Assessing the Biological Weapons and Bioterrorism Threat
Milton Leitenberg
December 2005
Full publication information and details can be found at: http://www.strategicstudiesinstitute.army.mil/pubs/display.cfm?PubID=639
Synopsis (from the Forward by Douglas C. Lovelace, Jr., Director, Strategic Studies Institute):
It is nearly 15 years since biological weapons (BW) have become a significant national security preoccupation. This occurred primarily due to circumstances occurring within a short span of years. First was the official U.S. Government suggestion that proliferation of offensive BW programs among states and even terrorist groups was an increasing trend; second was the discovery, between 1989 and 1992, that the Union USSR had violated the Biological Weapons Convention (BWC) since its ratification in 1975 by building a massive covert biological weapons program; third was the corroboration by the UN Special Commission in 1995 that Iraq had maintained a covert biological weapons program since 1974, and had produced and stockpiled large quantities of agents and delivery systems between 1988 and 1991; and, fourth was the discovery, also in 1995, that the Japanese Aum Shinrikyo group, which had carried out the nerve gas attack in the Tokyo subway system, also had spent 4 years attempting—albeit unsuccessfully—to produce and disperse two pathogenic biological agents. The distribution of professionally prepared anthrax spores through the U.S. postal system in the weeks afterwards September 11, 2001, magnified previous concerns by orders of magnitude. In December 2002, after U.S. forces had overrun much of the territory of Afghanistan, it was discovered that the al-Qaida organization also had spent several years trying to obtain the knowledge and means to produce biological agents. These new factors shifted the context in which BW was considered almost entirely to “bioterrorism.” Within 4 years, almost $30 billion in federal expenditure was appropriated to counter the anticipated threat. This response took place in the absence of virtually any threat analysis. The purpose of this monograph is to begin to fill that gap.
CONCLUSION from book:
A summary of the material presented in the appendix and the four subsequent sections of this monograph produces the following conclusions:
- Significance of the problem. "Bioterrorism" may or may not develop into a serious concern in the future, but it is not "one of the most pressing problems that we have on the planet today."
- The evolution of state biological weapons programs. The number of state BW programs has apparently been reduced by one-third or one-fourth in the past 15 years. The remaining number of countries appears to be stable; no compensating rise in offensive state BW programs has been identified. In addition, the U.S. government — which has almost without exception in past decades been the only country to publicly identify WMD proliferants — appears in its most recent statements to be qualifying the status of states with presumed offensive BW programs. To date, no state is known to have assisted any nonstate or terrorist group to obtain biological weapons.
- The evolution of nonstate/terrorist
biological weapon capabilities. The production and distribution
of a dry powder anthrax product in the United States in 2001 is the
most significant event. However, understanding to what degree
that demonstration of competence is relevant to "traditional"
terrorist groups is impossible until the perpetrator(s) of the
anthrax events are identified. If it was done with assistance,
materials, knowledge, access, etc., derived from the U.S. biodefense
program, the implications change entirely.
The Rajneesh group (1984) succeeded in culturing
Salmonella. The Japanese Aum Shinrikyo group failed to obtain, produce,
or disperse anthrax and botulinum toxin.The steps taken by the al-Qaida
group in efforts to develop
a BW program were more advanced than the United
States understood prior to its occupation of Afghanistan in
November-December 2001. Nevertheless, publicly available
information, including the somewhat ambiguous details that
appeared in the March 31, 2005, report of the Commission
on Intelligence Capabilities, indicates that the group failed
to obtain and work with pathogens. Should additional information become available regarding the extent to which the al-Qaida BW effort had progressed, that assessment might have to be changed. Scenarios for national BW exercises that posit various BW agents in advanced states of preparation in the hands
of terrorist groups simply disregard the requirements in knowledge and practice that such groups would need in order to work with pathogens. Unfortunately, 10 years of widely broadcast public discussion has provided such groups, at least on a general level, with suggestions as to what paths to follow. If and when a nonstate terrorist group does successfully reach the stage of working with pathogens, there is every reason to believe that it will involve classical agents, without any molecular genetic modifications. Preparing a dry powder preparation is likely to prove diffi cult, and dispersion to produce mass casualties equally so. Making predictions on the basis of what competent professionals may find "easy to do" has been a common error and continues to be so. The
utilization of molecular genetic technology by such groups is still further off in time. No serious military threat assessment imputes to opponents capabilities that they do not have. There is no justifi cation for imputing to real world terrorist groups capabilities in the biological sciences that they do not posess. - Framing "the threat" and setting the
agenda of public perceptions and policy prescriptions. For the past decade the
risk and immanence of the use of biological agents by nonstate
actors/terrorist organizations — "bioterrorism" — has been
systematically and deliberately exaggerated. It became more
so after the combination of the 9/11 events and the October-November
2001 anthrax distribution in the United States that followed immediately
afterwards. U.S. Government officials
worked hard to spread their view to other countries. An edifice
of institutes, programs, conferences, and publicists has grown
up which continue the exaggeration and scare-mongering. In the last year or two, the drumbeat had picked up. It may however become moderated by the more realistic assessment of the likelihood of the onset of a natural flu pandemic, and the accompanying realization that the U.S. Government has been using the overwhelming proportion of its relevant resources to prepare for the wrong contingency. Others see exaggeration as necessary in order to prompt preparation. They acknowledge the exaggeration but argue that political action, the expenditure of public funds for bioterrorism prevention and response programs, will not
occur without it. "Bioterrorism" may come someday if societies survive all their other impending crises. However, the persistent exaggeration is not benign: it is almost certainly the single greatest factor in provoking interest in BW among terrorist groups, to the degree that it currently exists, for example, in the al-Qaida organization. Precisely this occurred: Their most senior leadership was provoked by statements regarding bioterrorism and its supposed ease by U.S. officials
in 1996-97. - Costs of the U.S. biodefense program. On the grounds of "necessity,"
the U.S. biodefense research program appears to
be drifting into violation of Article 1 of the BWC. There is little
question but that U.S. offi cials would make that judgment of
any other nation’s biodefense program in which the same
kind of work was being carried out as is taking place and is
planned by U.S. agencies, or in the case that agencies of another
government put forward reinterpretations of the provisions
of Article 1 of the BWC so as to imply that work could be
done on "defensive" biological weapons. A national-level
oversight system to see that BWC compliance is maintained
by all projects of the U.S. biodefense program—unclassified,
classified, and perhaps yet other "black" projects — does not
exist. Should the BWC be weakened further and if other state programs begin to go down the same research path as the U.S. biodefense program, together with any eventual recourse to BW by nonstate actors, the international regime against the development of biological weapons may be irrevocably damaged.
POLICY RECOMMENDATIONS from book:
The policy recommendations derive directly from the analysis presented in the study, and fall into two groups: 1) threat assessment, and 2) U.S. biodefense program oversight.
Recommendation 1: A thorough national BW threat assessment is necessary, to the degree that the best available information permits. It should be based on the realities of state and nonstate actor capabilities, rather than on hypothetical projections of technological state-of-the-art.
Recommendation 2: Government officials should avoid, and where necessary correct, exaggerated portrayals of the biological weapons threat. Such exaggeration, even if seen as politically useful by some, runs counter to the national interest by stimulating the interest of others in BW development.
Recommendation 3: Federal expenditures for Bioshield I and II — to procure vaccines against BW "select agents" — would very likely be of far greater benefit to the U.S. public if they were redirected to procuring vaccines against pandemic flu strains. Such reconsideration and redirection should be an urgent executive and legislative priority.
Recommendation 4: The U.S. Government should make
every effort to strengthen the Biological Weapons
Convention, the international treaty regime whose essential
purpose it is to maintain the norm against the proliferation
of BW. It should do nothing to damage it or reduce its
stature or relevance.
Recommendation 5: A serious national policy of oversight for the U.S. biodefense research program is necessary:
- Above all, oversight should exist at the level of the National Security Council.
- The Department of Defense should see that its relevant Compliance Review Group is functional.
- The Department of Homeland Security should institute a similar group to monitor the compliance of the work program of the National Biodefense Analysis and Countermeasures Center (NBACC) with the provisions of the Biological Weapons Convention.
- Authority to explicitly review international treaty compliance of all programs carried out by NBACC should additionally be extended to the Committee on Biodefense Analysis and Countermeasures of the National Research Council. Most desirable would be an advisory group of the stature of the President’s Science Advisory Council of the 1960s. Review panels with members selected from in-house laboratories and federal contractors are unlikely to provide a critical review.
- The National Science Advisory Board for Biosecurity (NSABB) should be provided with authorization to include classified biodefense research programs under its jurisdiction.
Also, see Milton Leitenberg's The Problem of Biological Weapons, published in 2004 by the Swedish National Defence College.
From back cover :
It had been widely assumed that the problem of Biological Weapons had been frozen, if not removed, when the Biological Weapons Convention (BWC) came into force in 1975. However, the subject which had been dormant for some 25 years exploded in the 1990s as an issue for international security elites, most particularly in the United States.
This occurred for a conjunction of reasons:
- Increased concern about the proliferation of national biological weapon programs.
- The discovery, between 1989 and 1992, that the USSR had violated the BWC since its ratification, and had built a massive covert biological weapons program, the largest that the world had ever seen.
- The corroboration by the United Nations Special Commission (UNSCOM) in 1995 that Iraq had maintained a covert biological weapons program since 1974, and had produced and stockpiled very large quantities of agents and delivery systems between 1987 and 1991.
- The discovery, also in 1995, that the Japanese Aum Shinrikyo group, which had carried out the nerve gas attack in the Tokyo subway system, had also spent four years of effort in attempting – albeit unsuccessfully – to produce and disperse two pathogenic biological agents.
After 1995-96 US government officials and security elites had amalgamated all of these into a postulated threat of “bioterrorism”, the potential use of biological agents or weapons by non-state actors, that is, terrorist groups. The issue developed long before the events of September 11, 2001, but was still further exacerbated by those events. It has been driven in the United States despite an absence of any detailed threat analysis of the actual capabilities of non-state actors/"terrorist" groups to engage in biological warfare.
The studies combined for this book were written since 1999 in an effort to establish the current global status of biological weapons, their proliferation, their level of threat, and the efforts to bring them under international control.