The History and Threat of Biological Weapons and Bioterrorism

Dembek, Zygmunt F.

doi:10.1016/b978-012088440-7/50004-5

Cited by 13 publications

References 33 publications

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The History of Biological Weapons Use: What We Know and What We Don't

Carus

2015

Health Security

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This article critically reviews the literature on the history of biological warfare, bioterrorism, and biocrimes. The first serious effort to review this entire history, made in 1969, had numerous limitations. In recent decades, several authors have filled many of the gaps in our understanding of the past use of biological agents (including both pathogens and toxins), making it possible to reconstruct that history with greater fidelity than previously possible. Nevertheless, there are numerous remaining gaps, and closer inspection indicates that some supposed uses of biological weapons never took place or are poorly substantiated. Topics requiring additional research are identified.

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The History of Biological Weapons Use: What We Know and What We Don't

Carus

2015

Health Security

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The Biological Weapons Taboo

Bentley

2023

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The non-use of biological weapons has been described as the ‘great mystery of biological warfare’. This book solves that mystery by analysing the bioweapons taboo—in the first comprehensive study of the concept. Bioweapons are so vile, obnoxious, and morally abhorrent that they are deemed to be pariah. Biological armaments are not just another weapon in our minds, and actors do not treat them as such. In applying this understanding of biowarfare to what those actors do (or not) in relation to biological violence, this study explains precisely why actors find bioweapons repulsive and how this sentiment is then expressed in the form of political behaviours, including the refusal to engage in biological aggression. Drawing on extensive archival evidence, this book looks back on United States’ foreign policy decision-making (particularly in relation to the Geneva Protocol and the Biological Weapons Convention) to demonstrate how and why the taboo has comprised a decisive factor in shaping both biowarfare strategy and political rhetoric—and why the taboo needs to be recognized as a necessary consideration in the study of bioweapons. In analysing a taboo, the book also takes the debate on international norms forward by questioning and challenging the wider analytic comprehension of ‘taboo’ itself. Rejecting current definitions of the concept as inadequate, the book proposes a new and original model of understanding based on the normative characteristics of disgust, stigmatization, and fetishization.

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2023

The Biological Weapons Taboo

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The History and Threat of Biological Weapons and Bioterrorism

Cited by 13 publications

References 33 publications

The History of Biological Weapons Use: What We Know and What We Don't

The History of Biological Weapons Use: What We Know and What We Don't

The Biological Weapons Taboo

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