As a field of study international relations has always been concerned with the problem of war. Since the second world war much attention has been given to the impact of weapons of mass destruction, most commonly in the form of nuclear weapons. More recently, a wider variety of issues have been addressed by the field, notably widening its coverage of economic, welfare and social issues. Three broad approaches to international relations have emerged: political realism, pluralism, and globalism.

Biotechnology represents a major technological revolution which will have enormous impact on the world at many levels. One impact which cannot be ignored is its potential for weaponry. This paper assesses the three international relations approaches with respect to their elucidation of biotechnology and its potential for violent and aggressive applications.

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.

Recent advances in the biosciences and biotechnology erode confidence in the reliability of the Biological Weapons Convention (1972). During its review conferences (1980, 1986) concerns were expressed as to the military misuse of civil research. Although some improvements were achieved at these conferences, there still exist major deficiencies related to the definition of substances and activities to be controlled, to verification and to cooperation (transfer of technology). It is suggested that in light of the positive international climate an entirely new regime should be built. This endeavor might draw on experience acquired in environmental treaty making. An institution should be entrusted with adapting the scope of the regime (controlled substances and activities) to scientific progress, with monitoring compliance, and with organizing cooperation. Thus would be matched the rigidity of international law with the flexibility required by science and politics.

Arms control is not about agreements, but rather deals with creating enhanced security and international stability. Such objectives are difficult to realize in the field of biological and toxin weapons. The 1972 convention which bans them contains neither enforcement nor verification mechanisms. Rapid advancements in the fields of biochemistry and genetic engineering provide enormous potential for developing novel toxin weapons that defy virtually all conventional verfication methodologies. Moreover, it is widely assumed that the 1972 agreement has been violated by the Soviet Union and its client states in various parts of the world. This undermines the agreement's credibility as an effective international tool to prevent the exploitation of science and technology for ever more egregious weapons. Despite the troubled past and uncertain future of arms control in this area, every moral government must attempt to make arms control a viable element in the fight against the proliferation and use of biological and toxin weapons.

This article analyses the accomplishments and shortcomings of the 1972 Biological and Toxin Weapons Convention and recent attempts to strengthen it. It examines why developing countries show little interest in these efforts. Neither do they seem intent on acquiring this weapons system. Might this situation change? To find out, the article examines past thrid world conflicts, focusing especially on those where chemical weapons have seen use. The lessons from the past are applied to assess the possibility of a country acquiring, then employing biological weapons in future conflicts as an adjunct to, or instead of, chemical arms. Finally, suggestions are made as to possible steps that the international community can take to lessen the threat of biological warfare generally and to involve third world countries in the on-going attempts to strengthen the Convention.

The U.S. Army conducts the Biological Defense Research Program to provide medical protection for U.S. military personnel against the threat of biological weapons. The unclassified medical research program is consistent with the Biological Weapons Convention, which prohibits the production and stockpiling of biological and toxin weapons, and encourages the international exchange of scientific and medical information on the prevention and treatment of infectious diseases. The program is the source of secondary benefits to civilian public health in the form of vaccine and drug development, diagnostic capability, and contributions to the world body of knowledge on infectious diseases. As the executive agent for the program, the Army submits descriptions of the work conducted under the program to Congress as part of its budget request, and provides numerous other responses to Congressional scrutiny of the program. Internal monitoring of the program is conducted from the perspectives of safety, compliance with regulatory agencies, quality assurance, and close administrative and technical oversight of contracts.

The biological defense research program maintained by the Department of Defense as a deterrent to the potential use of biological warfare against United States forces or national interests has been subjected to intense criticism. Concerns center on developments in the protective programs and the potential for new offensive developments through the application of biotechnology. The arms control activities intended to preclude any offensive developments are reviewed which point out the relative ineffectiveness of these control mechanisms. The nature, scope and direction of the biological defense research program and the openness of the program are noted. The proliferation of biological warfare capabilities adds to the urgency of an adequate defense program. The political nature of the problem and its relationship to control of biological warfare is examined and the interplay between the technical and the political roles leads to a potential solution. Key attributes of a control program should be enhanced efforts to develop the political framework to achieve effective control mechanisms while maintaining a complementary biological defense research program as the only effective deterrent at this time.

The Biological Weapons Convention (BWC) is widely regarded as a treaty whose provisions are difficult to verify because of the paucity of measures to verify compliance within the treaty framework and the nature of the weapons themselves. Advances in biotechnology and their effect on the perceived military utility of biological weapons have focused international attention on this issue. This article examines the concepts of “adequate” and “effective” verification and argues that the treaty falls under the definition of adequate verification in the United States. For other countries, however, the lack of verification measures is of greater concern. The article describes measures that should be added to the BWC to detect violations and promote compliance with the treaty. These include improved methods of resolving allegations of noncompliance, increased reporting requirements for activities permitted under the treaty, greater openness in biological research, and inspections of laboratories and other facilities.

The articles by Alan Russell and Winfried Lang make an excellent but somewhat frightening combination. The former deals with the emerging international challenges of biotechnology and the latter with institutional or regime responses. This combination is sobering because the potential challenges to international stability outlined by Russell give the appearance of easily overwhelming the regulatory regimes suggested by Lang. Growth in biotechnology is part of a more general acceleration of scientific discovery and technological innovation which threatens to overwhelm existing regulatory mechanisms. Developments in biotechnology, however, are much more challenging than in other fields because of both the threat they pose to established values and because of the relative cheapness with which “designer weapons” could potentially be produced.

On November 25, 1969 Richard Nixon announced that because of the “massive, unpredictable, and potentially uncontrollable consequences” of biological weapons, the United States would never use these weapons, would destroy all existing stocks, and would confine its research to strictly defined measures of defense (Harris, 1987:193). This unilateral renunciation followed an extensive review by the National Security Council of U.S. chemical and biological warfare policy, which lasted six months and involved every relevant agency in the U.S. government and which concluded that U.S. biological warfare capabilities provided no compelling military advantages (Tucker, 1984-85:61). Three years later the Biological and Toxin Weapons Convention (BWC) was signed; it was the first postwar arms control agreement to elminate an entire class of weapons from the arsenals of states (U.S. Arms Control and Disarmament Agency, 1982:122). The treaty was ratified unanimously by the U.S. Senate in 1974, and over 100 nations have acceded to it. This arms control achievement has been attributed in part to the serious doubts which many countries, including the United States, shared about the military value of biological weapons (Harris, 1987:205-6). Within a decade of the signing of this treaty, however, the development of recombinant-DNA (deoxyribonucleic acid) technology had raised the possibility of a new and more effective form of biological warfare.

DeForest offers a closely reasoned and persuasive analysis of how the characteristics of biological weapons have affected nations' perceptions of their utility and acceptability. He shows how such perceptions bear in turn of efforts to outlaw biological weapons, even as science and technology are expanding the potential for their use. His paper's historical perspective, broadly researched data, and intriguing analytical approach will measurably enhance readers' understanding of the arms control process.

In so far as any new technology or information in biology or biomedicine is also potentially relevant to biological warfare (BW), and therefore to the Biological Defense Research Program (BDRP), BDRP is equivalent to a biore-search program, making it, ipso facto, unnecessary. The papers by Dashiell and Dasey reviewed herein certainly present this equivalence and provide very little, if any, justification of BDRP as having a unique, distinctive military role requiring budgetary dispensations. In fact, the only specific military role mentioned for BDRP, that of protecting personnel, would utilize military means developed for chemical warfare.

In agreement with the overwhelming number of experts, I certainly share the view of Chevier and Hansen that the Biological Weapons Convention needs to be strengthened. Of course it is still a matter of discussion whether the military utility of biological and toxin weapons (hereafter, respectively, BW and TW) changed after the introduction of biotechnology. It is impossible, however, to ignore the 1986 statement of the U.S. Department of Defense (1988), that:

… perhaps the most significant event in the history of biological weapons development has been the advent of biotechnology. It enables the development of new microorganisms and products with new, unorthodox characteristics… Conceptually, then, a nation or terrorist group can design a biological weapon to meet a variety of contingencies or needs… The break through and the subsequent achievements make biological warfare much more feasible and effective for countries which either are not bound by the convention or which choose to violate it.

When I agreed to review L. Cole's book Clouds of Secrecy: The Army's Germ Warfare Tests over Populated Areas (PLS, February 1989), I did so because the subject is interesting and important. I did not know Cole, nor had I read any of his previous work. To the editor of the PLS and, implicitly, to its readers, I committed to appraise the book as fairly as I could. As anyone whose working life is spent writing knows, much work goes into producing a book. I regard criticizing a book as a serious responsibility, because I know the labor that the author has gone through before the first copy is printed.

Modern science has made it easy for fertile women to become pregnant by artificial insemination. And childless couples have been able to find women willing, for a fee, to accept insemination by a prospective father and agree to transfer custody of the resulting child to the father. Enterprises designed to match willing mothers and sperm-donating fathers have established themselves. The central public policy dilemma raised by this union of technology and the ancient desire for issue of one's own loins—is it wiser for the legal system to provide its normal protections to the participants in surrogacy arrangements or withdraw from the field—was brought to national attention by the Baby M case.

This much I recently learned: don't expect your audience to react to what you say when you talk about ideological critique. Some people love anything with “ideology” in it. They will congratulate you for every use of that term. Others hate the very word and they will shower you with questions they had ready before you even started. I can sympathize with both, I really can; “ideology” is an exciting topic, but that is small comfort if there is something you want to get across. So let me say clearly and right form the start: what I am going to do here is quite boring for those who are heavily into ideological critique, and it is grist off the mill for those who hate it.

I will discuss what people mean when they use the phrase “ideological critique” and I will suggest that they talk about different things at different occasions. Each of those things can be important but they should be kept apart because what one ought to do about it is different in each case. For that reason, the conceptual scheme I will propose is relevant both for theoretical and for practical reasons.