Biological Weapons: Today’s Most Significant WMD Threat to U.S. National Security
The current WMD issue most significant to U.S. national security – utilizing a definition of WMD that focuses on CBRN threats - is that of biological weapons.
By
Adam Arthur
March 1, 2025
The current WMD (Weapons of Mass Destruction) issue most significant to U.S. national security – utilizing a definition of WMD that focuses on CBRN (Chemical, Biological, Radiological, and Nuclear) threats – is that of biological weapons. Biological weapons pose a drastically more significant threat to the United States than chemical, radiological, or nuclear weapons. This is because an adversary may utilize them with stealth, without escalating the risk of kinetic conflict. An adversary would also experience a significant advantage in using biological weapons to sow confusion within the United States. Additionally, the COVID-19 pandemic – although not a result of foreign bioweapons (despite the claims of some of the world’s more rabid conspiracy theorists), has served as a test case for the United States’ response to biological attack.
First, unlike nuclear weapons, point out John P. Caves and Seth Carus in the publication The Future of Weapons of Mass Destruction, “the use of some chemical and biological weapons may be hard to attribute or be of sufficiently low lethality so as not to provoke an adversary to escalate to a more lethal response.” This means that the opportunity costs of using biological weapons against the United States are low for potential state or non-state adversaries. This low opportunity cost would make biological weapons particularly appealing to such hostile actors. Most concerning, in my own view, is the use of biological weapons by state actors that are seeking to exploit plausible deniability, rather than non-state actors seeking to prove a visible point.
Second, biological weapons provide a significant advantage to an adversary who wishes to sow confusion within the United States. An adversary would gain an advantage, for example, from targeting the U.S. military’s chain of command. It is important to note that this does not imply precision targeting, but rather an exploitation of biological weapons’ inherent imprecision to create chaos within the ranks. In pursuing the use of biological weapons to these ends, an adversary would rely on the fact that “a biological attack can range in operational decrement from that of a more limited impact to unit effectiveness due to lost duty days (e.g. norovirus outbreak) to catastrophic for affected units (e.g., pneumonic plague).”
https://moderndiplomacy.eu/2025/03/01/biological-weapons-todays-most-significant-wmd-threat-to-u-s-national-security/
