Ashish K. Jha, Matt Pottinger and Matthew McKnight write:

President Richard M. Nixon’s bold 1969 decision to renounce biological weapons and spearhead a treaty to ban them helped contain the threat of a man-made pandemic for half a century.

But our inheritance from Nixon is now fading. And in this age of synthetic biology, unless we act quickly to deter our adversaries from making and using bioweapons, we could face disaster in the near future.

The nightmare of a biological holocaust is far from fanciful. A recent Post investigation showcased Russia’s reopening and expansion of a military and laboratory complex outside Moscow that was used during the Cold War to weaponize viruses that cause smallpox, Ebola and other diseases. In China, senior military officers have been writing for years about the potential benefits of offensive biological warfare. One prominent colonel termed it a “more powerful and more civilized” method of mass killing than nuclear weapons. An authoritative People’s Liberation Army textbook discusses the potential for “specific ethnic genetic attacks.”

At the same time, 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 outbreak of covid-19 in Wuhan, China, which might have involved an accidental leak of an artificially enhanced coronavirus, offers a sense of the stakes: Some 27 million people have died as a direct or indirect result of that virus. And researchers around the globe — civilian and military — are tinkering with viruses far deadlier than that one.

The question is: How do we achieve bioweapons deterrence?

Treaties and conventions alone cannot solve this problem. Nor are nuclear deterrence models quite up to the task. The prospect of mutually assured destruction is unlikely to inhibit death-obsessed terrorists who have a better shot at acquiring bioweapons than nuclear weapons. Dictatorships might be tempted to unleash a bioweapon if they are confident the nations they target would struggle to pinpoint the source of the attack — and if the attackers believe they can do more damage to their enemies than to their own population. They might, for example, covertly vaccinate their people before launching an attack. Or they might succeed in developing pathogens capable of disproportionately affecting specific ethnic groups, as envisioned by Chinese generals.

The Cold War nonetheless offers useful lessons for democracies that have chosen to forgo bioweapons. Foremost is the importance of superior intelligence gathering and analysis. For deterrence to work, Washington and its allies must have a robust, pervasive system for tracking and, where possible, eliminating highly dangerous research around the world. This surveillance system must also harness cutting-edge technologies to quickly detect newly emergent pathogens, gauge their threat level and reliably pinpoint their source — whether natural or engineered. [Continue reading…]