Symposium sponsored by:

Johns Hopkins Center for Civilian Biodefense Studies

Department of Health and Human Services

Infectious Diseases Society of America

Biological Weapons as a Strategic Threat
Paul Bracken, PhD

DR. HENDERSON: It is my pleasure to introduce Dr. Paul Bracken, who is professor of management and political science at Yale University, specializing in national security and management issues. He's written extensively on these subjects. An article, "The Second Nuclear Age," appears in the January issue of Foreign Affairs. His current book is Fire in the East: The Rise of Asian Military Power and the Second Nuclear Age.He's a member of the Council on Foreign Relations and serves on the CNO executive panel. He holds a bachelor's degree in engineering from Columbia and a doctorate in operations research from Yale.
His paper is entitled "Biological Weapons as a Strategic Threat." Dr. Bracken.

(Applause.)

DR. BRACKEN: Thank you very much. I'm very honored to be here with so many experts, and I recall W.C. Fields' definition of an expert. If you remember that, it was somebody from out of town.

(Laughter.)

So I'm from out of town, although I get here fairly often.

What I'd like to talk about is the overall how to think about biological weapons, how I think about biological weapons in an overall context, and I've often found if you're thinking certain thoughts, it's often the case that somebody else is thinking about them also. So my subject is the implications of the proliferation of biological weapons and the effect is it might have on the changing the world balance of power, a rather lofty subject, but let me just briefly talk for a minute or two about the Cold War to make the point that I don't think biological weapons had much of an effect on the Cold War, even though there was a lot of them on the Soviet part and early on in the case of the United States.

My first introduction to biological warfare, and I am not like in the biological warfare studies community; I am not an expert in that. I'm not sure there are any experts. There's specialists, but there's probably no experts. My first introduction to this subject was when I got a job out of college. I had to go up to a place -- I don't even know if it exists anymore -- Edgewood Arsenal, and I had to read something called the "Mandrake Route War Game," and they locked me in a vault, and I read this study. It was a biological attack on Western Europe.It was absolutely nauseating and repulsive. You have the sort of beginner's mind when anybody is exposed to biological warfare. It just is overwhelming in its depressing aspects of it.

Then in 1973, I was doing a study for the Army, and we went up to Aberdeen, and we actually had some of the chemical warfare suits that we captured in the '73 war. These are chem. suits, not bio. protection, and we did some experimentation with those and found out that if you wore them for more, I think, than two hours, you would collapse from heat prostration. These were not very effect, and they leaked like hell, too, not a good feature of protective suits.

So the point of these anecdotes is to suggest that biological and even chemical warfare, although huge stockpiles were built during the Cold War, they really did not have much effect on the world balance of power. Rather, I would summarize it by saying although there were large stockpiles, these forces were not in any way, shape or form integrated into the armed forces of either side.

Now, I know the Soviets built a lot of this anthrax and things, but the average Soviet division was really untrained in them, did not have good protective cover. They just were not -- they were kind of an existential deterrent, and that's how I think they were looked. They were put in the background. And this reinforced a strong belief in the policy community in the United States that chem. and bio. weapons had a certain opprobrium attached to them, that they had such a stigma that decision makers would not ever want to use them, and actually that I think is true. And I say that now because I think it's a lot less true. I think biological and chemical weapons will be major features of proliferation because the payoff from them in what I'm going to call the second nuclear age is a lot greater than in the first nuclear age, where I argued that it was pretty low.

I actually lost interest in a lot of national security issues in the '80s and '90s and turned to other things, but a couple of years ago I got interested in it once again when the Indians tested their nuclear shot in 1998, and I was asked to do a study for the commander in South Korea, the Kamon forces command on the North Korean biological warfare program. That got me over there and into some stuff. It was really quite interesting. I had the same, I think, experience that the people who studied the Iraqi program had, which is it was just so vast, so enormous for an economy that miniature size, and somebody has still yet to tell me how a country like Iraq or North Korea, countries which have GNPs of probably about $20 billion, which is about one-sixth of the revenues of the General Electric Corporation, can mount these awesome military programs.

I mean, we don't understand the economics of defense spending in these countries because if you look at the nuclear programs in both countries, there's tens of thousands of people. I don't see how they can do it. I mean even pressing their own populations.

But, anyway, how do I think about these things now, biological weapons and weapons of mass destruction? I argue that the world really is dramatically changing in the following way: that with all of this focus on globalization and international business and the Internet bringing countries together, I think there's really another part of it. I believe that's all true, and it's very good, very useful, but we're seeing a spread of weapons of mass destruction and what I would call the second nuclear age.

Now, the way I think to get this notion of the second nuclear age across is to recognize that we're not talking about a handful of rogue states, countries here or there which are resisting the trends towards globalization and acceptance of international arms control norms. We're talking about really a fair number of states. Picture in your minds for a moment a map of Asia extending from Israel to North Korea, and in that map there is a connected belt of countries every single one of which is mounting major programs of weapons of mass destruction and/or ballistic missiles to deliver them, every single one of them.

There's a field in political science that says if you're from a poli. sci. background you'll know that comparator politics is, you know, one of the major fields like international relations or American studies. And if you ask, you know, what does North Korea have in common with Pakistan, what do they have in common with Israel or Syria, the answer you'd think is not very much, but let me tell you one thing they do have in common. Every single one of those countries is building weapons of mass destruction and missiles.

You have Israel, which, you know, who knows what their program is, but very strong evidence that they have bio. and chem. programs. Syria, it's well know. Iraq we have the best information on because she lost the war and we sent inspectors in, and we really don't know much about Pakistan, India and China. I personally would be amazed if they did not have major programs. There is not, I think, a lot of hard intelligence to support that conclusion, but you know, after all, we have to be realistic about what intelligence can give us, and the answer is that we can't ask in the intelligence community to make estimates about things which really you can't expect to know very much about.

So my argument is that the world is entering a second nuclear age. Now, the argument is that a lot of countries, the ones I've mentioned, are building weapons of mass destruction and the missiles to deliver them. I would make a couple of points about this. What's distinctive about the second nuclear age is how little it has to do with the first nuclear age. It has nothing to do with the NATO-Warsaw Pact battle in Europe and NATO, which is what got the United States and the Soviet Union into this arms race with these kinds of weapons.

I think it's in a strange way, but accurate, to think about this as a restoration of the dynamic aspects of Asian civilization. You can write a pretty good history of the past 1,000 years by saying the West got technology first and commercial technology and military technologies and use this as a source of domination for the entire world. Well, those technologies are now spreading. They can no longer be retained by a Western monopoly of countries, including the Soviet Union and now Russia as a Western country, but they're spreading, and I think they're spreading fairly rapidly.

As to the motivations for this, one could put on an arms control framework for why all of this stuff is going on, and you discuss the norms and try to build up global norms why building biological weapons is a bad thing to do, but I would ask you for a moment just to suspend those frameworks and see what it looks like if you're a country, such as Iraq or Iran.

You're faced with the world's only super power, the United States, and if they are to challenge the United States head on using laser guided bombs, stealthy aircraft, it presents impossible problems for them to solve technologically and economically. They couldn't possibly do it.

So I think the way to understand why countries are building these weapons is just to look at local business practice, to understand that if a company were to challenge IBM or AT&T, they wouldn't do it with the same skill sets that the dominant players have. And many of these technologies have an unusually large, disruptive effect on American advantages. So to take one example, if you put a biological weapon on a ballistic missile, which is a very simple thing to do, I mean, we can get into an argument, you know, about whether it's easy or not to do, but to put it on there -- I didn't say to make it work, but to put it on there -- is an easy thing to do.

It really, I think, changes dramatically the balance of power in the world for the following reason. U.S. and, in fact, following a long tradition of Western outside powers in Asia have built their military prowess on a small number of bases, military bases, bases in Okinawa, Guam, Diego Garcia, South Korea, Yakuska in Japan. To render those bases vulnerable, to render those bases at risk only takes a handful of missiles.

Just consider what's happening now. The United States is about to go into at least a theater ballistic missile defense program which is designed to protect bases in Asia. Now, my calculations roughly show that for every dollar in offense you spend, you can force the opponent to spend $12. This means that puny countries like North Korea, serious countries like China are forcing the United States into this expenditure of about 12 to one to defend a Marine base in Okinawa, and I think this is unsustainable politically and economically in the United States, and I would anticipate the U.S. will put a lot less emphasis on military bases in the future, but I would offer that as an example of changing balance of power in the world.

The United States is not going to have the base presence in Asia that it has had for the past 50 years. Indeed, there's even questions about the survivability of more mobile forces, but that would require technologies that are a little further off into the future.

A couple of other points which got me interested in this subject and which I think really are sort of new, yet the same, and I often think that people ask me how are things different in this second nuclear age than the first. Well, in one way that they are the same is that in both cases you have huge what we call command and control problems, which is how do you keep your control over there forces so that they're not fired when they shouldn't be; they are fired when you want them to be, and they are not so vulnerable that they draw fire from the other side, causing that kind of accidental or inadvertent war.

That's a real consideration if you look at the Pakistani forces and the Indian forces, which in some of those cases, their weapons of mass destruction are stockpiled in a very small number of bunkers, almost suggesting that they draw fire.

But these are problems of the first nuclear age, the U.S.-Soviet competition, and I think they are also problems of the second nuclear age, but they're a lot worse because the United States and the Soviet Union were willing and did spend hundreds of billions of dollars to lock up their weapons, protect them, guard them, run very realistic simulations and war games, and in my view the arsenals were safe, but only because they spent tens or hundreds of billions of dollars to make them safe, and it's unimaginable to me that that would happen with North Korea or Pakistan or even, frankly, Israel, that they would spend anything like a proportion of their defense budgets on securing these systems.

I think something we often forget when we look at proliferation as a kind of abstract phenomenon is a lesson from the first nuclear age that leaders matter. The individual personality of the head of state when he's in a crisis or when they are making decisions about what weapons to acquire has a profound impact. These are not autonomous technologies.

The French never would have built nuclear weapons had they not had De Gaulle President in the late 1950s. I don't think North Korea or Iraq would have had the program they had if they did not have Kim Il Sung or Saddam Hussein, respectively, as leaders. And so we really have to factor in the personality of leaders in considering these matters.
Now, I think there's a couple of differences between the era we are now entering and the Cold War competition from previous years. One is the role of nationalism. If you look at the United States and the Soviet Union, in waging the Cold War public opinion had relatively little to do with the behavior of the states in a crisis.

There was a lot of play to public opinion about bomber gaps and missile gaps with respect to weapons acquisition programs, but in things like the Cuban missile crisis, the '73 Middle East war, leaders could look at the national interest almost divorced because the public wanted them to dampen the crisis, and I think that's much less likely to be true in the proliferating countries that I've been discussing up here.

Indeed, one of the premier feature of the Cold War was this kind of icy rationality that was used to wage it. We had think tanks like the Rand Corporation and the Hudson Institute using models loosely based on game theory, the kind of paradigm of icy rationality where you calculate your move six and seven steps ahead and find equilibrium points. I just think that's very unlikely to govern the behavior of a North Korea, a Syria and, again, frankly, an Israel which is imbedded in this network of states like them.

So when I look at, you know, what does it all mean, how to think about biological weapons, I would say unlike the first Cold War, the first nuclear age, they really are having a major effect on changing the world balance of power because the social norms attached to using them are really quite different. Iraq had integrated chem. and bio. into her military forces.

I mean, the Iraq program is truly frightening. They had anthrax in Scud warheads ready to go. They had predelegated launch authority to some of their commanders, that if the United States went into Baghdad you have the automatic authority to launch, and at the end game of the war, it was quite interesting if you read Victor Hasselkorn's book of how they were sending a signal that if the war continued, they might bombard Israel with biological weapons.

So I think the norms, unlike in the first nuclear area, are radically different and leaning you toward greater use, greater acceptance because of this kind of anti-Western nationalism that you find in much of Asia, and it goes something like this: that you guys have all the big technology and the aircraft carriers and the Stealth bombers. So it's fair for us to use these cheaper, poor man's nuclear weapons like biological weapons.

And finally, I'll say that I'm not predicting a nightmare future. The future I learned a long time ago hasn't happened yet. It's up to us to shape that future. But I would be very suspect of arguments that say globalization and international norms of a Western variety are spreading so fast that they will drive our proliferation. It seems to me a better, more empirical description of what's happened in the last few years at least is that the economists have this term "a wealth effect." As countries get a larger GNP, some of it spills over into the military.

So not surprisingly, when India gets richer, she builds more nuclear weapons and probably more biological weapons. That's harder to apply to North Korea and Iraq, but as I said earlier, I'm not sure how to think about the economies of those countries. So I see just a gradual build-up in proliferation, and whether or not there's a war depends on a whole set of factors, but war is not the thing to look at. The thing to look at is the spread of the weapons.

Thank you very much.
(Applause.)