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The Matrix of Biological Disarmament: Strategy, Law, and Technology

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  17 May 2016

Paul H. DeForest
Paul H. DeForest*
Affiliation:
Department of Social Sciences, Illinois Institute of Technology, Chicago, IL 60616
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Abstract

During this century strategy, law, and technology have worked to the distinct advantage of biological arms control over weapons proliferation. Reliable strategies for biological warfare were never formulated. Customary and treaty law severely constrained use of biological weapons. Advances in technology were inadequate to overcome moral and tactical objections to disease as an instrument of war. As the first treaty prohibiting possession of an entire category of weapons, the 1972 Biological Weapons Convention signalled the apparent achievement of biological disarmament.

Subsequently, the rise of genetic engineering and renewal of superpower hostility engendered fear that biological disarmament was threatened by technological advances in biological weapons promoting their increased military utility. Neither the recent past nor the foreseeable future justify such fear. Instead, there is now the opportunity to entirely eliminate biological warfare research, to extend disarmament to chemical weapons, and to redirect resources to the global war against disease.

Type
Articles and Commentaries
Information
Politics and the Life Sciences , Volume 9 , Issue 1: Special Issue: Biotechnology and International Conflict , August 1990 , pp. 21 - 35
Copyright
Copyright © Association for Politics and the Life Sciences 

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