Illogic of the Biological Weapons Taboo

摘要

In an important monograph published in 1961, Thomas Schelling and Morton Halperin argued that arms control and military policy should be committed to the same fundamental security purposes--preventing war, minimizing the costs and risks of arms competition, and curtailing the scope and violence of war in the event it should occur. The strategists, writing primarily about the budding nuclear age and the missiles then being deployed, additionally emphasized that arms controllers and military planners alike should be committed to developing secure arsenals that do not invite war. In particular, especially vulnerable and dangerously provocative weapons systems should be limited because they might tempt or encourage preemptive or even preventive war. In the preface to the 1985 reprint edition, Schelling and Halperin note that this strategic understanding of arms control 'is now widely accepted.' Indeed, their strategic logic continues to have significant influence. Despite the continued utility of the 'strategy of arms control,' we argue in this article that the international community is constructing an ill-considered and potentially dangerous biological weapons taboo that rebukes its fundamental logic. For decades, states attempted to develop an arms control regime that limited both the acquisition and use of biological weapons. However, efforts to limit biological weapons capabilities have now stalled, even as prohibitions on biological weapons use have been maintained and even strengthened. The resulting regime effectively allows states to retain suspicious capabilities that are inevitably viewed as threatening by many of their peers. In turn, relying upon states to uphold a taboo against using these weapons seems increasingly irrelevant in a world where nonstate actors might too readily acquire or develop dangerous capabilities.