Washington Post: The United States may soon face a threat stronger than nuclear weapons

Former US President Richard Nixon’s bold decision in 1969 to renounce biological weapons and lead a treaty banning them helped contain the threat of man-made pandemics for half a century, but Nixon’s legacy is now fading.

If the world doesn’t act quickly in this age of synthetic biology and deter the creation and use of biological weapons, it could face catastrophe in the near future.

With this introduction, the Washington Post opened a recent investigation, which showed that researchers around the world are working on tinkering with viruses more deadly than Covid-19, which means that the nightmare of a biological holocaust isn’t a figment of the imagination.

The Washington Post’s investigation, according to a joint report by biology researchers, showed that Russia has reopened and expanded a military and laboratory complex that was used during the Cold War to weaponize viruses that cause smallpox, Ebola and other diseases.

China’s top military officers are writing about the potential benefits of offensive biological warfare, with one senior colonel describing it as a more powerful and more civilized method of mass killing than nuclear weapons.

An army textbook even discusses the possibility of ethnic-specific genetic attacks.

The book warns that breakthroughs in gene-editing technology and artificial intelligence have made the manipulation and production of deadly viruses and bacteria easier than ever, for state and non-state actors alike.

The 2019 Covid-19 outbreak in Wuhan, China, which may have been the result of an accidental leak, provided a sense of risk.

An estimated 27 million people have died as a direct and indirect result of the virus, while researchers around the world are working on even more deadly viruses.

How do we achieve deterrence with biological weapons?

According to the author who quotes some researchers as saying that treaties and agreements alone cannot solve this problem, and that models of nuclear deterrence cannot fully fulfill the purpose.

Dictatorships may be inclined to launch a biological weapon if they are confident that the countries, they target will face difficulty in identifying the source of the attack, and attackers may secretly vaccinate their people before launching any attack.

But the Cold War, according to the investigation, offers useful lessons for democracies that have chosen to abandon biological weapons, the most important of which is the importance of collecting and analyzing superior intelligence.

Therefore, for deterrence to succeed, Washington and its allies must have a robust and comprehensive system for tracking highly dangerous research around the world and eliminating it where possible, taking advantage of advanced technologies to rapidly detect newly emerging pathogens, measure their threat level, and reliably identify their source, whether natural or engineered.

The researchers propose that biological surveillance and detection be a national security concern, not just a public health activity for the United States and friendly nations, and they call for the creation of a new congressionally funded intelligence discipline, biological intelligence, to mobilize allied governments and private companies to detect and assess high-risk scientific research and emerging biological threats.

The book argues that the history of American nuclear forensics provides a rough model.

In 1943, the United States, fearing that Nazi Germany might develop a nuclear weapon, collected air and water samples in Germany for testing.

During the Cold War, it equipped aircraft with devices to sniff out radioactive particles, providing compelling evidence that the Soviets had tested their first atomic bomb in 1949.

Nuclear intelligence has been further refined to determine the origin of nuclear materials used in bombs, and the United States and its allies have already compiled databases of the unique radiochemical and environmental signatures of individual uranium mines and processing facilities, in an effort to deter covert nuclear arms sales by demonstrating that Washington can reliably trace the origin of a weapon even after detonation.

Molecular forensics techniques mean that newly discovered pathogens can be sequenced and analyzed to determine whether they occurred naturally or through scientists’ machinations, and as data libraries grow and AI models improve, analysts will become less likely to be puzzled by the origins of a new disease like Covid-19.

The main obstacle to expanding and improving America’s emerging biointelligence efforts appears to be not technology but resolve.

Congress recently failed to meet the Biden administration’s latest budget request for pandemic prevention, and the biosurveillance network is underfunded.

The investigation concluded that these elements of deterrence won’t succeed unless they are first supported by world-class biological intelligence, and concluded that Washington and its allies can, by proactively investing in strong biological surveillance and support capabilities and developing rapid countermeasures, protect the promise of the bioscience revolution and ensure that biotechnology remains a force for good, not a new frontier for global disasters.