The RUSI Journal

ISSN: 0307-1847 (Print) 1744-0378 (Online) Journal homepage: http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/rusi20

Biological Threats in the 21st Century: The Politics,

People, Science and Historical Roots

Jennifer Cole

To cite this article: Jennifer Cole (2016) Biological Threats in the 21st Century: The
Politics, People, Science and Historical Roots, The RUSI Journal, 161:6, 70-71, DOI:
10.1080/03071847.2016.1265839

To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/03071847.2016.1265839

Published online: 21 Dec 2016.

Submit your article to this journal

Article views: 11

View related articles

View Crossmark data

Full Terms & Conditions of access and use can be found at

http://www.tandfonline.com/action/journalInformation?journalCode=rusi20

Download by: [University of Newcastle, Australia] Date: 27 December 2016, At: 18:09
 ThE Rusi JOuRNAl
REViEWs
The Changing Character of War Biological Threats in the
Jennifer Cole reviews 21st Century: The Politics,
Biological Threats in the 21st Century: People, Science and
The Politics, People, Science and Historical Roots
Historical Roots
Edited by Filippa Lentzos
Edited by Filippa Lentzos
World Scientific, 2016
Alan James reviews
War in Europe: 1450 to the Present
By Jeremy Black
Cultural Property and Conflict
Ewan Lawson reviews
The Bad-Ass Librarians of Timbuktu: And
Their Race to Save the World’s Most
Precious Manuscripts
By Joshua Hammer
US Politics
A re biological weapons a major threat
to global health and security? Or
– as Marie Isabelle Chevrier and Alex
Gorana Grgic reviews
America and the Politics of Insecurity Spelling ask, citing Thomas C Schelling’s
By Andrew Rojecki interpretation of US President Richard
Nixon’s decision to discontinue the US
Military History bioweapons programme in the late
1960s – are they nothing more than
Jonathan Eyal reviews ‘An infinity of ridiculous weapons that
The Vanquished: Why the First World War nobody [should be] interested in having
Failed to End, 1917–1923
even if the other side is foolish enough to
By Robert Gerwarth
procure them’ (p. 339)? Filippa Lentzos’s
Richard Toye reviews comprehensive overview comes no closer
Never Surrender: Winston Churchill and to answering the question than the many
Britain’s Decision to Fight Nazi Germany in academics who have asked it before her,
the Fateful Summer of 1940 but at least the way she sets out the
By John Kelly arguments serves as an ideal introduction
to the subject while also allowing those
Gill Bennett reviews with more experience of it to reflect on
The Sabotage Diaries why it remains such a difficult issue.
By Katherine Barnes
Divided into three sections, the
book has an interesting structure.
Within each of the main sections
– Past Proliferators, Bioweapons in
Today’s Context and Disarmament and
Non-Proliferation – formal chapters are
interspersed with opinion pieces from
academics and scientists, many of whom
have worked on state bioweapons and
biodefence programmes, and in drafting
non-proliferation policy. Their thoughts
provide unique personal perspectives
on issues usually discussed from an
academic distance and are the most
© RUSI JOURNAL DECEMBER 2016 VOL. 161 NO. 6 pp. 70–79
RUSI 161_6 Text.indd 70
valuable contribution the book makes to
the bioweapons literature.
While this is a novel and interesting
approach, however, it also serves to
highlight a key challenge: there is very
little to say beyond the fact that most
major world powers have supported
biological weapons programmes (on
and off) but virtually no-one – state or
non-state actor – has ever used them,
and no-one is really sure why. Covering
the same problem from two directions is
a clever approach when there is so little
material to work with.
The answers to these more
interesting questions on biological
weapons – and by extension the
biological threats of the twenty-first
century suggested by the book’s title
– are missed. The key issues are not
about the history of who has worked
on developing them but why – when
the capability to release biological
weapons probably exists (and certainly
has existed in the past) – it seems that
the intent does not. Why have states
funded (at great expense); hidden (with
high degrees of secrecy); denied (until
the proof is laid bare); but ultimately
abandoned, without use, the extensive
biological weapons programmes that
emerged and thrived during the middle of
the twentieth century? Questioning this
more deeply might have been a better
way to qualify how real the threat from
a deliberate release of harmful biological
agents actually is.
All the usual perspectives are
touched on: biological weapons are
difficult to control; there are easier and
more precise ways to wage war; and
better ways for terrorists to get media
attention. The usual challenges are also
discussed: how do you separate genuine
life sciences research from something
more sinister? However, the book misses
an opportunity to delve more deeply
into the psyches of the precious few
individuals and small groups who have
actually used these weapons. Such an
investigation might help to identify
contexts that facilitate the emergence
16/12/2016 16:00:20

of such anomalies. They may well be
related to crime rather than terrorism, as
the book posits – two teenagers in 1970s
small-town America, religious cults in the
US and Japan, a mentally unbalanced US
biosecurity lab worker – but rather than
discussing how they should be classified,
it would have been better to explore why
they happened.
The book touches on, and would
have benefited from more exploration of,
the moral repugnance that seems to be
the control on intent. Is there something
fundamentally more horrifying about
delivering plague to a population than
drone strikes – something we find harder
to justify even in times of war – and
terrorists seem to find just too terrifying?
If so, what is this, and in what context or
environments has it broken down? In
Chapter II, Jeanne Guillemin speculates
whether Japan’s lack of first-hand
experience of the horrors of the First
World War was a factor in it violating the
Geneva Protocols in the 1920s and 1930s
– the Japanese use of biological weapons
on the Chinese and Russians from the
1920s through to the Second World War
being virtually the only example of state
use in warfare. It would have been good
to see this taken further. Academics such
as Philip Eate, writing in a 2008 article,
have previously considered how Japanese
culture shaped the violent actions of
Aum Shinrikyo. Yet the question of how
it shaped its attitudes towards biological
violence and whether cultural factors also
influenced the actions of the Japanese
state remains under-examined. This
book does not substantially address these
issues.
The history of biological warfare
is one of secretism and isolation, often
driven by individuals with a morbid
fascination for the subject, from Japan’s
Surgeon General Ishii Shiro in the early
twentieth century to Dr Wouter Basson,
who oversaw and controlled South
Africa’s bioweapons programme Project
Coast until the 1990s. Such individuals
are often viewed suspiciously by the
governments which ultimately have the
power to close programmes down – and
frequently do. But in some cases, they
are given free rein, kept at arms’ length
from official decisions to ensure state
deniability of their actions. Even years
RUSI 161_6 Text.indd 71
later, there often seems to be no official
record of exactly what happened behind
closed laboratory doors.
Some interesting points are made
about how this need for secrecy protects
those involved in biological weapons
experiments from the wider political
community, media and public who might
object to their work and guilt them out
of doing it. However, the book does not
substantially address why right-minded
people are so repelled and how much
protection such an approach really
affords.
Much of the biological weapons
capability that has persisted into the
twenty-first century has done so on
the premise that carrying out such
experiments is needed to protect a
state’s own citizens from the mythical
other who is poised to do them harm.
Research programmes aim to develop
medical countermeasures, not causative
agents (but to make antidotes and
vaccines, the causative agent needs to
be fully understood, of course). The
irony, as David R Franz points out in his
chapter, is that increased US concern
over biological threats following the US
anthrax letters attack in 2001 – suspected
of being carried out by mentally unstable
US scientist Bruce Ivins, not by a state
enemy – led to the re-ignition of US
interest in bioweapons. This increased
the number of laboratories holding
dangerous pathogens and the number
of scientists working with them, thus
creating more contexts just like the one
from which Ivins emerged (p. 266). Our
fear of bioweapons may prove to be the
greatest danger.
The most valuable section of the
book is the last – Disarmament and
Non-Proliferation. In this section, a
number of experts were brought together
and invited to give their opinions on the
past and current state of affairs, both
individually and collectively. Of particular
value is the transcript of a roundtable
on the Future of Biothreat Governance
held at Wilton Park, UK in September
2014. This provides unique and in some
cases very personal insights into how
weapons programmes were run, hidden
and justified by those involved in them.
But perhaps most revealing of all is the
opinion that is shared virtually exclusively
REViEWs
by those who know the most about the
potential threat: while no-one really
believes a major bioweapons attack will
ever be launched, no-one is comfortable
thinking it might not be, either. In the
meantime, continued interest in the
subject can help to fund biosecurity
programmes. In turn, this money is used
to fund public health capability for all
potential disease outbreaks, regardless
of whether state actors, terrorists,
criminals, lone actors or nature is
responsible. By helping Liberia to ratify
the Biological Weapons Convention –
as it did on 4 November this year just
before the convention’s Eighth Review
Conference – we may be building a better
defence against nature, the world’s most
dangerous biological actor, and that
cannot be a bad thing. 
Jennifer Cole is Senior Research Fellow,
Resilience and Emergency Management
at RUSI and a Reid Scholar in Health, the
Human Body and Behaviour at Royal
Holloway, University of London.
DOI: 10.1080/03071847.2016.1265839
War in Europe:
1450 to the Present
Jeremy Black
Bloomsbury, 2016
T his is a typically ambitious book by
Jeremy Black. It is an open challenge
to linearity – that is, to explicit or
unstated models of change in warfare
over time – while offering a broad
chronological coverage of those very
changes. This is a very difficult balance
to strike, though he manages it with
tremendous skill. The chronological
structure of the book does creak at
times under the sheer weight of his
encyclopaedic knowledge and his ability
71
16/12/2016 16:00:20