Partially funded by the Ploughshares Fund, this primer reviews the history of CBW, describes defenses against currently known biological and chemical agents, considers the incentives and disincentives facing nations that either develop CBW armaments or tolerate their development, and reflects on the prospects for control and disarmament.

Klappentext

The armaments of chemical and biological warfare (CBW) are now widely held not just by nation-states, but by terrorist and criminal enterprises. The weapons themselves are relatively inexpensive and very easy to hide, allowing organizations of just a few dozen people to deploy potentially devastating attacks. While in the twentieth century most arms-control efforts focused, rightly, on nuclear arsenals, in the twenty-first century CBW will almost certainly require just as much attention. This book defines the basics of CBW for the concerned citizen, including non-alarmist scientific descriptions of the weapons and their antidotes, methods of deployment and defensive response, and the likelihood in the current global political climate of additional proliferation.

Inhalt

1: Chemical warfare (CW) history; 2: Defenses against chemical weapons; 3: Incentives and Disincentives to Acquire Chemical Weapons; 4: The Geopolitics of Proliferation; 5: Strategies for Control and Disarmament; 6: Definition of a biological warfare (BW) agent; 7: Brief History of Biological Weapons; 8: Motivations for Proliferation; 9: Biological warfare (BW) agent detection; 10: Biological warfare (BW) and terrorism; 11: Biological and Toxin Weapons Convention of 1972