The natural war

Abstract

The Biology of Doomby Ed RegisHenry Holt & Company259 pages, hardback, US $25.000805057641 ‘The great mystery of biological warfare, in the end, was why it had never been used.’ This sentence is near the end of The Biology of Doom , where the author gives us a series of explanations for this affirmation: boomerang effect, irreproducibility of combat missions, moral repugnance… And he demonstrates that none of these hold true. Unfortunately, it is known—and the author indeed reports it—that biological warfare using plague and smallpox has been used not only in the past, but also more recently by the Japanese army in World War II. Ed Regis seems to consider biological weapons as an advance rather than a threat as he writes: “Why was it worse to die from a disease (which people did continually in the normal course of events) than from bullets, bombs or nuclear radiation? […] Indeed the case could be made that biological weapons were less morally objectionable than other types since they were in an obvious way far more ‘natural’ than high explosives or …