Good Bugs, Bad Bugs: A Modern Approach for Detecting Offensive Biological Weapons Research

摘要

Monitoring covert offensive biological weapons research from afar has always been a daunting task. The problems facing analysts today are even more difficult, as advances in life sciences and dual-use biotechnology are rapidly spreading the knowledge, equipment, and materials needed to produce crude and sophisticated biological weapons around the world. Unlike nuclear programs, a well-defined and limited set of equipment and material that can be controlled through various import/export controls does not exist. Future monitoring will become more challenging as the distinctions among military, civilian and dual-use research and applications continue to blur. Managing proliferation risks in this environment will constitute the greatest challenge to policymakers in the biological weapons arena over the next two decades. One of the factors that make this new type of analysis challenging is that nearly every nation-state in the world today has some level of biodefense and biotechnology capability. Most government decisionmakers and planners view the life sciences as promising drivers fueling future economic growth. These common trends serve to create a lot of noise that makes it much more difficult than even a few years ago to identify signs of covert biological weapons research and development. The major requirements for dealing successfully with biological challenges today, therefore, are to shape a new conceptual framework and analytical approach sophisticated and rich enough to capture current complexities and dynamics, and to create new policy tools that, taken together, improve the international community's ability to drive biological risks to the lowest possible levels. The search for good indicators of malicious intent, destructive capabilities, or a combination of the two, therefore, must continue. Such indicators need not provide evidence of a smoking gun.