Barriers to Bioweapons: The Challenges of Expertise and Organization for Weapons Development

BARRIERS TO BIOWEAPONS The Challenges of Expertise and Organization for Weapons Development Sonia Ben Ouagrham-Gormley, Cornell University Press, Ithaca, New York, 2014, 240 pagesPresident Bill Clinton reportedly read Richard Preston's The Cobra Event, the terrifying fictional story of a viral bioterrorist attack against New York City. The novel seems to have had an impact on Clinton, more so perhaps than the nonfiction strategy documents of his predecessor. In President George H.W. Bush's 1993 National Security Strategy, the last of his presidency, the term "biological" was mentioned only four times, and the focus was on arms control measures and the need to "press for a full accounting of former Soviet biological warfare programs."With Cobra Event on his bookshelf, Clinton's 1998 National Security Strategy devoted entire sections to the perceived biological weapons threat: "The Administration has significantly increased funding to enhance biological and chemical defense capabilities and has begun the vaccination of military personnel against the anthrax bacteria, the most feared biological weapon threat today." The document also highlighted terrorist use of biological weapons, and in a commencement speech at the U.S. Naval Academy, Clinton announced a massive effort to protect the civilian population from biological weapons. Initiatives included public health and medical surveillance systems, training and equipping first responders, development of medicines and vaccines, and notably, preventing the nefarious use of biotechnology innovations.In the days following 9/11, letters containing spores of Bacillus anthracis were disseminated through the U.S. postal system, resulting in the deaths of five people, and spreading fear and panic in an already fragile public and national security apparatus. Overseas for the CIA at the time, I remember receiving my mail from the United States; the yellowed, barely-legible, brittle envelopes were the result of irradiation as a precaution against additional attacks.The threat from biological weapons seemed to be expanding, as the United States attempted to understand and deal with terrorist interest in biological weapons, along with nation-state programs-the former Soviet Union, China, Syria, Libya, Iran, North Korea, and Iraq, among others. Then in October 2002, the U.S. intelligence community produced a National Intelligence Estimate on Iraq's weapons of mass destruction (WMD) programs that stated unequivocally, "Baghdad has chemical and biological weapons." This certainty evaporated quickly.Author Sonia Ben OuagrhamGormley deploys this history as backstory to her thought-provoking work on the challenges of accurately assessing the threat posed by biological weapons. …