The United States is likely to face a growing threat in coming years from biological and chemical weapons that are increasingly lethal and easy to manufacture, the Defense Department said in a report published this month (see GSN, March 13, 2008).
(Apr. 23) -
U.S. military personnel conduct a chemical, biological and radiological warfare exercise in 2003 (Chung Sung-jun/Getty Images).
While some countries continue to seek out "traditional" chemical weapons, others might attempt to produce new materials that are "more difficult to detect, easier to disseminate, resistant to available medical countermeasures or have increased lethality," states the Pentagon's 2009 report on its Chemical and Biological Defense Program.
"The increased availability of related technologies, coupled with the relative ease of producing some chemical agents, has increased concern that CW production and employment may become more attractive to states or terrorist groups," the report says, according to Inside Missile Defense.
Biological threats are likely to grow over the next decade, the report states, noting that disease agents have been deemed "a valuable tool in nonstate arsenals" because they are "easier and cheaper to develop than nuclear weapons and are potentially for more destructive than [chemical weapons] to unprotected military forces or civilian populations."
U.S. enemies could engineer biological materials, "enhancing virulence, increasing stability and resistance and minimizing detection -- even creating a new synthetic biological agent," says the report. "While conventional weaponization and delivery of biological agents are difficult, even crude delivery systems," like sending anthrax-loaded envelopes by postal mail, have proved "effective."
"Additionally, adversaries may use human delivery systems by infecting themselves or others to spread certain biological agents within a civilian or military populations," the document notes.
While the United States and Russia have reduced the size of their nuclear stockpiles (see related GSN story, today), China, India and Pakistan are likely to expand their own atomic arsenals, according to the report.
China, North Korea and Russia continued to export sensitive equipment that could support missile or WMD production in the Middle East, South Asia and elsewhere, the report says.
The Chemical and Biological Defense Program is planning new WMD sensor technologies, protection systems, decontamination agents and other innovations that it intends to develop between fiscal years 2010 and 2015, the report states (Fawzia Sheikh, Inside Missile Defense, April 22).