Biological Weapons: From the Invention of State-Sponsored Programs to Contemporary Bioterrorism (review)

Jeanne Guillemin here provides by far the most complete, transparent, and clear-eyed account to date of the history of biological weapons research in global context. Through a combination of careful analysis and the judicious use of every available source, she contributes a truly remarkable and thoughtful study of a difficult subject. Because biological weapons (BW) are widely understood to cross moral, ethical, and political boundaries, they have not left a clean paper trail. Biological weapons research has historically been a site for disinformation, uncertainty, and secrecy, with documents classified or destroyed, participants unwilling to talk, and known "facts" that are instead misleading propaganda. In this context, a serious history would seem to be almost impossible to write—yet Guillemin has succeeded in a historical reconstruction that illuminates many key issues.

Particularly compelling is Guillemin's exploration of the choice made by the Soviet Union, in the wake of the 1972 Biological Weapons Convention, to drastically ramp up its biological weapons programs, in violation of the treaty it had signed. Biopreparat, a conglomerate for commercial biological research that masked a secret biological weapons program, was created by the Soviet Council of Ministries in 1973. It comprised dozens of research centers and factories, including the massive Obolensk compound outside Moscow, and employed thousands of scientists. Suspicions about Soviet BW waxed and waned in the United States, and eventually, with the revelations of the defector Ken Alibek, the program became known—but the reasoning and strategies that justified it remain unclear. Guillemin suggests that Soviet observers read the spectacular advance of biology in general in the West as a sign that the United States was violating the treaty, too. The scientific breakthroughs reported in Western journals, they reasoned, had to be fueling a bioweapons program.

Guillemin's account of the Clinton administration's planning for bioterrorism, with the help of Joshua Lederberg and Craig Venter, provides a chilling perspective on medical, scientific, and political leaders as they debated ways to plan for catastrophe. And her analysis of President Nixon's decision to renounce biological weapons and greatly restrict research in chemical weapons in the fall of 1969 is ably contextualized in terms of Nixon's discussions with Kissinger and with the Harvard biochemist Matthew Meselson (Meselson is Guillemin's husband; they were both involved in the investigation of the Sverdlovsk anthrax incident, which was the subject of her 1999 book).

The study is largely organized around research programs in France, the United Kingdom, the United States, and Japan; around key shifts in public perceptions of biological and chemical weapons; and around the negotiation of international agreements to limit biological weapons. The story of Porton Down, where the United Kingdom began bioweapons research in 1940, has already been the subject of significant scholarly and journalistic interest, and Guillemin's account, while well organized, does not break new ground. Nor does her treatment of the Japanese program in Manchuria, or of the American program during the war. Yet even in these chapters, exploring well-known incidents in the history of biological weapons, she contributes a clear, steady voice and perceptive insights.

In short, there is no better source for an overview of the global history of biological weapons research. Guillemin draws on the vast published literature from the policy world, scientific reports, legal cases, archives, press accounts, and military publications and documents, and on relevant literatures in science studies, peace studies, and history of science and medicine. The result is a serious study that should be required reading in any course about the history of science in the twentieth century.