New Publication
UPDATE: Professor Kellman Delivers 'Democratization of Mass Violence' Speech at BWC- Apr. 12 (.pdf)
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*This is the pre-peer reviewed version of the article forthcoming in Global Policy, May 2011.
The Biological Weapons Convention and the Democratization of Mass Violence
Barry Kellman
International Security & Biopolicy Institute
Download Available: .doc / .pdf
Abstract
The global governance regime to address the vast dangers of intentionally inflicted disease is ineffectively adaptive to meet emerging challenges. Scientific advances pertaining to manipulation of disease offer profound benefits but also open ominous new capacities for violence. Weaponized disease can transform a few malevolent actors wholly lacking in power from purveyors of localized death into architects of existential crises endangering international security. The historically inexorable relationship between political-economic power and technology for mass violence is shifting – a paradigm shift called the democratization of mass violence. The 7th Review Conference of the Biological Weapons Convention in December could set markers for how the world should address this paradigm shift. Three sets of global policies could reduce dangers of intentionally inflicted disease and promote bioscience’s advance while elevating global attention to public health: (1) worldwide implementation of harmonized measures to secure and account for especially dangerous pathogens and to enable interruption of intentional biothreats; (2) strengthened national reporting obligations and international investigations of suspicious behavior in order to build mutual confidence about national biodefense programs; and (3) implementation of harmonized measures to improve disease surveillance, strengthen resilience to bio-attacks and stanch an attack’s transnational spread.
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The following question is important for global governance: how should the world address dangers of intentionally inflicted disease? It is important because the potential for catastrophic harm due to intentionally inflicted disease is enormous. Yet, there are scant answers to the question. Despite the vast consequences of someone actually inflicting disease, the governance regime to address such dangers is disaggregated – a potpourri of conventions and programs without coherent legal order and therefore ineffectively adaptive to meet emerging challenges.
In December 2011, the United Nations will convene the 7th Review Conference of the Biological WeaponsConvention1 in Geneva. If it passes into history as an unevent – as something that happened to little effect –it would be a wasted opportunity for strengthening international peace and security. There could be a better outcome. At best, the 7th RevCon could be an imminent occasion to set markers for how the world addresses dangers of intentionally inflicted disease. I begin this article by asserting that there is an evolving paradigm shift of considerable significance to global security. For all of human history, an inexorable relationship has existed between political-economic power and technology for mass violence. Entities possessing power also had technology for mass violence; entities that lacked technology for mass violence did not have power.
Over centuries, the concentration of technological capacity in a few states has increasingly become central to the projection of capacities for mass violence. Nuclear weapons are the epitome of this phenomenon. Controlling those states’ capacities for violence – international weapons control – is thus pivotal to international security. I assert that scientific advances pertaining to manipulation of disease are severing the exclusive link between power and technology for mass violence. These advances in genomics, nanotechnology and other micro-sciences offer profound benefits for combating disease, environmental remediation and economic growth, but they also open ominous new capacities to intentionally inflict disease.
Disease agents do not destroy buildings; they do not necessarily destroy flesh. They do not blast. These agents interfere with life processes and are, therefore, generally referred to as bioweapons. It matters less whether the agent is animate; most scientists would suggest that distinguishing agents that are biological from chemical from nano is decreasingly clear. What matters is that weapons agents in this category typically: (1) are mutable such that there are always new agents that can be weaponized; (2) must be produced (particalized) in specialized laboratories; and (3) must be disseminated widely through populations in order to inflict mass violence.
I assert that all of these conditions are becoming more available to actors that in every meaningful sense are wholly lacking in power. Laboratories with specialized equipment are increasingly ubiquitous – proliferating to the point that the term ‘specialized’ has almost lost meaning. Moreover, there are increasing vulnerabilities of broad populations who would be victims of intention-ally inflicted disease.
Bioweapons agents can be made resistant to vaccines or antibiotics or altered to increase their lethality or to evade treatment. Diseases once thought to be eradicated can now be resynthesized, enabling them to spread where there is limited immunity. Smallpox, the deadliest scourge in our species’ history, has been eradicated from nature, but most scientists agree that it can soon (if not now) be created de novo in well-equipped laboratories. Altogether, techniques that were on the frontiers of science only a decade or two ago are rapidly mutating as scientific progress enables new ways to produce lethal catastrophe (see, generally, Tucker, 2010). Today, these techniques are on the horizon. Within a decade, they will be pedestrian. According to the National Academies of Science, ‘The threat spectrum is broad and evolving – in some ways predictably, in other ways unexpectedly. In the future, genetic engineering and other technologies may lead to the development of pathogenic organisms with unique, unpredictable characteristics’.2
In all, advances pertaining to manipulation of disease are spreading mass violence capacities to any small group that is malevolent enough to want to inflict intolerably grievous harm on masses of humanity with concomitant ramifications for the global economy and for public confidence in governance. More than any other instrumentality, disease wielded by malevolent actors can transform those few actors from purveyors of localized death into the architects of existential crises endangering international security.
I refer to this paradigm shift as the democratization of mass violence. This is why the Biological Weapons Convention is important. The BWC is the best available system of global governance for developing security policies to address this paradigm shift.
Yet, for reasons embedded in its history, the BWC is among the weakest of all treaty regimes, lacking institutional capacity to do much of anything. At its inception, President Richard Nixon called it a jackass treaty, and not much has changed in the four decades since. The global governance challenge, therefore, is to determine how this weakling can ascend to meet emerging and profound dangers to human security.
The Biological Weapons Convention’s significance
The BWC’s great accomplishment is to ensconce into international law the absolute prohibition against the intentional infliction of disease – among the strongest norms in international law. Article I outlaws the entire class of bioweapons, broadening the Geneva Protocol’s prohibition against bioweapons use by outlawing their development, production, acquisition and retention. This prohibition applies to all states as a matter of customary international law.3
Humanity has fought disease forever, and we know that its intentional infliction has consequences too catastrophic to tolerate. It is the ultimate indiscriminate weapon in terms of failing to distinguish between combatants and civilians. It is violence unbounded in every sense: available to unidentifiable groups; capable of causing enormously acute damage to victims anywhere in the world; requiring diverse and sundry capabilities to reduce its impact.
It matters not whether the Biological Weapons Convention imposes a prohibition against intentional infliction of disease or is merely the most recent iteration of that prohibition. What matters is that intentionally inflicted disease is not normal crime. The potential for tens of thousands of casualties, perhaps far more, makes this a crime of the very highest order. In view of the role of disease in human history and the universal fear of its spread, for someone to inflict disease intentionally is to undertake not a crime against one or a few persons but to undertake a crime against the human species, literally a crime against humanity.
In this regard, one issue can be conclusively resolved: to whom does the Biological Weapons Convention’s binding obligation against the intentional infliction of disease apply? Does it apply exclusively to states parties that have agreed to that obligation, or does it also apply to everyone including terrorists and other criminals? These questions continue to be debated, manifesting an untenable misunderstanding of why international law dictates that the BWC’s normative avowal must apply to everyone: both states and non-state actors.
Declaring the intentional infliction of disease a crime against humanity means, by definition, that it cannot be any less a crime, regardless of who commits it. Indeed, BWC Article IV requires states parties to enact legal measures to ensure the extension of Article I’s prohibition to private persons, and United Nations Security Council Resolution 1540 obligates all states to enact legal measures against the proliferation and use of weapons of mass destruction, including biological weapons. Altogether, if there is any doubt over whether the BWC’s normative prohibition applies to criminal or other non-state conduct, then such doubt should be clarified. But there should be no doubt.
The BWC’s enforcement quandary
The BWC was the second of the triad of treaties about weapons of mass destruction, following the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty. The two treaties had one conspicuous difference: the prohibition against nuclear weapons proliferation carried an intricately empowered enforcement system in the International Atomic Energy Agency, but the prohibition against bioweapons proliferation carried no comparable system whatsoever. The deficiency of the BWC became more pronounced when the Chemical Weapons Convention – the third treaty about weapons of mass destruction (WMD) – entered into force in 1997. The CWC built the most complex verification system of any multilateral treaty, leaving the BWC the sole WMD nonproliferation regime bereft of an enforcement system.
This inadequacy had serious consequences. In the early 1990s came the near simultaneous revelation of the Soviet Union’s two decades of violating the BWC and of Iraq’s development of bioweapons stockpiles. These programs, as well as later discovery of the South African bioweapons program and growing suspicions of other nations’ bioweapons programs, prompted vigorous assertions that having an unenforceable norm against bioweapons was insufficient: there are bad states that have violated and will violate that norm if they can do so without risk of discovery.
One school emerged to argue for a BWC enforcement scheme modeled on that of the CWC. Another school emerged to argue for negotiated arrangements among like-minded nations to take joint actions to achieve the norm. Both schools emerged from the same diagnosis of the BWC’s enforcement infirmity; they diverged on whether the solution should be a global structure or a web of politically aligned commitments.
Throughout the 1990s, formal negotiations on a BWC enforcement scheme saw proponents of a global structure in the ascendance. The result was the Biological Weapons Convention Protocol, calling for a scheme of confidence-enhancing visits to facilities having capabilities associated with bioweapons and for an international bureaucracy to undertake these visits and related functions. The Protocol became something of a cause célèbre to proponents of neoliberalism and a bête noire to proponents of neoconservatism – not a comfortable place to be in the late 1990s.
The election of President George Bush settled the issue. Within months after inauguration, President Bush announced that the United States would not join the Protocol because the scheme of confidence-enhancing visits would jeopardize the intellectual property of US biotechnology sectors and would do little to reduce the potential for violent infliction of disease whether from states or non-states.
The first claim about private sectors losing confidential business information was something of a distraction – the CWC had implemented rigorous methods for protecting such intellectual property, and those methods had been grafted strongly into the Protocol. The claim supported a perception that the Bush administration cared more about preserving US technological superiority than about international arms control. It also fed suspicions that the US rejected the Protocol in order to protect information relating to US biodefense programs.
The second claim about the scant potential for reducing biothreats was more substantive. Amid proliferating applications of bioscience that enable unidentifiable groups to inflict a disease catastrophe, the critical challenge is how to prevent wrongful behavior from any source. A question in the context of the BWC is: does the Protocol offer the right answer to the right question – is a system for monitoring activities in selected laboratories effective for detecting hostile uses of the life sciences?
Many observers doubt the utility of such monitoring of activities. If a state intends to violate the treaty, it can readily do so at a near-infinite number of undeclared biological laboratory facilities lacking distinctive features. In sum, verification modalities are a very expensive way to gain information about sites where bioweapons risks are negligible; such modalities would provide scant information about where bioweapons are in fact being prepared and would not meaningfully address threats associated with subnational groups.
Ultimately, the Protocol seems to make less and less sense with recognition of technological proliferation. If anyone can intentionally inflict disease, attention should be devoted to stopping them wherever they might be.
By focusing on specific sites recognized as sophisticated in the life sciences, the Protocol looks where it can shine a light, not on where problems might be found. Yet, from a diplomatic perspective, the Protocol was the product of a decade-long process that manifested the legitimacy of international law in the making. BWC states parties had negotiated in good faith; the US had been engaged throughout. A decade is a long time to waste. Here in direct counterpoise was a staunch commitment to strengthening international institutions vis-à-vis increasing recognition of the Protocol’s misdirectedness for sustaining international peace and security.
The Biological Weapons Convention’s crucible: October–December 2001
In the midst of debates about the value of onsite inspections at bioscience facilities as called for by the Protocol, about the implications of proliferating scientific progress that might enable hostile infliction of disease, about whether the BWC should focus on prohibited conduct committed by non-state actors – amidst all these debates came the anthrax attacks in October 2001.
The attacks proved that intentional infliction of disease is not a myth; it has happened and could recur. Furthermore, the attacks demonstrated bioweapons’ capacity to cause enormous disruption, with huge financial implications and raising questions about whether governments should have been better prepared. Ultimately, the attacks were contained with five fatalities. Seven years later, the FBI identified the perpetrator (Dr Ivens, who committed suicide).
For the community that focuses on bioweapons threats, the anthrax attacks heightened attention to the BWC 5th Review Conference in December 2001. The US rejection of the Protocol was the top agenda item, but now the US had been victimized; certainly, everyone associated with the BWC should reconsider their views and be open to new strategies. The supervening question going into the 5th RevCon was about process. The substantive objections to the Protocol had been noted and the attacks had happened; now the mission was to advance a process that could be both substantively productive and multilaterally engaging.
Instead, the 5th RevCon was an unprecedented diplomatic disaster. For nearly three weeks, states parties engaged in sculpting a consensus final declaration to be approved on the final Friday. As of the final Thursday evening, a favorable outcome on how to advance the world’s objective against intentionally inflicted disease seemed in sight. Too much was at stake to forsake consensus.
Then, on Friday at 4:30 p.m., the US undersecretary of state, John Bolton, rose to call for discontinuation of the process for strengthening the BWC. Thus, in a tense conference that had focused for weeks on how to advance the BWC process despite the Protocol’s rejection, the US at the last minute proposed disbanding the only extant forum for strengthening the convention. Bolton’s proposal provoked an eruption. In the ensuing chaos, the states parties agreed to the unprecedented tactic of suspending the Review Conference for one year.
In 2002, after a year of intense diplomatic wrangling, the resumed RevCon adopted an intersessional workplan of yearly meetings to consider: national legislation to implement treaty obligations; biosecurity measures for protecting pathogens; response measures for disease outbreaks, natural or manmade; and a bioscience code of conduct. This workplan was renewed at the 6th Review Conference in 2006 with modified topics. Importantly, the 6th Review Conference fortified the three-person Implementation Support Unit with responsibilities for managing the intersessional process and promoting the convention’s universality. The years since the initiation of the intersessional workplans have been good for the BWC in terms of raising awareness of global obligations to improve pathogen containment practices that complicate wrongful access to particularly dangerous pathogens. The meetings have highlighted the importance of criminal law enforcement both for preventing biothreats and for responding to bio-attacks. They have explored the utility of bioscience codes of ethics. For these and many other accomplishments, the BWC since the 5th RevCon may be seen as a modest success of international deliberation in this domain.
From the perspective of addressing current challenges to international peace and security, however, the BWC’s record might be differently graded. No binding obligations and no international authoritative structures have emerged from the BWC. From the perspective of any actual governance change, initiation of a program or reduction of any specific biothreat, the BWC has done remarkably little. The intersessional workplans have called for states parties to discuss a few crucial topics – discuss but not take action. Nearly everyone remotely associated with the BWC agrees that the magnitude of threats is rising far more rapidly than are global mechanisms to counter those threats.
Optimizing the Biological Weapons Convention
Nothing is off-limits for the 7th RevCon. Having devoted the 1990s to discussing how to strengthen the Convention’s enforcement scheme and the last decade to heightening awareness about issues of pathogen containment, public health and law enforcement, the BWC process now has no definitive agenda in place, no ongoing initiatives that dominate its attention.
Today, the BWC is a tabula rasa and therefore can look forward unencumbered by passé doctrines or vain requirements. In this regard, the 7th Review Conference is a threshold of opportunity to confront formally the paradigm shift that I earlier referred to as the democratization of mass violence. As the dangers associated with malevolent infliction of disease change, and as the likely perpetrators of those dangers expand beyond states, efforts to empower the treaty should change accordingly. To do that, there must be a recognition that arms control is not what it used to be. Traditional mechanisms for limiting state development of lethal capacities must be broadly supplemented with new techniques for early detection of malevolent schemes and effective preparedness against attacks. Equally as important, there must be institutional capacity to implement these techniques by working with international and regional organizations and with the private sector.
In brief, there are global policies that could substantially reduce dangers of intentionally inflicted diseases while simultaneously promoting bioscience’s advance and elevating global attention to public health. The following three recommended policy directions are offered as a useful guide for action at the upcoming 7th RevCon.
1. Worldwide implementation of harmonized measures to secure and account for especially dangerous pathogens and to enable interruption of intentional biothreats.
Improving information integration and analysis is critical to enabling law enforcement, public health, scientific and intelligence communities to prevent bio-attacks by early identification of bio-offenders. Today, too much is unknown about the location of particularly dangerous pathogen strains, and there is inadequate capability to track movement of such strains globally. Well-accepted techniques exist for denying unauthorized access to dangerous materials such as requiring registration of labs that work with dangerous pathogens – registration depends upon adoption of security techniques. Yet, these techniques remain insufficiently implemented and monitored in too many places. Comparable gaps would not be tolerated with regard to nuclear materials.
The BWC can promote globally accepted pathogen security measures that make it more difficult for potential perpetrators of intentionally inflicted disease to pursue their plans. Systems should be strengthened to improve collaborative information sharing about high- risk bioscience activities. The BWC can forge linkages with relevant standard-setting organizations to develop guidelines about which pathogens present the most acute threats and how best to contain them securely. A compliance monitoring process, analogous to an International Organization for Standardization (ISO) process, could certify facilities that meet harmonized security standards and, as appropriate, help build capacity and promote training in developing nations.
Moreover, the BWC should advocate comprehensive national criminal legislation that enables transnational law enforcement cooperation by sharing information, conducting investigations and accountability for use of bioweapons, whether by states or non-state actors. Useful microbial forensic techniques for diagnosing attack agents are gaining scientific credence, but substantial legal problems impede multilateral use of these techniques. The BWC should identify how emerging principles of international criminal legal assistance can be harmonized to enhance attribution capabilities for wrongful use ⁄ release of disease agents and ensure that investigations proceed expeditiously.
2. Strengthened national reporting obligations and international investigations of suspicious behavior in order to build mutual confidence about national biodefense programs.
Some biodefense research is difficult to distinguish from conducting a bioweapons program. To avoid misconceptions that foment suspicions, states should have information that sustains confidence about other states’ disinterest in developing bioweapons. Expending vast resources on superfluous verification systems is not the point. This is an argument for updated confidence-building measures that reveal enough about national bioscience activities to deflate suspicions of other states’ biodefense initiatives.
The BWC could usefully initiate a process for identifying and implementing confidence-building measures that explicitly target concerns about national bioweapons programs. That process should respect the fact that national biodefense programs may look like bioweapons programs; the difference has to do with the degree of transparency: covert biodefense facilities are suspicious.
Altogether, this process should have two pillars. First, the BWC should have an independent capacity to gather open-source or freely proffered information that might pertain to suspicious bioweapons programs. This is not about obligatory onsite verification inspections. It is about delegating a research capacity for: (1) identifying data streams and other indicators that might discern prohibited bioweapons activities; and (2) proposing useful techniques for optimizing how these streams and indicators could ensure confidence in multilateral compliance with the BWC.
Second, the BWC should resolve that the United Nations Mechanism for Investigations of Alleged Use of Biological Weapons (under the Secretary General’s authority) be expanded to include alleged production. The term production refers to activities that are not incidental to bioscientific research or technological development but which are very difficult to justify otherwise than for building weapons to inflict disease. The criteria for invoking the mechanism must disregard most bioscience. Only in extreme cases should the Secretary General utilize his or her discretion in invoking such an investigation. If invoked, however, the investigation should be capable of resolving the doubts that provoked it initially. Ultimately, the expanded mechanism should serve as a deterrent.
3. Implementation of harmonized measures to improve disease surveillance, strengthen resilience to bio-attacks and stanch an attack’s transnational spread.
Strengthening public health preparedness to cope with disease outbreaks can reduce vulnerabilities to intentionally inflicted disease. A perpetrator is unlikely to inflict a disease against an effectively immunized population or try to spread it in a secured site. If the attack occurs, more lives can be saved and damage contained in prepared communities.
Yet, no one can claim that the world is well prepared to minimize the suffering that would ensue from intentionally inflicted disease. There is no adequate global preparedness strategy, whether inside the BWC or otherwise; nor is it clear who should be responsible for this strategy.
An initial element of this strategy is sharpened disease surveillance and detection techniques to optimize accurate identification of what has happened and what should be done. Global response coordination among key sectors – health, law enforcement, environment, agriculture protection and military – should be improved. Such coordination faces multiple challenges: strengthening food defense, promoting cross-border cooperation and developing rapid response plans that include quarantine to limit the spread of contagion.
Preparedness of medical countermeasures for curing victims is pivotal. Realistically, such medical countermeasures must be produced and stockpiled before the attack; surge production to meet bio-attacks will leave far too many people dead. However, advance planning is complicated by the distinctiveness of agents – each requiring its own countermeasures – and by the logistical complexities of delivering medical countermeasures to victims in time. These complications are magnified by an array of legal barriers and gaps that render well-intentioned efforts to promote biopreparedness substantially ineffective.
The BWC could usefully establish a biopreparedness working group to focus on the following. (1) What are the unique characteristics of preparedness for intention- ally inflicted disease that are atypical for naturally occurring disease and therefore are within the domain of the BWC? (2) What options could improve global biopreparedness against bio-attacks? (3) What obstacles exist to those options, including legal obstacles? (4) How can international organizations and other governance systems promote biopreparedness by reducing obstacles and incentivizing progress?
Optimizing engagement through the Biological Weapons Convention process
The BWC process should usefully engage entities and ideas that will advance the BWC’s mission, whether from public, private or social entities. Just as emerging threats to international peace and security are not limited to states, the stakeholder communities that must devote capacities and expertise to countering those threats are not at all limited to states. The democratization of mass violence must call, in turn, for the democratization of global security.
The ironic good fortune in this context is that there are very real and substantial benefits that should be welcome to health professionals, scientists, pharmaceuticals, development proponents and law enforcers. But these benefits are available only to those who participate. Yet, the BWC process for developing any initiative is remarkably vague, and there are no easy ways to engage similar-thinking persons. It is imperative to reward pro-active contributions, but little has been done to define relevant contributions or to incentivize the various contributors.
From the perspective of global governance, perhaps the most important outcome of the 7th RevCon would be to establish a process whereby working groups of experts could address, on a continuing and progressive basis, some of the substantive challenges identified above.
Conclusions
The first priority for the BWC 7th RevCon is for some (any?) world leaders to highlight the paradigm shift associated with the democratization of mass violence. In announcing the United States National Strategy for Countering Biological Threats at the 2009 BWC States Parties Meeting, Undersecretary of State Tauscher auspiciously highlighted the Convention’s significance. However, as of writing, not a single national chief executive or leader of an international organization has articulated a commitment to implementing the above-discussed proposals within the BWC process or specified how that process can undertake a reconstruction of international peace and security to meet emerging threats associated with intentionally inflicted disease. Absent devotion of some political capital, prospects for progress in building security against tomorrow’s dangers are dim indeed.
Altogether, dangers of intentionally inflicted disease shrink the planet into an interdependent neighborhood, posing unprecedented dangers and opportunities for global governance. Achieving security entails adoption of policies that focus on humanity as a species entity and that are implemented everywhere with centralized governance. However imperfect the extant global regimes for peace and security may be, it is imperative that they be ardently engaged. The Biological Weapons Convention 7th Review Conference is a moment for leadership that should not be ignored.
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Notes
1. The Convention on the Prohibition of the Development, Production and Stockpiling of Bacteriological (Biological) and Toxin Weapons and on their Destruction, United States Treaties, Vol. 26, p. 583; Treaties and Other International Acts Series, No. 8062; United Nations Treaty Series, Vol. 1015, p. 163 (signed 10 April 1972; entered into force 26 March 1976).
2. Committee on Advances in Technology and the Prevention of Their Application to Next Generation Biowarfare Threats, National Research Council of the National Academies, Globalization, Biosecurity, and the Future of the Life Science (2006), p. 49.
3. This has long been the position of the United States government. See United States Department of State, Bureau of Verification, Compliance and Implementation, Case Study: Yellow Rain. Fact Sheet (1 October 1 2005). Available from: http://www.state.gov/ documents/organization/57428.pdf [Accessed 11 September 2007].
4. United States National Strategy for Countering Biological Threats. Available from: http://www.whitehouse.gov/sites/default/files/National_Strategy_for_Coun... [Accessed 17 February 2011].
Reference
Tucker, J. (2010) ‘Preventing the Misuse of Gene Synthesis, Issues in Science and Technology, 26 (3), pp. 23–27.
Selected Readings
Beard, J. M. (2007) ‘The Shortcomings of Indeterminacy in Arms Control Regimes: The Case of the Biological Weapons Convention’, American Journal of International Law, 101 (271).
Cole, L. A. (1997) The Eleventh Plague: The Politics of Biological and Chemical Warfare. New York: W. J. Freeman and Company.
Furukawa, K., Revill, J., Dando, M. and van der Bruggen, K. (2009) Biosecurity: Origins, Transformations and Practices (New Security Challenges). Palgrave Macmillan.
GAO Report (2002) ‘Arms Control: Efforts to Strengthen the Biological Weapons Convention’, for the Chairman, Subcommittee on National Security, Veterans Affairs, and International Relations, Committee on Government Reform, House of Representatives (September).
Kellman, B. (2007) Bioviolence: Preventing Biological Terror and Crime. New York: Cambridge University Press.
Littlewood, J. (2005) The Biological Weapons Convention: A Failed Revolution. Aldershot: Ashgate.
Ouagrham-Gormley, S. B. and Vogel, K. M. (2010) ‘The Social Context Shaping Bioweapons (Non)proliferation’, Biosecurity and Bioterrorism: Biodefense Strategy, Practice, and Science’, 8 (1), pp. 9–24.
Rapper, B. and McLeish, C. (2007) A Web of Prevention: Biological Weapons, Life Sciences and the Future Governance of Research. Earthscan.
Roberts, G. B. (2003) ‘Arms Control without Arms Control: The Failure of the Biological Weapons Convention Protocol and a New Paradigm for Fighting the Threat of Biological Weapons’. Institute for National Security Studies, NSS Occasional Paper 49.
Tucker, J. B. and Koblentz, G. D. (2009) ‘The Four Faces of Microbial Forensics, Biosecurity and Bioterrorism: Biodefense Strategy, Practice, and Science, 7 (4), pp. 389–397.
Author Information
Barry Kellman, President, International Security & Biopolicy Institute, and Professor, DePaul University College of Law.
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