Biological readinessPandemic Shows Need for Biological Readiness
President Joe Biden’s inauguration comes during the worst stage of the deadliest biological event of our lifetimes. As bad as this pandemic is, imagine if instead it were caused by the deliberate release of a sophisticated biological weapon. About 2 percent of those infected have died of COVID-19, while a disease such as smallpox kills at a 30 percent rate. A bioengineered pathogen could be even more lethal. Our failed response to the pandemic in 2020 has exposed a gaping vulnerability to biological threats, ranging from natural outbreaks to deliberate biological weapons attacks.
President Joe Biden’s inauguration comes during the worst stage of the deadliest biological event of our lifetimes. Too many thousands of citizens have suffered and died due to President Donald Trump’s failures. As bad as this pandemic is, imagine if instead it were caused by the deliberate release of a sophisticated biological weapon. About 2 percent of those infected have died of COVID-19, while a disease such as smallpox kills at a 30 percent rate. A bioengineered pathogen could be even more lethal. Our failed response to the pandemic in 2020 has exposed a gaping vulnerability to biological threats, ranging from natural outbreaks to deliberate biological weapons attacks.
North Korea have employed prohibited chemical weapons in brazen attacks in Syria, the United Kingdom, Malaysia, and last summer against Russian dissident Alexei Navalny in Siberia. Although these were not biological attacks, a country that develops and uses horrific chemical weapons seems unlikely to respect the parallel taboo against bioweapons. We need to strengthen the Chemical Weapons and Biological Weapons Conventions and make pariah countries that wantonly violate them pay a heavy price.
Biological weapons are not an abstract concept. Twenty-five years ago, I led a secret U.S. visit to the world’s largest biological weapons factory, just over the Russian border in the formerly secret town of Stepnogorsk, Kazakhstan. The Soviet Union built this massive facility in the 1980s, not long after the entry into force in 1975 of the Biological Weapons Convention (BWC). It was proven capable of producing 300 metric tons of anthrax agent during a wartime mobilization period of about eight months. Remember the havoc that less than two grams of anthrax agent delivered in a letter caused at the Hart Senate Office Building in the fall of 2001. Thanks to the foresight of Senators Richard Lugar (R-Ind.) and Sam Nunn (D-Ga.), the Nunn-Lugar Cooperative Threat Reduction (CTR) programs helped Kazakhstan safely destroy the biological weapons factory there.
