Biological Weapons as a Strategic Threat

Abstract

Paul Bracken, PhDa What are the implications of the proliferation of biological weapons and its effects on changing the world balance of power? This is a chilling subject. I don’t think biological weapons had much of an effect on the Cold War, even though there were many of them in the Soviet Union and, early on, in the United States as well. My first introduction to biological warfare—in which there are probably no experts, only specialists—was when I got a job out of college. I had to go up to a place—I don’t even know if it exists anymore—called Edgewood Arsenal, and I had to read something called the Mandrake Route War Game. They locked me in a vault, and I read the study. It was about a biological attack on western Europe, and it was absolutely nauseating and repulsive. When anyone is exposed to biological warfare, he/she has a beginner’s mind. Biological warfare is overwhelming in its depressing aspects. In 1973 I was doing a study for the US Army. At the Aberdeen Proving Ground, they actually had some of the chemical warfare suits that we captured in the 1973 Middle East war. These are chemical suits, not biological protection. We did some experimentation and found out that anyone who wore them for more than two hours would collapse from heat prostration. These were not very effective, and they leaked badly, not a good feature for protective suits. The point of these anecdotes is to suggest that for biological and even chemical weapons, although huge stockpiles were built during the Cold War, they did not have much effect on the balance of world power. Rather, these elements were not in any way, shape, or form integrated into the armed forces of either side. The Soviets produced a lot of anthrax and other biological weapons, but the average Soviet division was untrained in how to work with them and did not have good protective cover. Biological weapons were kind of an existential deterrent, and that’s how I think they were viewed. They were put in the background. This reinforced a strong belief in the policy community in the United States that chemical and biological weapons had a certain opprobrium attached to them, that they had such a stigma that decision makers would never want to use them. Actually, I think this was true in the past, but it’s a lot less true