counts as mass destruction? This is a question raised, explicitly or implicitly, by many of the authors in this volume. In just war theory, as well as in most non-Western traditions, who is killed is morally crucial. According to the principle of discrimination, soldiers may be killed in battle, but civilians are not to be attacked. What distinguishes WMD from conventional weapons is the special relationship WMD have to civilian deaths. In the case of nuclear weapons, the explosive effects are so great that almost anywhere they would be used they would kill many civilians, even if that were not the purpose of their use. This is reinforced by the strong probability that in any likely nuclear war, many nuclear weapons would be used. In general, then, it is close to impossible to use nuclear weapons without killing many civilians. In addition, the secondary effects of nuclear weapons, such as radiation and environmental damage, would severely affect civilians.

Consider now chemical and biological weapons. Neither kind is very effective in military terms. 20 Chemical weapons were originally used (in World War I) in a discriminate way. But they were not very effective militarily even then, and, as Martin writes, whatever effectiveness they had depended on the element of surprise. 21 Their general lack of military effectiveness results from their dependence on atmospheric conditions and the ability of the opponent to protect against them. As for biological weapons, Martin notes, the delayed onset of the effects of their use generally makes them militarily ineffective in battle. The battle may be long over before any symptoms take the soldiers out of action. In addition, like chemical weapons, their use is also dependent on various environmental factors. While chemical and biological weapons are not very effective militarily, they can do great damage to civilians. 22 This means that they are more likely to be used against civilians than against military forces, and if they were used against military forces, the greater harm is likely to be done to civilians who are relatively unprotected and unprepared to respond.

Thus, the use of nuclear, chemical, or biological weapons would almost necessarily involve many civilian deaths. Although the use of conventional weapons may involve many civilian deaths, this is not necessarily so. Conventional weapons can be used with military effectiveness in ways that discriminate between combatants and civilians. As a result, suggest some of the authors, we may say that WMD are necessarily or inherently indiscriminate, while conventional weapons are not. This is a morally relevant difference to justify the distinction between WMD and conventional weapons. In light of this, it might be better to refer to nuclear, chemical, and biological weapons not as weapons of mass destruction, but rather as weapons of indiscriminate destruction , for this better captures their moral distinctiveness.

This approach provides a fuller answer to the first question as well, in that it helps to explain why the conventional WMD category is not too broad. Nuclear weapons and most biological and chemical weapons are inherently indiscriminate, and this provides a basis for considering them together as a moral category. Inherent indiscriminateness becomes, from the perspective of moral relevance, both a necessary and a sufficient condition for regarding nuclear weapons and most biological and chemical weapons as WMD. We may add to this the pragmatic argument discussed above: Even nonlethal chemical and biological agents may be regarded as WMD because of the moral value of clear line drawing in policies of control and prohibition. Putting all these points together gives us this definition:

Weapons of mass destruction are those classes of weapons most of whose members have the characteristic of being, when used in war, inherently indiscriminate, meaning that their use, with whatever intention, would almost certainly result in the deaths of many civilians.

This definition gives us the WMD category as conventionally understood, that is, one that includes all nuclear, chemical, and biological weapons. 23 Because inherent indiscriminateness is a morally important feature, the conclusion is that the traditional category of WMD defines a group of weapons that require special moral attention.

But there is another basis on which to challenge the claim that biological and chemical weapons should be included along with nuclear weapons in the WMD category. There are morally relevant differences between nuclear weapons, on the one hand, and biological and chemical weapons, on the other, despite their shared feature of inherent indiscriminateness. Nuclear weapons have a special moral property that the other two do not have. When used for deterrence, nuclear weapons can lead to what has come to be called mutual assured destruction (MAD), and this has special moral importance. 24

Dangerous World

Understanding Existential Risks

Unit 731: Imperial Japan’s Biological and Chemical Warfare

Written by Romeo Jung.

Introduction

Unit 731 was a secret Biological and Chemical Warfare Unit that Imperial Japan had established during the World War II. Eager to win the war, the scientists involved committed a lot of inhumane crimes like vivisection to Chinese, Korean, Russian, and Mongolian prisoners of war, and used the data gained to harm many Chinese civilians. This essay details heavily on the biological research and its data from start to the end as well as their impacts and aftermath.

Unit 731 was established first in 1932 as a small group of five scientists interested in biological weapons, and was expanded around 1936 when Shiro Ishii was given full command of the unit. Given alternative names like “lumber yard” and “Epidemic Prevention and Water Purification Department of the Kwantung Army”, the name “Unit 731” was made formal in 1941. The lab was based at the Epidemic Prevention Research Laboratory in Japanese Army Military Medical School in Tokyo. Their purpose was none of the given names, but biological and chemical warfare research.

The idea of Unit 731 first circulated around by a memo written in April 23, 1936, that speaks about the establishment of reinforcement military forces in Manchuria. The memo states that there would be a new “Kwantung Army Epidemic Prevention Department” and that it shall be expanded later on.

The headquarters was set in three square kilometers of land in Pingfang district, Manchuria. Many of the lab’s buildings inside were hidden by a tall wall and high voltage wired fences. The lab had around 150 buildings, including incinerator, housing for prisoners, an animal house, and air field. The buildings were completely isolated from the outside world, with only a tunnel as the entrance.

Unit 731, along with two other units to be mentioned later, was created in opposition to the Geneva protocol of 1925 banning biological and chemical warfare. This protocol was signed at June 17, 1925 in Geneva. It became effective from February 8th, 1928, and got registered by League of Nations Treaty Series on September 7, 1929.

Within Unit 731, there were eight subunits designed to focus on different topics of warfare. The first division focused on biological weapons like bubonic plague, cholera, anthrax, typhoid, and tuberculosis, with human subjects to work with. The second division focused on effectively spreading the biological weapons covered in the first division. The third division was focused on a specific way of spreading biological agents by bomb, the fourth on bacteria mass production and storage. The fifth through eighth divisions were mostly focused on the supplying the rest of the Unit, which included training workers, providing equipment, and overall administrative units.

Outside of Unit 731, Japan established two departments: Unit 100 and Unit 516. Unit 100 was first declared as the “Kwantung Army Military Horse Epidemic Prevention Workshop,” which focused on developing biological weapons aside from Unit 731. “Kwantung Army Technical Testing Department”, later called Unit 516, was also established for more research that focused on chemical weapons.

People Involved

There were many involved with the research of Unit 731, most of them remaining anonymous to this day. Shiro Ishii was the Chief of Unit 731, with Masaji Kitano as second in command. Other scientists were most likely to be a Professor at an university or a chief of a medical research unit, like Dr. Hisato Yoshimura, who directed the frostbite experiments on subjects, and Dr. Hideo Futaki, who lead the tuberculosis research squad and some vivisections. Other personnels include Lieutenant Shunichi Suzuki, who, after the trials, went to work as the Governor of Tokyo, and Amitani Shogo, who remained at the lab afterwards and received the Asahi Prize for outstanding scientific performance.

Shiro Ishii served in the Imperial Japanese Army from 1921 to 1945, and in the meantime, he was a Japanese army medical officer, microbiologist, and the director of Unit 731. Before serving in the army, he had studied medicine at Kyoto Imperial University. He was first assigned as an army surgeon, then to the First Army Hospital and Army Medical School in Tokyo. His work soon impressed the superiors, which earned him postgraduate level medical education. Ishii was promoted to an army surgeon in 1925, and was advocating for a biological weapons research program.

After getting promoted to higher ranks, Ishii began his experiments in Zhongma Fortress for biological weapons. Then the government granted him permission to set up Unit 731 in his hopes of digging deeper into the topic. After World War II, he was arrested for a short time by the US occupation authorities for Unit 731, then received immunity from consequences in exchange for data. There are different accounts as to what he did after that, but some say that he traveled around to give talks about biological weapons and others say that he stayed in Japan to provide medical services for free.

What They Did

In Unit 731, the first division conducted many outrageous experiments which were violating human rights. They conducted many experiments that tested the limitations of the human body. The prisoners, used as subjects, were of mixed ethnicity and gender, some pregnant, and some as young as three years old. The prisoners, tied to stakes, would have to endure the biological agent bombs that carried plague infested fleas on them or rats with the diseases. Then they were subject to their body being cut open with a scalpel and examined while they were screaming for mercy on the table.

An unnamed Unit 731 surgeon, in an interview with New York Times, described his experience with the unit. His first vivisection, which he recalled that he “cut [the prisoner] open from the chest to the stomach, and he screamed terribly, and his face was all twisted in agony… …finally he stopped. This was all in a day’s work for the surgeons…” (Kristof) There was no use of anesthetics during vivisections at all because they were afraid that it would have an effect on the results and data.

In another part of his article, Kristof interviews a former medical worker in Unit 731, Takeo Wano. Wano says that he had seen “six-foot-high glass jar in which a Western man was pickled in formaldehyde. The man had been cut into two pieces, vertically.” There were many other jars in the headquarters of Unit 731 containing other body parts from different people, labeled often as their ethnicity. An anonymous Unit 731 veteran says that most of the jars had been noted as Chinese, Korean, and Mongolian, although there were occasionally American, English, and French. Some body parts were even sent in from other places.

Other experiments included prisoners being locked inside a pressure chamber to test how much pressure the body can handle before their eyes started popping out, being exposed to poisonous gas and many more biological and chemical weapons, having limbs cut off for studying blood loss, having cut off limbs attached to different parts of the body, having horse urine injected into kidneys, and having lethal dosages of x-rays. Kristof noted that “The accounts are wrenching to read even after so much time has passed: a Russian mother and daughter left in a gas chamber, for example, as doctors peered through thick glass and timed their convulsions, watching as the woman sprawled over her child in a futile effort to save her from the gas.”

Hisato Yoshimura, apart from infection based experiments, led the frostbite experiments, which focused on the effects of frostbite on human limbs. He gave orders to freeze limbs of prisoners, often until they were black. The prisoners were let in only when an officer was sure that their limbs were frozen. The officers would test limbs by beating them with a stick, as they knew that frozen limbs sound like wooden boards upon hitting.

After chilling prisoners’ limbs to near 0 degrees Celsius with ice water, Yoshimura continued to chop off parts of the limb, especially fingers, so that he may record how the frostbite was affecting human limbs. He and his team experimented on subjects as young as three years old, with a needle in their finger to keep it from clenching into a fist.

Effects During War

The Japanese Military used the biological weapons developed by Unit 731 directly on Chinese civilian population. Agents in divisions other than the first division in Unit 731 would spread the diseases by train, road, and airplanes. Many Chinese civilians developed the worst infections on their limbs, and only a few were exposed to treatment since no local doctors or hospitals had seen the infections before.

Quzhou village, Ya Fan village, and Chong Shan village in the Zhejiang Province had suffered deeply from the Bubonic Plague, as well as Dysentery, Typhoid, Cholera, and many more. In an episode of BBC Correspondent, Wu Shi-Gen, a victim of Unit 731’s biological weapons, tells his story of how the Bubonic Plague had affected his nine-year old brother. The rest of the family chose to lock his little brother away in another room to minimize the possibilities of infections while the little boy cried out from the room. Wu said he still remembers how he could not run in and help his brother when he cried out in pain.

Ya Fan village was affected with an unknown infection, commonly known to residents as “The Rotten Leg Disease.” A victim of this infection describes it as something that “started like an insect bite, then swelling and unbearable pain. Then his flesh started rotting away. Many died of it. Experts say it’s probably Glanders, another of Unit 731’s special recipes. Treatments were ineffectual and cost a fortune.” He stated that while his mother and he both had the disease on their legs, she refused the medicine so that he could have it instead of her. She passed away a few months later.

Aside from negative effects, Unit 731’s research was also used to heal Japanese soldiers with certain conditions. Studying about human conditions like frostbites and different diseases, the doctors could effectively pinpoint medical solutions for their sick soldiers. For instance, the frostbite experiment revealed that putting frozen limbs in water from 100 to 122 degrees Celsius is the best.

As soon as the World War II was over, the scientists at Unit 731’s headquarters started burning the building down, getting rid of all the evidence. When Shiro Ishii and many others were captured by China and sent over to the US for a trial, they had a deal with President MacArthur. He decided to let go of the Unit 731’s scientists free of charge for the war crimes in exchange for their medical research data.

In addition, Japanese government was fairly late to apologize to the rightful victims of Unit 731, while paying war tributes to the dead war criminals of Unit 731. They have been continuously visiting their shrines every year since 2013, offending neighboring countries and victims. Many news articles had been written about it, yet they do not seem to matter to the Japanese government.

Many Japanese scholars also deny the fact that there was ever a Unit 731 and state that the history involving the group is fabricated, although there are plenty of evidences. The Japanese history textbooks do not cover most of Japan’s horrific acts in World War II, leading them to believe that Japan was mostly a victim country rather than hostile like their opponents. By large, the Japanese public has a false sense of history due to the fact that their history textbooks are skewed.

The former members of Unit 731 seem to have conflicting opinions about the publicity of the topic. Yoshio Shinozuka and some others had gone to give talks and share information about Unit 731, but others like Toshimi Mizobuchi intend to keep the promise to hide the information. A portion of Unit 731 members still hold their annual staff reunion parties hosted by Mizobuchi.

Unit 731 has been one of of the most cruel groups to do human experimentation, yet so few people that I’ve met know about what really happened. Although these inhumane experiments could be defended by saying that they were useful for modern medical science, they were definitely not worth the cost of many civilian lives as well as prisoners’ suffering.

Maruta — “Log” in Japanese. Prisoners were often called logs so that they could be experimented on without scientists feeling remorse.

Vivisection — Much like dissection, but with an alive person.

Unit 731: Japan’s Biological Warfare Project. (2018). Retrieved March 14, 2018, from https://unit731.org/ Kristof, N. D. (1995, March 17). Unmasking Horror — A special report.; Japan Confronting Gruesome War Atrocity. Retrieved March 24, 2018, from https://www.nytimes.com/1995/03/17/world/unmasking-horror-a-special-report-japan-confronting-gruesome-war-atrocity.html?pagewanted=all L. (2013, February 11). Unit 731: Japan’s biological force. Retrieved March 24, 2018, from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8LfMNX3TsT0 Working, R. (2001, June 5). The trial of Unit 731. Retrieved March 24, 2018, from https://www.japantimes.co.jp/opinion/2001/06/05/commentary/world-commentary/the-trial-of-unit-731/#.WqoQ6z9zJhE McCurry, J. (2013, December 26). Japan’s Shinzo Abe angers neighbours and US by visiting war dead shrine. Retrieved March 24, 2018, from https://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/dec/26/japan-shinzo-abe-tension-neighbours-shrine Beijing, S. A. (2014, October 17). China protests at Japanese PM’s latest WW2 shrine tribute. Retrieved March 24, 2018, from https://www.theguardian.com/world/2014/oct/17/china-protests-japan-shinzo-abe-yasukuni-shrine Japanese PM Abe sends ritual offering to Yasukuni shrine for war dead. (2017, October 17). Retrieved March 24, 2018, from https://www.reuters.com/article/us-japan-yasukuni/japanese-pm-abe-sends-ritual-offering-to-yasukuni-shrine-for-war-dead-idUSKBN1CL355 Abe training jet photo sparks outrage in South Korean media. (2013, May 15). Retrieved March 24, 2018, from http://www.scmp.com/news/asia/article/1238533/abe-training-jet-photo-sparks-outrage-south-korean-media Tsuneishi, K. (2005, November 24). Unit 731 and the Japanese Imperial Army’s Biological Warfare Program. Retrieved March 24, 2018, from https://apjjf.org/-Tsuneishi-Keiichi/2194/article.html Pure Evil: Wartime Japanese Doctor Had No Regard for Human Suffering. (2016, June 15). Retrieved March 24, 2018, from https://www.medicalbag.com/despicable-doctors/pure-evil-wartime-japanese-doctor-had-no-regard-for-human-suffering/article/472462/ Tsuchiya, T. (2007, December 16). Retrieved March 24, 2018, from http://www.lit.osaka-cu.ac.jp/user/tsuchiya/gyoseki/presentation/UNESCOkumamoto07.html Unit 731: One of the Most Terrifying Secrets of the 20th Century. (n.d.). Retrieved March 26, 2018, from https://www.mtholyoke.edu/~kann20c/classweb/dw2/page1.html

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Research Paper

Research paper on chemical and biological weapons.

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I. Introduction

Ii. chemical weapons, iii. biological weapons, a. difficulties of surveillance, iv. ethical issues for biomedical scientists, v. ethical issues for physicians, vi. conclusion.

The development, production, storage, transfer, use, and destruction (demilitarization) of chemical and biological weapons (CBW) pose a number of ethical issues. First, those weapons, like nuclear weapons, are largely indiscriminate in their effects and are generally more effective against vulnerable noncombatants than against combatants; they therefore are known as weapons of mass destruction, and their use generally is considered a violation of the proportionality principle of a just war. Second, CBW, also like nuclear weapons, are the subject of intensive international arms-control efforts involving problems of definition, verification, and enforcement. Third, biomedical scientists and physicians may be called on to participate in research and development on more effective CBW as well as on methods for defense against them and the treatment of their victims.

Chemical weapons (CW), which have been known since antiquity, are designed to inflict direct chemical injury on their targets, in contrast to explosive or incendiary weapons, which produce their effects through blast or heat. In the siege of Plataea in 429 B.C.E., for example, the Spartans placed enormous cauldrons of pitch, sulfur, and burning charcoal outside the city walls to harass the defenders. Although nations that signed the 1899 Hague Declaration promised not to use CW, during World War I those weapons, including in descending order of use tear gas, chlorine gas, phosgene, and mustard gas, were employed. Overall, 125,000 tons of CW were used during World War I, resulting in 1.3 million casualties. One-quarter of all casualties in the American Expeditionary Force in France were caused by them (Harris and Paxman; Sidel and Goldwyn; Sidel, 1989; United Nations; World Health Organization).

In 1925 twenty-eight nations negotiated the Geneva Protocol for the “prohibition of the use in war of asphyxiating poisonous or other gases and of all analogous liquids, materials or devices and of bacteriological methods of warfare” (Wright, p. 368). In fact, however, the protocol prohibited only the use, not the development, production, testing, or stockpiling, of those weapons. Furthermore, many of the nations that ratified the protocol reserved the right to use those weapons in retaliation, and the protocol became in effect a “no first use” treaty with no verification or enforcement provisions. The United States was one of the initial signers, but the Senate did not ratify the treaty until 1975 (Sidel, 1989; Wright).

Despite the protocol, the use of CW continued. Italy used mustard gas during its invasion of Abyssinia (Ethiopia), and Japan used mustard and tear gases in its invasion of China. Germany, with its advanced dye and pesticide industries, developed acetylcholinesterase inhibitors known as nerve gases, and the United States and Britain stockpiled CW during World War II; transportation and storage accidents caused casualties (Infield), but there was no direct military use. After World War II CW were used by Egypt in Yemen, mustard and nerve gases were used in the Iran-Iraq war in the 1980s, and Iraq used CW against Kurdish villages in its territory. CW stockpiles and production facilities in Iraq were ordered destroyed by the United Nations after the 1991 Persian Gulf War. The United States and Russia are known to have maintained CW stockpiles, and a number of other countries have stockpiles or facilities for rapid CW production (Harris and Paxman; Sidel, 1989).

Troops can be protected against those weapons for limited periods through the use of gas masks and impenetrable garments. That protective gear, however, reduces the efficiency of troops by as much as 50 percent and damages morale, and so the use or threat of use of CW may continue to be considered effective against troops. Civilian populations, in contrast, cannot be protected adequately. Israel, for example, provides every civilian with a gas mask and a self-injectable syringe filled with atropine, a temporary antidote to nerve gas. However, that protection is inadequate against weapons, such as mustard gas, that attack the skin and against longer-term exposure to nerve gas. Furthermore, poorly trained civilians are likely to injure themselves with equipment such as self-injectable syringes (Amitai et al.).

The production of CW has been associated with serious accidents to workers and high levels of pollution in the production sites and nearby communities. Tests of mustard gas, nerve agents, and psychochemicals, including lysergic acid diethylamide (LSD), during and after World War II involved thousands of military personnel, many of whom later claimed disabilities from the exposure. The records of participation and effects are so poor that only a small fraction of those who participated can be identified. Even the destruction of the weapons is dangerous because toxic ash is produced by their incineration (Sidel, 1993).

A Chemical Weapons Convention (CWC) that prohibits the development, production, storage, and transfer of those weapons and calls for their demilitarization was approved by the United Nations General Assembly in 1992. The Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW), which is responsible for ensuring the implementation of the CWC, was established in the Hague after the entry into force of the CWC in 1997. By 2003 a total of 151 “states parties” (nations) had ratified or acceded to the BWC. The First Review Conference of the States Parties to the CWC was held in the Hague in April 2003, and Kofi Annan, secretary general of the United Nations, urged that “membership in the CWC be extended to all nations in the world and that enough funds be provided to accelerate complete chemical disarmament.”

In the 1960s and 1970s the United States used both tear gas and herbicides in Vietnam. Although most nations that are parties to the Geneva Protocol considered tear gas and herbicides to be CW and thus prohibited under the provisions of the protocol, the United States until recently rejected that interpretation (Sidel and Goldwyn; Sidel, 1989). Many countries use tear gas to quell civil disorders (Hu et al.). The signatories to the CWC have agreed not to use riot-control agents or herbicides as weapons of war.

In 2002 Russia used derivatives of fentanyl, a potent opium-based narcotic, to subdue Chechen rebels who had occupied a theater in Moscow and taken 800 hostages. Although Russia formally considered the chemical agent “nonlethal” and its use permissible under the CWC, a total of 117 people died as a result of its use (“Russia Names Moscow Siege Gas”).

In 1984 members of a cult in Oregon intentionally contaminated the salad bars in local restaurants with salmonella bacteria. More than 700 people became ill, but there were no reported deaths. In 2001, shortly after the attack on the World Trade Center, anthrax spores were disseminated through the U.S. mail. Approximately twenty people became ill, and five people died.

Biological weapons (BW) depend for their effects on the ability of microorganisms to infect and multiply in the attacked organism. In this regard they differ from toxins, which, as biological products used as chemicals, are covered under CW as well as BW treaties. BW are very hard to defend against and are not as controllable and predictable in their use as are CW (Harris and Paxman; Geissler, 1986; Sidel and Goldwyn; Sidel, 1989; United Nations; World Health Organization, 1970).

The effects of BW were characterized officially by a U.S. government agency in 1959: “Biological warfare is the intentional use of living organisms or their toxic products to cause death, disability, or damage in man, animals, or plants. The target is man, either by causing sickness or death or through limitation of his food supplies or other agricultural resources.… Biological warfare has been aptly described as public health in reverse” (U.S. Department of Health, Education, and Welfare).

BW have been known since antiquity. Persia, Greece, and Rome used diseased corpses to contaminate sources of drinking water. In 1347 Mongols besieging the walled city of Caffa (now called Feodosiya), a seaport on the east coast of the Crimea, began to die of the plague. The attackers threw the corpses into the besieged city; the defenders, who were Genoans, fled back to Genoa and carried the plague farther into Europe. During the French and Indian Wars Lord Jeffrey Amherst, commander of the British forces at Fort Pitt, gave tribal emissaries blankets in which smallpox victims had slept (Harris and Paxman; Geissler).

During World War I Germany is alleged to have used the equine disease glanders against the cavalries of eastern European countries (Harris and Paxman, p. 74). According to testimony at the Nuremberg trials, prisoners in German concentration camps were infected during tests of BW. Great Britain and the United States, fearing that the Germans would use BW in World War II, developed their own BW. The British tested anthrax spores on Gruinard Island off the coast of Scotland; the island remained uninhabitable for decades. The United States developed anthrax spores, botulism toxin, and other agents as BW but did not use them (Bernstein).

In the 1930s Japanese troops dropped rice and wheat mixed with plague-carrying fleas from planes, resulting in plague in areas of China that previously had been free of it. During World War II Japanese laboratories conducted extensive experiments on prisoners of war, using a wide variety of organisms selected for possible use as BW, including anthrax, plague, gas gangrene, encephalitis, typhus, typhoid, hemorrhagic fever, cholera, smallpox, and tularemia (Wright). Unlike the Soviet Union, which in 1949 prosecuted twelve people who had been involved in that work, the United States never prosecuted any of the participants. Instead, U.S. researchers met with Japanese biological warfare experts in Tokyo and urged that the experts be “spared embarrassment” so that the United States could benefit from their knowledge (Powell; Williams and Wallace).

After World War II the development of BW continued. None of the numerous allegations of BW use have been substantiated or even investigated fully, but it is known that extensive BW testing was done. In the 1950s and 1960s, for example, the University of Utah conducted secret large-scale field tests of BW, including tularemia, Rocky Mountain spotted fever, plague, and Q fever, at the U.S. Army Dugway Proving Ground. In 1950 U.S. Navy ships released as simulants (materials believed to be nonpathogenic that mimic the spread of BW) large quantities of bacteria in the San Francisco Bay area to test the efficiency of their dispersal. Some analysts attributed subsequent infections and deaths to one of those organisms. During the 1950s and 1960s the United States conducted 239 top-secret open-air disseminations of simulants, involving areas such as the New York City subways and Washington National Airport (Cole). The U.S. military developed a large infrastructure of laboratories, test facilities, and production plants related to BW. By the end of the 1960s the United States had stockpiles of at least ten biological and toxin weapons (Geissler). A 1979 outbreak of pulmonary anthrax in the Soviet Union is said to have been caused by accidental release from a Soviet BW factory. Recent disclosures by Russian scientists indicate extensive environmental contamination and medical problems caused by CW production (“Russian Experts Say Many Died Making Chemical Weapons”).

In 1969 the Nixon administration, with the concurrence of the U.S. Defense Department, which declared that BW lacked “military usefulness,” unconditionally renounced the development, production, stockpiling, and use of BW and announced that the United States would dismantle its BW program unilaterally. In 1972 the Soviet Union, which had urged a more comprehensive treaty that would include restrictions on CW, ended its opposition to a separate BW treaty. The United States, the Soviet Union, and other nations negotiated the Convention on the Prohibition of the Development, Prevention and Stockpiling of Bacteriological (Biological) and Toxin Weapons and on Their Destruction (BWC). The BWC prohibits, except for “prophylactic, protective and other peaceful purposes,” the development or acquisition of biological agents or toxins as well as weapons carrying them and means of their production, stockpiling, transfer, and delivery. The U.S. Senate ratified the BWC in 1975, the same year it ratified the Geneva Protocol of 1925. As of 1987, 110 nations had ratified the BWC and an additional 25 had signed but not yet ratified it (Wright).

Invoking the specter of new biological weapons and unproven allegations of aggressive BW programs in other countries, the Reagan administration initiated intensive efforts to conduct “defensive research,” which is permitted under the BWC. The budget for the U.S. Army Biological Defense Research Program (BDRP), which sponsors programs in a wide variety of academic, commercial, and government laboratories, increased dramatically during the 1980s. Much of that research work is medical in nature, including the development of immunizations and treatments against organisms that might be used as BW (Piller and Yamamoto; Wright).

Although research on and the development of new BW are outlawed by the BWC, it is possible that they will occur in the future. Novel dangers lie in new genetic technologies that permit the development of genetically altered organisms that are not known in nature. Stable, tailor-made organisms used as BW could travel long distances and still be infectious, rapidly infiltrate a population, cause debilitating effects very quickly, and be resistant to antibiotic treatment (Piller and Yamamoto).

Biologists, chemists, biomedical scientists, and physicians have played important roles in CBW research and development. Fritz Haber, who was awarded the 1918 Nobel Prize in chemistry for his synthesis of ammonia, is known as the father of Germany’s chemical weapons program in World War I. In his speech accepting the Nobel Prize Haber declared poison gas “a higher form of killing” (Harris and Paxman, 1982). By contrast, during the Crimean War the British government consulted the noted physicist Michael Faraday on the feasibility of developing poison gases; Faraday responded that it was entirely feasible but that it was inhumane and he would have nothing to do with it (Russell).

Many scientists who explicitly acknowledge the ethical conflicts involved in work on weapons argue that a higher ethical principle—the imperative of defending one’s country or helping to curb what is perceived as evil or destructive— permits or even requires participation in such work. Dr. Theodor Rosebury, who worked on BW during World War II, based his participation on his belief that crisis circumstances that were expected to last for only a limited time required that he act as he did. “We were fighting a fire, and it seemed necessary to risk getting dirty as well as burnt,” he later wrote (Rosebury, 1963). Rosebury refused to participate in BW work after the end of the war (Rosebury, 1949).

Other scientists resolved their ethical dilemma by arguing that their work on weapons was designed to reduce the devastation of war. For example, while working on “nonlethal” CBW in the 1960s Dr. Knut Krieger argued that his research would lead to decreased fatalities: “If we do indeed succeed in creating incapacitating systems and are able to substitute incapacitation for death it appears to me that, next to stopping war, this would be an important step forward” (Reid).

Relevant ethical concerns about “defensive research” on BW by biomedical scientists include issues of content, safety, context, and locus (Lappe).

The Japanese laboratory established in 1933 to develop BW was called the Epidemic Prevention Laboratory. One of its activities was supplying vaccines for troops bound for Manchuria, but its major work was developing and testing BW (Powell). Military forces today could conduct research on the offensive use of BW under the cover of defensive research because offensive and defensive research are joined inextricably in at least some phases of the work (Huxsoll et al.). In the parts of the work in which offensive and defensive efforts are parallel new forms of organisms may be found or developed that would be more effective as biological weapons. The possibility that offensive work on BW is being done in the United States under the cover of defensive work has been denied by the leaders of the BDRP, who point out the areas in which the two types of research diverge (Huxsoll et al.). Critics nonetheless raise questions about the ambiguity of BDRP research, arguing that “these efforts are highly ambiguous, provocative and strongly suggestive of offensive goals” (Jacobson and Rosenberg; Piller and Yamamoto; Wright).

Many analysts believe that CW or BW research, even if it is truly defensive in intent, may be dangerous to surrounding communities if toxic materials or virulent infectious organisms are released accidentally.

CW or BW research, even if it is defensive in intent, can be viewed by a potential military adversary as an attempt to develop protection for a nation’s military forces or noncombatants against weapons that that nation might wish to use for offensive purposes, thus permitting that nation to protect its own personnel in a CW or BW first strike. In fact, the military justification for preparing altered organisms is that they are needed for the preparation of defenses. It is therefore impossible for adversaries to determine whether a nation’s defensive efforts are part of preparations for the offensive use of weapons.

Fears in this area usually are based on military sponsorship of defensive BW research. Even if that research is relatively open, other nations may view with suspicion the intense interest of military forces rather than civilian medical researchers in vaccines and treatments against specific organisms. Those fears can feed a continuing BW arms race.

More generally, concern has been expressed about the militarization of genetic engineering and biology in general. Characterization of biological weapons as “public health in reverse” therefore may have an even broader and more sinister meaning: The entire field of biology, along with and aspects of it such as the use of human genome research to design weapons to target specific groups, may be in danger of military use for destructive ends (Piller and Yamamoto; Wright). The imprisonment of a chemist by the Russian government and the revocation of his university diploma for publishing an article describing the development of new, highly toxic CW illustrate the restrictions that are placed on scientists who do CBW research (Janowski).

The first question that arises is whether it is constructive to view certain ethical responsibilities as unique to the physician’s social role. Theodor Rosebury described the response to physician participation in work on BW during World War II: “There was much quiet but searching discussion among us regarding the place of doctors in such work … a certain delicacy concentrated most of the physicians into principally or primarily defensive operations.” Rosebury went on to point out that the modifiers principally and primarily are needed “because military operations can never be exclusively defensive” (Rosebury, 1963). What is seen as the special responsibility of physicians is based largely on an ethical responsibility not to use the power of the physician to do harm (primum non nocere). Although the Hippocratic oath seems to apply to the relationship of the physician to an individual patient, its meaning has been broadened by many to proscribe physician participation in actions harmful to nonpatients.

In regard to research on offensive weapons of war there seems to be a consensus that physicians participate in such research at their ethical peril even if their country demands it or they think it useful for deterrence or other preventive purposes. However, because of the ambiguity of defensive work on BW, the dilemma for the physician is not easily resolved even for those who believe that defensive efforts are ethically permissible.

Some proponents of defensive research on BW have argued that it is entirely ethical—that in fact it is obligatory— that physicians work on it. According to this perspective, not only will defenses be needed if such weapons are used against the United States, that work also may be useful in developing protection against naturally occurring diseases (Crozier; Huxsoll et al.; Orient). Other analysts believe that it is unethical for physicians to play a role in military-sponsored BW research because it has a strong potential for intensifying a BW arms race and helping to militarize the science of biology, thus increasing the risk of the use of BW and the destructiveness of their effects if they are used (Jacobson and Rosenberg; Nass, 1991; Sidel, 1991).

The question is: Where on the slippery slope of participation in preparing for the use of BW should physicians draw the line? If physicians engage in civilian-sponsored research on disease control that carries an obligation to report all findings in the open literature even if the research may have implications for BW, that participation, most analysts agree, cannot be faulted on ethical grounds. However, when physicians engage in military-sponsored research in which the openness of reporting is equivocal and the purposes are ambiguous, it is difficult to distinguish their work ethically from work on the development of weapons.

As was noted above, the BWC prohibits any “development, production, stockpiling, transfer or acquisition of biological agents or toxins” except for “prophylactic, protective and other peaceful purposes.” The responsibility for government-sponsored medical research for prophylactic, protective, and other peaceful purposes in the United States lies largely with the National Institutes of Health (NIH) and the Centers for Disease Control (CDC). The NIH or the CDC therefore might be given the responsibility and the resources for medical research of this type. The U. S. Army still may want to conduct nonmedical research and development on defense against BW, such as work on detectors, protective clothing, and other barriers to the spread of organisms. Under this proposed division of effort that research is less likely to be seen as offensive, provoke a BW race, pervert the science of biology, and involve physicians (Sidel, 1989).

A different type of ethical issue related to CBW arose during the Persian Gulf War in 1991. The United States provided protective measures such as immunization against botulinum toxin and anthrax for its military forces. Despite the fact that some of those measures were experimental, no informed consent procedures were used and compliance often was required. Furthermore, the measures were made available to military forces but not to noncombatants in the area (Annas; Howe and Martin).

In addition to the ethical dilemmas involved in these decisions it may be unethical for physicians to ignore the issues involved in CBW. One of the greatest dangers of those weapons may be the apathy of the medical profession toward them. The fact that BW are the weapons with which physicians may become engaged and the ones about which they have specialized knowledge gives physicians a special responsibility not only to refuse to work on them but also actively to work to reduce the threat of their development or use.

Physicians and biomedical scientists should support methods for international epidemiological surveillance to detect the use of BW and investigate incidents in which use has been alleged after an unexplained disease outbreak (Geissler, 1986; Nass, 1992a, 1992b) and support the Vaccines for Peace Programme for the control of “dual-threat” agents (Geissler and Woodall). Support also might be given for measures to strengthen the BWC through the introduction of the verification proposals that were put forth at the 1991 BWC Review Conference (Falk; Rosenberg and Burck; Rosenberg). With regard to chemical weapons, biomedical scientists and physicians might support effective implementation of the 1993 CWC (Smithson).

More broadly, physicians may wish to explore the connection between CBW and nuclear weapons. It has been argued that by refusing to reduce their vast stockpiles of nuclear weapons substantially and refusing to agree to verifiable cessation of nuclear weapons testing and production, the nuclear powers provoke nonnuclear powers to contemplate the development and production of CBW for deterrence against nuclear weapons. The U.S. Defense Intelligence Agency reported that “third world nations view chemical weapons as an attractive and inexpensive alternative to nuclear weapons” (U.S. General Accounting Office; Zilinskas, 1990a, 1990b). There is much that physicians can do, for example, through the International Physicians for the Prevention of Nuclear War, the organization that received the 1985 Nobel Peace Prize, and its affiliates in many countries to reduce the provocation and proliferation of weapons of mass destruction caused by the continuing nuclear arms race.

Individual physicians and scientists can add to the awareness of the dangers of CBW by signing the pledge sponsored by the Council for Responsible Genetics “not to engage knowingly in research and teaching that will further development of chemical and biological warfare agents.” U.S. physicians also may wish to support legislation to transfer all medical aspects of biological defense from the military to the NIH or the CDC. Physicians may help awaken the medical profession to the dangers of CBW and nuclear weapons by adding a clause to the oath taken by medical students upon graduation from medical school, similar to the oath for medical students in the former Soviet Union, requiring them “to struggle tirelessly for peace and for the prevention of nuclear war” (Cassel et al., p. 652). The clause might be worded as follows: “Recognizing that nuclear, chemical, and biological arms are weapons of indiscriminate mass destruction and threaten the health of all humanity, I will refuse to play any role that might increase the risk of use of such weapons and will, as part of my professional responsibility, work actively for peace and for the prevention of their use.”

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article that won essay awards from the US Joint Chiefs of Staff and the Naval War College: The outlook for biological weapons is grimly interesting. Weaponeers ... The 1972 Biological Weapons Convention (B WC) entered into force in 1975. It is the first worldwide treaty to prohibit an entire class of weapons. The BWC now has some
The Oxford Handbook of Bioethics
The ethical problems associated with these other threats are closely associated with those raised by biological agents. Therefore, this article necessarily refers to these related potential terrorist technologies, all of them made more available to militant organizations through the spread of knowledge and material in the post-cold war era.
Bioethics and Biological Weapons
Biological weapons, whether wielded by the military forces of nations or by terrorists, will continue to pose a serious threat to international security for the foreseeable future. Although access to toxic material and pathogenic strains of microorganisms is restricted, covert traffic in such agents is as difficult to control as that of illegal drugs. Since international travel of ...
Biological weapon
biological weapon, any of a number of disease-producing agents—such as bacteria, viruses, rickettsiae, fungi, toxins, or other biological agents—that may be utilized as weapons against humans, animals, or plants.. The direct use of infectious agents and poisons against enemy personnel is an ancient practice in warfare.Indeed, in many conflicts, diseases have been responsible for more ...
Genomics and future biological weapons: the need for preventive action
There is an increasing concern within both the scientific and security communities that the ongoing revolution in biology has great potential to be misused in offensive biological weapons programs.
What is a bioweapon? The fight to protect the world from germ weapons
Illness, weaponized. Biological weapons are the "poor man's atom bomb," said Yong-Bee Lim, the deputy director of the Converging Risks Lab and Biosecurity Projects Manager at the Council on ...
PDF Ethics and Weapons of Mass Destruction
changes in the international system. The ethics of biological and chemical weapons has been largely ignored, in part due to the cold war emphasis on nuclear weapons. The ethical discussion needs to extend beyond nuclear weapons to include chemical and biological weapons. approach The comparative method we have used in this volume is to bring schol-
The Impact of Biological Weapons
Biological weapons can do way far that just causing death and, it creates fear in the hearts of people. And the goal is to confuse and disrupt political, economic and social activities; a small number of infections may cause a huge panic among innocent citizens and a real fear, such as the anthrax attacks letters.
Engaging scientists in biosecurity: lessons from the Biological Weapons
ABSTRACT. Major efforts to engage scientists in issues of biosecurity in the United States and internationally began in the early 2000s in response to growing concerns about terrorists using weapons of mass destruction and the mailing of anthrax-laced letters in October 2001.
Biological warfare and bioterrorism: a historical review
EARLY USE OF BIOLOGICAL WARFARE. Infectious diseases were recognized for their potential impact on people and armies as early as 600 BC ().The crude use of filth and cadavers, animal carcasses, and contagion had devastating effects and weakened the enemy ().Polluting wells and other sources of water of the opposing army was a common strategy that continued to be used through the many European ...
Ethical issues in military bioscience
Interestingly, biological warfare has drawn more moral scorn than chemical warfare (e.g. Krickus 1965). Along with the practical difficulties of using biological warfare agents, this may have helped pave the way for the blanket ban on biological warfare in the 1972 Biological Weapons Convention (BWC), whereas the comprehensive prohibition of ...
Ethics and Weapons of Mass Destruction
The ethical discussion needs to extend beyond nuclear weapons to include chemical and biological weapons. APPROACH The comparative method we have used in this volume is to bring scholars from a broad range of ethical traditions, both religious and secular, into structured conversation on a defined set of moral concerns created by WMD.
Unit 731: Imperial Japan's Biological and Chemical Warfare
This essay details heavily on the biological research and its data from start to the end as well as their impacts and aftermath. Background. Unit 731 was established first in 1932 as a small group of five scientists interested in biological weapons, and was expanded around 1936 when Shiro Ishii was given full command of the unit.
Ethical Implications of Chemical, Biological and Nuclear Warfare
Chemical, biological and nuclear weapons are capable of mass destruction aimed at killing masses of people. Using CBW agents comes with many ethical dilemmas and consequential side-effects. Chemical, biological, and nuclear weapons are designed to yield a great number of deaths. Regarding the ethical use of CBW, while looking at the larger ...
Experts Debate Biological Weapons Challenges
Arms Control Today. September 2018. By Jenifer Mackby. The meetings of experts of states-parties to the Biological Weapons Convention (BWC) on Aug. 7-16 discussed the potential for abuse of advances in gene-editing technology, along with other issues related to the treaty that bans biological arms. Delegates to the meeting of experts of ...
Research Paper on Chemical and Biological Weapons
Biological weapons (BW) depend for their effects on the ability of microorganisms to infect and multiply in the attacked organism. ... Many scientists who explicitly acknowledge the ethical conflicts involved in work on weapons argue that a higher ethical principle—the imperative of defending one's country or helping to curb what is ...

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HISTORY OF BIOLOGICAL WEAPONS

POSSIBLE MECHANISMS OF BIOWEAPONS

OBJECTIONS TO THE USE OF BIOWEAPONS

CONCLUSIONS

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Bioweapons research is banned by an international treaty – but nobody is checking for violations

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1960s-1970s: International negotiations to outlaw biowarfare

1990s: Revelations of treaty violations

Monitoring biological agents

Political opposition to bioweapons verification

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30 Bioethics and Bioterrorism

Biological Weapons and the Ethics of Human Experiments

Public Health and Civil Liberties

Triage in a Bioterror Attack

Responsibilities of Emergency Health Care Professionals

Organization Ethics

Genetics and Bioterrorism

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Genomics and future biological weapons: the need for preventive action by the biomedical community

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1 Introduction

2 Human enhancement

3 Duty of care

4 Accountability

5 Dual loyalties

6 By way of a conclusion

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Unit 731: Imperial Japan’s Biological and Chemical Warfare

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