Biological Weapons - an existential threat

Lessons learned from the Cold War

During the 1962 Cuban missile crisis, John F. Kennedy and Nikita Khrushchev held the fate of humanity in their hands as the world teetered on the brink of annihilation. At the time, the USA and the Soviet Union controlled over 30,000 nuclear warheads between them.

Between 1962 and 1995 the world has come perilously close to nuclear war on at least five occasions due to accidents and misunderstandings:

• During the Cuban Missile Crisis in 1962, a Soviet submarine captain almost launched a nuclear torpedo at U.S. forces, believing war had started, but was stopped by his second-in-command, Vasili Arkhipov.?
• In 1979, a computer error at NORAD falsely indicated a Soviet nuclear attack, prompting bomber crews to prepare for action before the mistake was discovered.?
• NATO's Able Archer 83 exercise in 1983 was so realistic that it convinced some Soviet leaders it was a prelude to an actual attack, nearly prompting a nuclear response.?
• Also in 1983, Soviet lieutenant colonel Stanislav Petrov averted disaster by identifying a false alarm in their early-warning system as a malfunction rather than an actual U.S. missile launch.?
• In 1995, a Norwegian research rocket was mistaken for a potential U.S. missile strike, causing Russian forces to prepare for a retaliatory strike before realising the error.?

The Cold War having ended, we may mistakenly believe that these sorts of existential threats are now behind us. There are good reasons, however, to believe that we’re now in a far more precarious position than before.

The tools needed to engineer harmful pathogens are no longer confined to state-run laboratories but are within reach of smaller groups and even individuals. Gene editing technology like CRISPR is relatively uncomplicated and now within reach of non-state actors with even a modest budget.?

Here is a disturbing question: How many people alive today have the motivation, expertise, and resources to do indiscriminate harm to humanity by creating and deploying biological weapons? The Venn diagram of danger encompasses an identifiable set of overlapping actors.?

• There are those with misplaced grievances, ranging from ideological zealots to those suffering from severe mental illness.?
• There are individuals equipped with the requisite scientific knowledge and technical skills, often gained through advanced education and professional experience.?
• There are also those who have access to the necessary resources, whether through legitimate means or illicit networks.?

The intersection of these groups—those with the motivation, expertise, resources, and predisposition to cause large-scale harm—now translates into a significantly larger number of potential threats than existed in 1962, when there were only two men with their fingers poised over the proverbial “red buttons”.?

Even more worrying is the continuation of the Cold War deterrence strategy, aptly abbreviated as MAD (Mutually Assured Destruction). The five near-miss examples cited above, should be warning enough against MAD being a long-standing strategy. And yet it remains. And if the logic is considered palatable in the context of nuclear weapons, why would the same argument not be made for nation-states developing and stockpiling biological weapons? Existential threat seems to be a chess piece that the powers-that-be are quite comfortable to move around the board.?

Aside from the potential for accidental catastrophe, it is a fallacy that Mutually Assured Destruction is a deterrent for ideological zealots.? Many religious fundamentalists consider the ending of this world to be a necessary fulfilment of prophecy, and a stepping stone to an eternity in the presence of their deity.?

The ongoing threat associated with nuclear weapons and the new threat associated with biological weapons are just two of a number of existential threats facing humanity right now. These are worsened by increasing political polarisation within countries, the rise of fanatical nationalism, the undermining of supra-national and multilateral institutions, and the perpetuation of global inequities that fuel discontent and ideological zeal.

Perhaps instead of talking about Mutually Assured Destruction we should be looking over our geo-political and ideological borders and adopting the philosophy of, “We’re only safe, when we’re all safe.”

If we used just a fraction of what is spent on “defence” to improve the lives of the poorest and most disenfranchised people in the world, we’d be addressing the threat at its roots.?People with nothing to lose are not concerned with preserving our way of life.

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