THE SHIELD OF ACHILLES (115 page)

For both Germany and Japan, the utility of antiballistic missile defenses can be very high, both as a hedge against nuclear attacks (or missile attacks with other warheads of mass destruction) and, just as important, as a means of reassuring their respective publics that a national deterrent is not necessary. Thatcher's program of ballistic missile defense development makes a great deal more sense in this antiproliferation role, than as a force for states already possessing nuclear weapons. To the extent that the United States supplies technical assistance for such defenses, this will require a modification of the Antiballistic Missile (ABM) treaty. This is, I believe, well worth the diplomatic cost.
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The contribution of international law to preventing major-state proliferation is limited. Germany and Japan are states with representative institutions that can legitimately claim the rights of sovereignty to choose the means of their own protection. Insofar as the peace and stability of the entire international system is jeopardized by the multipolarity such proliferation brings in its wake, there are grounds for condemnation and perhaps even some sort of sanctions, but these are the sort of steps that isolate
rather than reassure a state and thus tend to radicalize the domestic politics of a democratic state with problematic consequences for its security policy. Rather the role of international society, and its rules, is as a benchmark: it tells us what steps are disfavored, but it does not tell us what to do once these fateful steps have been taken. The renewal of the prophylactic Nonproliferation Treaty (NPT) must be taken as an important accomplishment, although the treaty doesn't specify effective remedies for its violation. Both Japan and Germany are signatories, and despite hard bargaining to the contrary, no new American nuclear guarantees to other states were extracted as a price for the agreement. Such guarantees—particularly to the former Warsaw Pact states and the states of the former Soviet Union—would have run the risk of undermining the tie that binds Germany to the West, because these guarantees put Germany in the position of an unwilling, and unarmed, co-guarantor who might be dragged into a nuclear conflict. We should not want to put Germany in the situation that Japan now finds itself in with respect to the American guarantee to South Korea.

Major-state proliferation that risks multipolarity is the most important, but not the most intractable, part of a nonproliferation agenda for the society of states. That dubious status is reserved for the medium-size state that is a party to a long-standing dispute and feels the necessity of acquiring nuclear weapons, either for an advantage in that dispute or to protect against its adversary's gaining an advantage by a timely nuclear deployment of its own. India and Pakistan, Israel and Iraq, Brazil and Argentina, China and Taiwan, Iran and its several targets—all either have nuclear weapons or have at one time had active programs to acquire such weapons. Insofar as such states develop a capacity to deter Western intervention, they check the West's power to enforce international norms, as we saw in the Gulf War. This, too, is a threat to the society of states, because the West—and particularly the United States—underwrites the stability of that society.

There are two ways we might approach such a problem: we could expect the great market-state powers to choose sides in each potential conflict, ad hoc, and give those great powers a free hand to resolve matters by mediation or force; or we could set up rules that specify sanctions (including force) whenever the acquisition of nuclear weapons violates international understandings like the NPT and the MTCR, or is done in contemplation of international aggression. The successful Gulf War action was an amalgam of both approaches, but so was the Bosnian debacle. The latter experience suggests that relying on the West to act forcibly outside immediate threats to its well-being is impractical, even when it is clear that such inaction can ultimately reduce the West's ability to deter or to act.

To date, the only successful examples of active counterproliferation are the Israeli and coalition attacks on Iraq in 1981 and 1991, respectively. These can hardly provide a precedent for action generally. It is more likely that the buyout of North Korean nuclear capacity, should it prove successful, will provide a model for the future. Certainly the South African renunciation of its nuclear program seems to fit within a market-state paradigm—exchanging military power of dubious utility for economic relationships that promise development and investment. But what of the “rogue state”? Is it realistic to think that radical states can be bought off?

Perhaps not. But in such cases, who is really at risk? Is the system at risk? Libya threatens Chad; it does not really threaten Italy, which is a member of NATO, or the United States, which has evidenced its wiillingness to retaliate and whose means, which once deterred the Soviet Union, ought to be adequate to deter Libya. Iran threatens Israel, Iraq, and Saudi Arabia—but Israel and Saudi Arabia are protected by U.S. weapons, including nuclear weapons, which the U.S. administration has stated were in readiness during the Gulf War in case Saddam Hussein resorted to weapons of mass destruction. Only North Korea poses a challenge to the international system as a whole, not because it threatens South Korea— which is also protected by the U.S. nuclear deterrent—but for the ironic reason that it can provoke the United States to reactions that will themselves destabilize the system of deterrence, by overreacting or by withdrawing, either of which could propel Japan into developing its own nuclear option. No set of legal rules can help much here: it is a matter of prudence and wisdom in the formation and execution of policy. Nor can the international society of states do much as a group because so much turns on the policies of one state, the United States, which, after all, committed the first act of nuclear proliferation at Alamogordo.

Perhaps the best argument for a credible, if limited, ballistic missile defense lies not in its impact on “rogue states” so much as in its reassurance to potential proliferatees that fear attacks from such states. Such defenses reduce the extortion value of nuclear threats. The actual operation of missile defense systems, however, will bring new and complex problems of international coordination. These can be greatly eased by the sharing of U.S. air surveillance and early warning capabilities.
Indeed, the provision of information by the United States in order to enable missile defense may play as large a role in the twenty-first century as the provision of extended deterrence did in the twentieth
. What is needed is an institutional mechanism for sharing and protecting this information.

That brings us to the two other acute threats to a stable security system of market-states, Russia and China. They pose the most signficant concerns in the immediate future precisely because their own constitutional
forms are still at issue and because they are both nuclear powers. Insofar as the society of market-states can help bring about a domestic transformation in the constitutional form of these states, it ameliorates the nuclear problem. In the meantime, these proto-market-states are likely to be among the most serious violators of the bans on the sale of missile technology and fissile material. Financial and political assistance to domestic parties in these states that wish to pursue admission and acceptance into the society of market-states is an apt investment for that society.

The market-state will face nuclear threats that are as novel and as market-driven and decentralized as it is. Nuclear terrorism, both on a large scale, involving attacks or threatened extortion against nuclear reactors, and on a micro level, using the nuclear materials commonly found in hospitals, universities, and laboratories, is more likely than an attack using a nuclear warhead. Still, the active international trade in weapons delivery systems and even fissile material will experience the same heady change in the scope of its markets, the speed of its transactions, and the astounding return on investment that the international market has provided other commodities, especially illicit ones. At some point it will simply be impossible to keep up with the nuclear weapons trade, which is at once lucrative and easily concealed. We missed a chance to slow this down when the United States failed to take up a suggestion that Soviet missiles simply be bought intact and destroyed rather than dismantled. This failure led to new opportunities for the diversion of nuclear fissile material, but some dispersion would have taken place at some time in any case. This is a proliferation of a different kind, less statist and all the more difficult to manage for that reason. The society of market-states will find it difficult to police such proliferation because intelligence sharing is as politically and strategically fraught for the market-state at peace as it was for the nation-state at war.

Deterrence and reassurance are the keys to the prevention of nuclear proliferation to states; they offer little in the way of help vis-à-vis transnational, stateless aggressors. This is the most difficult part of a nonproliferation agenda. If such organizations can be denied a state sanctuary, however, it will be difficult for them to assemble and deploy nuclear weapons on any scale that might disturb the system of stable deterrence, though they may be able to wreak a terrible destruction nevertheless. There may be a useful analogy, however: if the contribution of deterrence to nonproliferation is primarily that of reassurance, then the entire battery of market-state mechanisms for reassurance—surveillance, missile defense, redundancy of critical infrastructure, even market programs as mundane as insurance—should prove helpful. Ultimately only a global coalition that shares intelligence and information can hope to forestall terrorist attacks using nuclear weapons. We are in a race against time: can the new society of market-states develop technologies of information collection—like nanosensors, for example, that detect nuclear traces—
and
habits of cooperation before terrorists deploy nuclear devices in an attack?

The materials needed in order to create chemical weapons are far more widely available than those required for nuclear devices and the techniques of manufacture are vastly simpler. For these reasons, chemical weapons are often called the “poor man's nuclear weapons.” As with so many substitutes imposed by poverty, however, the “poor man's alternative” provides nothing like the satisfaction of the real thing. Although chemical weapons are ritually referred to as weapons of mass destruction, the lethality they bear is not all that “mass.” Chemical weapons would cause a small fraction of the deaths caused by nuclear or biological weapons. To take a single example: 100 kilograms of anthrax distributed in an aerosolized weapon by a cruising airplane would cause 300 times the fatalities that would occur if the same plane carried 1,000 kilograms of sarin gas.

Insofar as treaty regimes are useful in achieving the goals of nonproliferation, the ratification of the Chemical Weapons Convention provides a heartening case of politics in the market-state. Large chemical companies, concerned about the impact of the treaty on their enterprises if the United States stayed outside the treaty regime, were able to bridge the partisan gap in the U.S. Senate that has stymied so many other measures. On the other hand, it must be recognized that renouncing chemical weapons makes U.S. reliance on nuclear weapons that much greater
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and the consequence of this enhanced reliance could be a contraction of the willingness of other states—potential proliferatees—to rely on American security guarantees. Suppose for example that chemical weapons were used against a state that the United States had pledged itself to protect. The previous American position, no first use of chemical weapons, would have at least permitted retaliation in kind. Once the Chemical Weapons Convention came into force, requiring the destruction of American stockpiles and proscribing their use, however, retaliation (and hence deterrence) have depended upon a commitment of American conventional forces or nuclear attacks, as to both of which potential allies might have some skepticism. As is so often the case with respect to arms-control agreements—the landmines movement comes to mind—the United States is simply not in the same position as other states, at least as long as it continues to assume global security responsibilities, and therefore should not be shamed by charges of hypocrisy when it fails to adopt regimes that it urges on others.

The tactical use of microorganisms and toxins as weapons has been attempted by many warring parties, including aboriginal Americans who
tipped their arrows in amphibian-derived poisons. Fomites—entities that harbor and transmit disease—have been used to spread infection since antiquity. During the fourteenth century siege of Kaffa, a Genoese cathedral city on the Black Sea, the attacking Tatar force was struck by plague. They catapulted their diseased cadavers into the besieged city in an attempt to start an epidemic in 1347—or perhaps to trigger a collapse of morale within the city walls. An outbreak of plague did ensue and Kaffa fell. Ships carrying refugees from Kaffa are thought to have begun the second plague pandemic in Europe.

Smallpox was deployed as a weapon against Native Americans by the British in the eighteenth century.
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During the French and Indian War, Sir Jeffrey Amherst proposed the use of this weapon in order to reduce the tribes hostile to the British. When smallpox broke out at Fort Pitt in 1763, a Captain Ecuyer gave blankets and a handkerchief from the smallpox hospital to Indians and recorded in his journal, “I hope it will have the desired effect.” A smallpox epidemic did follow, although it is impossible to isolate the cause.
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The formulation of Koch's postulates
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and the development of modern microbiology in the nineteenth century led to the isolation and production of specific pathogens. In the ensuing years, many states attempted to develop pathogens and weaponize them. In World War I, Germany pursued an ambitious program using attacks on livestock in neutral countries and poisoning animal feed for export.

Japan conducted biological warfare research from 1932 onwards in occupied Manchuria. Prisoners were injected with anthrax, meningitis, cholera, and plague. At least 10,000 are said to have died. Eleven Chinese cities were attacked using contaminated water and food supplies. Pathogen cultures were also sprayed from airplanes. Plague was developed by allowing laboratory fleas to feed on plague-infected rats; these fleas were then harvested and were released by aircraft over Chinese cities. Fifteen million fleas are reported to have been released per attack.

During the same period, the British experimented with weaponized anthrax off the coast of Scotland. It was the discovery of the Japanese program at the end of World War II, however, that galvanized research in the United Kingdom, the United States, and the USSR. Japanese scientists were granted immunity from war crimes prosecution in exchange for extensive debriefings. During the Korean War the U.S. program expanded, and full-scale production of pathogens for weapons began in 1954. As part of a biological countermeasures program, American cities like New York and San Francisco were surreptitiously used as laboratories to test aerosolization. The offensive program was unilaterally terminated by President Nixon in 1969, and in 1975 the United States ratified the Biological and Toxic Weapons Convention. This treaty prohibits the development, production,
and retention of microbial or other biological stockpiles in quantities that have no justification for prophylactic purposes.

Unlike the Chemical Weapons Convention, however, the Biological and Toxic Weapons Convention has no provisions for verifying compliance. It is now widely conceded that several signatories have violated the Convention's provisions. For example, the KGB weaponized the lethal toxin ricin by producing small metallic pellets that were cross-drilled, filled with the poison, then sealed with wax that would melt at body temperature. The pellets were discharged by a spring-loaded weapon disguised as an umbrella. By this means the Bulgarian dissident Georgi Markov was assassinated in London in 1978 and at least six other persons were murdered. In 1992 President Yeltsin disclosed that the Soviet Union had pursued its biological warfare program in violation of the Convention and confirmed that an outbreak of anthrax in 1979 had been caused by an accidental release of spores from a biological weapons facility.

The scope of the Soviet program, as described by a defector,
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embraced more than 55,000 scientists and technicians. Yeltsin promised to suspend these activities; a 1995 report, however, concluded that between 25,000 and 30,000 persons were still engaged in various related programs.

The Iraqi program, while on a different scale, is known to have been extensive, and may have produced up to ten billion doses of anthrax, botu-linum toxin, and aflatoxin. UNSCOM, the UN agency set up after the Gulf War to discover and dismantle Iraq's programs of weapons of mass destruction, concluded that biological agents had been weaponized in considerable variety, including 155 mm artillery shells, 122 mm rockets, aircraft bombs, missile warheads, and aerosol tanks. UNSCOM was unable to determine, however, whether these weapons had been destroyed.

Today, it is thought that China, Egypt, Iran, Libya, Taiwan, Israel, and North Korea have active biological weapons programs.
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Public sources have estimated that between 10 and 25 countries possess or are seeking biological weapons. Unlike nuclear and chemical weapons, biological agents are easy to make and conceal and they are inexpensive. They can be produced in facilities that are also involved in legitimate scientific and pharmaceutical activities. These programs can flourish despite rigorous export control regulations because the same agents that furnish lethal weapons are also naturally occurring microorganisms and toxins. Similarly, the dual nature of biological agents makes verification of treaty commitments against weaponizing these agents virtually impossible. Finally, the advanced nature of the Soviet program and the temptation to market its fruits to other states presents a scenario every bit as disturbing as that involving Russian nuclear devices.

This duality of use—biology as medical science/war weapon—that so bedevils control regimes also, however, holds the possibility for at least
tempering the problem. The Soviet program turns out to be readily convertible to peaceful uses, in a way that its nuclear weapons program is not. One commentator has asserted that many of the Russian biological weapons facilities can be readily converted to biomedical research work and vaccine production, providing employment to a large number of scientists and technicians.
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In a highly creative approach, another commentator has argued that trade regimes and nonproliferation regimes can be carefully crafted in order to attract and enmesh a new tier of states that have been recently endowed with advanced technological capabilities, including the capacity to manufacture weapons of mass destruction.
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This approach plays on the new market-state and its intertwining of security and commercial links among states such that the transparency so crucial for market development can also be used to prevent clandestine military development.

At present, however, it is hard to get security analysts to pay much attention to biological weapons. To persuade them to pay more, we must first answer the question: if these weapons are so easy to deploy and so lethal,
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why haven't we seen more of their use?
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The two sets of consumers for such weapons are military commanders and terrorists. For commanders, biological weapons are too slow to affect operations at the front (it may take days or weeks for an enemy soldier to sicken, during which he can do a lot of damage) and too unpredictable
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(because the wide diffusion of virulent agents can infect one's own troops).
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For terrorists, the same features of biological weapons cut the other way: delay allows perpetrators time for escape, and an agent like smallpox is terrifying to the public because it is unpredictable owing to the fact that it is communicable. Communicability poses its own threats, however; it may be some time before the terrorists know whether they are themselves infected and are infecting others (their colleagues, for example) unintentionally. Accordingly, many biological weapons programs have mainly focused on anthrax spores that enter the lungs and hatch bacteria that multiply rapidly within the body but don't infect anyone else.

Genetic engineering, however, may be able to make biological weapons far more useful to both the commander and the terrorist. It should be possible to design a virus that would disproportionately afflict members of a particular ethnic group, giving safety to attackers from a different group.
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Genetic engineering could also match a particular virus with an effective
vaccine so that the aggressor would be immunized; or piggyback two agents, one quick and confined and the other latent and communicable. This sort of engineering will allow for the cloning of vast quantities of both traditional pathogens and new designer agents; these could be created quickly and cheaply, while their antidotes might take decades to develop. Such frightening prospects also hold within them some hope: the revolu-tion in genetics might also provide framework vaccines and antidotes that can be quickly modified and rapidly produced.

If biological weapons were used today against a civilian population, the public health systems of any of the major countries would be quickly overwhelmed. Our best strategy lies in recognizing the new and distinct nature of this threat and strengthening the public health surveillance systems,
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as well as the intelligence collection capabilities, that can quickly detect and possibly thwart such attacks.