Biosecurity Dilemmas

Dreaded Diseases, Ethical Responses, and the Health of Nations

Christian Enemark

• Publisher: Georgetown University Press
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781626164055
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: International Relations
• Index: Politics & International Relations

Biosecurity Dilemmas examines conflicting values and interests in the practice of "biosecurity, " the safeguarding of populations against infectious diseases through security policies. Biosecurity encompasses both the natural occurrence of deadly disease outbreaks and the use of biological weapons. Christian Enemark focuses on six dreaded diseases that governments and international organizations give high priority for research, regulation, surveillance, and rapid response: pandemic influenza, drug-resistant tuberculosis, smallpox, Ebola, plague, and anthrax. The book is organized around four ethical dilemmas that arise when fear causes these diseases to be framed in terms of national or international security: protect or proliferate, secure or stifle, remedy or overkill, and attention or neglect. For instance, will prioritizing research into defending against a rare event such as a bioterrorist attack divert funds away from research into commonly occurring diseases? Or will securitizing a particular disease actually stifle research progress owing to security classification measures? Enemark provides a comprehensive analysis of the ethics of securitizing disease and explores ideas and policy recommendations about biological arms control, global health security, and public health ethics.

PART I

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PROTECT OR PROLIFERATE

1
Biodefense and the Security Dilemma

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THE FIRST KIND OF BIOSECURITY DILEMMA under consideration here, “protect or proliferate,” can arise when a government acts to defend a state’s population against future biological attacks. A strong biodefense capability, based on a clear scientific understanding of pathogenic microorganisms (how they behave and how to resist them) affords a clear protective benefit. However, in some circumstances this capability can also generate pressure toward proliferation of biological weapons risks. At the domestic level (considered in chapter 2) this potential for proliferation accompanies an expansion of a state’s biodefense activities to provide more people with access to pathogenic microorganisms that they could then misuse for harm. At the international level, considered in this chapter, a proliferation problem might arise if a particular biodefense activity were perceived as having an offensive rather than defensive purpose. If fear of being attacked caused one state to respond by engaging in activities that were in turn perceived by another state as offensive, the result could be a proliferation of fearsome “biodefense” activities driven by mutual suspicion. As each state sought to increase its knowledge of what it perceived to be the other’s offensive capabilities, each could render itself more capable of using microorganisms for hostile purposes if it chose to do so. In this way biodefense would effectively generate an increase in the likelihood of biological weapons use; a defensive effort would worsen the threat to be defended against. Such is a problem with the 1972 Biological Weapons Convention (BWC), one goal of which is to reduce the overall likelihood of biological attacks on the grounds that these are an immoral mode of killing. Although the treaty’s outlawing of biological weapons has probably made many states more reluctant to use them, this general reluctance might fade if some states continued to appear not to have a genuine moral objection to such weapons. In particular, if a state were regarded as being able to maintain an illegal offensive biological weapons program under the guise of biodefense, other states may feel they are entitled to arm themselves in like fashion. Increased moral acceptability of biological weapons, sustained by the imagined necessity of maintaining relevant technical proficiency, would then become another source of international pressure toward proliferation and use.

The protect or proliferate dilemma associated with some biodefense activities will be explored here in three sections. The first compares this particular biosecurity dilemma to a concept well established in scholarship on international relations: the security dilemma. With respect to biological weapons, this dilemma is compounded by the conceptual and empirical difficulty of characterizing these as “weapons.” The second section focuses on the US government’s operation of the world’s largest national biodefense program, which is driven partly by US suspicions about other states’ activities and partly by the threat of nonstate bioterrorism. Elements of the US program have in turn aroused the suspicions of other states. Thus the US approach to biodefense serves as a useful reference point for exploring the challenge of achieving protection without at the same time occasioning proliferation, particularly when it comes to “threat assessment” activities that investigate offensive applications of biotechnology. Finally, the chapter concludes with suggestions for some ways in which pressure toward proliferation caused by biodefense activities might be reduced. In this context it is most important for states to engage in (and be seen to be engaging in) activities that are not prone to be characterized as violations of the BWC.

The Security Dilemma and Biological Weapons

In his 2009 book, Living Weapons, Gregory Koblentz warned that, as national biological defense programs increase in number and size worldwide, “other states may perceive these activities as threatening, thereby providing a justification for initiating or continuing a BW [biological weapons] program.”¹ The activities in question might not be, as a matter of fact, of a kind that are threatening or intended to threaten the state that perceives them from without. But when such a fact is difficult to verify, one state uncertain of another’s capabilities and intentions is liable to err on the side of caution, assume the worst, and act to bolster its own security. The effect this security-seeking behavior has on other states—in increased concern for their own security—is conceivably unnecessary and counterproductive if the concern causes these other states to act in ways that confirm or compound prior fears. This predicament of wanting to improve one’s security circumstances and running the risk of achieving the opposite is what John Herz called the “security dilemma.”² Herz recognized the potential for states to fall victim to their uncertainty abouteach other’s intentions once “the vicious circle of security and power accumulation is on.” The tragedy he imagined was that “mutual fear of what initially may never have existed may subsequently bring about exactly that which is feared most.”³ The result of “less security all round,” arrived at by a series of provocative actions that increase tension between states, is what Ken Booth and Nick Wheeler have referred to as a “security paradox,” an outcome that defies the intuitive expectation that acting to improve one’s security will serve actually to improve it.⁴

The international suspicion that lies at the heart of the security dilemma can sometimes be tempered by material considerations. Although the central point of the dilemma is that an increase in one state’s security in turn decreases that of other states, it may be that everyone regards military capabilities that are geared toward offense as more fearsome than those that are plausibly defensive in nature. According to Robert Jervis, “when defensive weapons differ from offensive ones, it is possible for a state to make itself more secure without making others less secure.”⁵ That is, if weapons acquired to protect a state do not also afford that state the capability to attack another, and if the defense they afford has the advantage over the offense that might be offered, the security dilemma is ameliorated. Writing in 1978, Jervis highlighted short-range fighter aircraft and anti-aircraft missiles as two examples of capabilities more useful for defense than for offense. He observed that these...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Tables
• Acknowledgments
• Abbreviations
• Introduction
• Part I. Protect or Proliferate
• Part II. Secure or Stifle
• Part III. Remedy or Overkill
• Part IV. Attention or Neglect
• Conclusion
• Selected Bibliography
• Index
• About the Author