Biological Weapons: From the Invention of State-Sponsored Programs to Contemporary Bioterrorism - Hardcover

Guillemin, Jeanne

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0231129424 ISBN 13: 9780231129428

Publisher: Columbia University Press, 2004

Synopsis

Until the events of September 11 and the anthrax attacks of 2001, biological weapons had never been a major public concern in the United States. Today, the possibility of their use by terrorists against Western states looms large as an international security concern. In Biological Weapons, Jeanne Guillemin provides a highly accessible and compelling account of the circumstances under which scientists, soldiers, and statesmen were able to mobilize resources for extensive biological weapons programs and also analyzes why such weapons, targeted against civilians, were never used in a major conflict.

This book is essential for understanding the relevance of the historical restraints placed on the use of biological weapons for today's world. It serves as an excellent introduction to the problems biological weapons pose for contemporary policymakers and public officials, particularly in the United States. How can we best deter the use of such weapons? What are the resulting policies of the Department of Homeland Security? How can we constrain proliferation? Jeanne Guillemin wisely points out that these are vitally important questions for all Americans to consider and investigate―all the more so because the development of these weapons has been carried out under a veil of secrecy, with their frightening potential open to exploitation by the media and government. Public awareness through education can help calm fears in today's tension-filled climate and promote constructive political action to reduce the risks of a biological weapons catastrophe.

Biological Weapons is required reading for every concerned citizen, government policymaker, public health official, and national security analyst who wants to understand this complex and timely issue.

About this title

About the Author

Jeanne Guillemin is professor of sociology at Boston College and senior fellow in the Security Studies Program at Massachusetts Institute of Technology. She is the author of Anthrax: The Investigation of a Deadly Outbreak.

Reviews

Having published a similarly squared-away study of the 1979 anthrax outbreak in Sverdlovsk, Russia, in 1999, MIT security studies fellow Guillemin returns with a compact and balanced history of biological weaponry, beginning with the British, American and Japanese programs that predate WWII. British and American programs continued through much of the Cold War; seeking strategic effectiveness but succeeding only indifferently, they were phased out. But the Soviet programs flourished and, when abolished in the 1990s, they left behind much of the resources in expertise and in some cases actual stockpiles now available to terrorists. Not that bioterrorism is necessarily the menace that media sensationalism makes it out to be, provided that responsible decisions influenced by common sense are made to prepare for it. Guillemin outlines such common sense programs in valuable detail, although she appears to underestimate the extent to which some of them will require international controls over basic scientific research and the amount of resistance this could meet from governments and scientists. Admirably free of finger-pointing, shrillness and Luddite tendencies, the book ranks high as a historical introduction to the subject and a handbook on contemporary remedies; in the latter role, it is superior to Daniel Barenblatt's A Plague Upon Humanity.
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Edition details

• Publisher: Columbia University Press
• Publication date: 2004
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0231129424
• ISBN 13: 9780231129428
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 272