American Biodefense: How Dangerous Ideas about Biological Weapons Shape National Security by Frank L. Smith III (review)

Biological weapons pose a threat, both to the U.S. military and to civilians who live near potential terrorist targets, and defending against viruses is a difficult undertaking—so why has the United States not made a more effective investment in biodefense projects in the past? Frank L. Smith III provides an answer to this question in his American Biodefense: How Dangerous Ideas about Biological Weapons Shape National Security. Smith identifies frames of reference that rely on kinetic weapons and stereotypes about non-kinetic weapons within the U.S. military bureaucracy, and he argues that they have resulted in poor policy decisions and systemic complacency with regard to biodefense.

In the first two parts, Smith describes the history of U.S. biodefense viewed through a variety of interpretive frames. His discussions of realism, bureaucratic interests, and organizational frames are contextualized with an overview of biodefense from World War II through the Iraq War. The shortsighted decision to vest biological warfare responsibilities with the Chemical Warfare Service (later the Chemical Corps), made in part because chemical warfare and biological warfare were presumed to be similar, is highlighted as an example of a decision influenced by stereotypes within U.S. military organizations about biological warfare. Smith accurately argues that institutional use of terms such as CBR (Chemical, Biological, and Radiological) or WMD (Weapons of Mass Destruction) “glosses over extreme differences in kind,” and “incorrectly implies that knowledge about one of these phenomena equates to useful knowledge about the others” (p. 28).

Smith describes the negative effects such stereotypes have had on the progress of scientific research, and how misconceptions about biological weapons led to a neglect of biodefense doctrine. Time and resources were wasted on unworkable biodefense systems because of an apparently widespread belief that a release of hazardous biological agents could quickly be detected in the same manner as chemical agents. The reality, Smith writes, is that “it is difficult to detect biological attacks until after the victims have already been exposed, by which time it is too late for physical protection to provide effective cover” (p. 7). Misconceptions about the availability and production cycle of vaccines led the Department of Defense to rely on a single aging thoroughbred at the University of Minnesota Medical School, named First Flight, for its entire supply of botulinum antitoxin in the decade that preceded the Gulf War.

American Biodefensereviews the missteps that led to the failure to deploy adequate medical countermeasures to soldiers serving in the Persian Gulf, who could have potentially encountered biological weapons and been injured or killed as a result. Its final chapter describes the emergence of civilian biodefense—an ironic development given that “biological weapons and biodefense were widely regarded as military issues throughout the Cold War” (p. 102). Historians of military technology will enjoy Smith’s discussion of civilian biodefense development in the context of the long-running debate about how much control civilian researchers should exercise over scientific projects with national defense applications.

Smith’s work is an overview, and it sometimes generalizes about what large, diverse institutions knew or did about biological threats. For example, American Biodefenseasserts that the Department of Defense should have developed more operable biodefense programs given that “the United States was aware of the Soviet BW program throughout the Cold War” (p. 20). However, events such as the Sverdlovsk incident (which the author highlights) demonstrated how elements of the intelligence community were hindered by a lack of dependable information on Soviet biological weapons programs during the period. More than one year after the incident, members of the National Security Council and the Arms Control and Disarmament Agency remained frustrated by their inability to satisfactorily confirm that the anthrax outbreak at Sverdlovsk had been the result of prohibited biological warfare activities. Readers also should note that American Biodefensedoes not include a discussion of the defense of U.S...