Biological warfare is illegal, and biological weapons are illegal, Annie Jacobsen notes (in Biological War), yet biological weapons exist:
Over 100 years ago, the international community banned the use of biological weapons with the Geneva Protocol of 1925, but by World War II, various nations were developing robust biological weapons programs, including the United States, the Soviet Union, Nazi Germany, and Imperial Japan.
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And then, in November 1969 and without much warning, President Richard Nixon renounced America’s biological weapons program. This led to the 1972 Biological Weapons Convention—the BWC—an international treaty prohibiting the development, production, acquisition, transfer, stockpiling, and use of biological and toxin weapons.
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The Biological Weapons Convention treaty allows for “defensive” biological weapons research, meaning scientists can conduct research involving the same pathogens that could be used for biological warfare—so long as the research warrants to be “for prophylactic, protective, or other peaceful purposes.” In other words, offensive biological weapons research can masquerade as “defensive” in scope.
“The treaty has no protocols for enforcement,” former assistant secretary of state Mallory Stewart tells us.
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In the second half of the Cold War, after signing the treaty, the Soviet Union secretly and illegally developed and stockpiled massive arsenals of biological weapons, including genetically engineered germs.
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A 2025 U.S. State Department compliance report assesses that Russia and North Korea each “maintains an offensive BW [biological weapons] program” in violation of the treaty, while China and Iran are engaged in biological research and activities that raise unresolved compliance issues.
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“The United States maintains that the Soviet program was absorbed, not dismantled, by the Russian Federation,” says the State Department’s special representative to the Biological Weapons Convention, Kenneth D. Ward, “and that program has continued and evolved in violation of Article I and Article II of the BWC.”
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A deadly germ—genetically modified to be human-to-human transmissible, hypervirulent, able to defeat countermeasures, and with no known cure—could be twenty-first-century humans’ last invention.
A law without a court, without an army, is hardly a law at all.
Jim,
Funnily enough that’s one of the reasons I’m in favor of re-establishing the Papal States as key step in the remediation of the Roman Curia, despite the fact that it’s administered by dubiously Catholic individuals at present.
As for modern bioweapons, it’s inevitable and stupid, but perfectly rational. Not every nation can afford, develop, or manage to sneak a nuke into operational existence, particularly under the watchful eye of the various Great Powers, so the cheaper easier deterrence alternative is obviously biological weaponry for them. It’s one of the reasons I’m actually pro-nuclear proliferation, I consider it safer and more controllable than the alternative.
Phileas, we don’t need to further expand the power of the Vatican to resuscitate manly honor and suppress the women and the olds. Even the Congress’s Commerce, Equal Protection, and Naturalization Powers, properly understood, could do that.
As for bioweapons, they have radically different properties and a much-different activation curve. I frankly doubt that they are actually all that useful.
Jim,
I agree, but as a Catholic I still want the house cleaned up over at the Lateran Palace.
With regard to bioweapons, you might be right, but I always liked to think of them as the, “Poor Nations Nuke.” I could be wrong, but I don’t think we’ve actually tried invading a nation armed with them, so they’re at least sufficiently dissuasive as to prevent American military intervention.
Yeah… maybe. But Russia invaded the Ukraine, and some shady motherfuckers were running a billion bioweapons facilities there. As far as I know, nothing was ever released—and the war continues to grind on, I assume.