Weapons of Mass Destruction | Research & Encyclopedia Articles

The phrase weapons of mass destruction (WMDs) was first used in the London Times in 1937 to describe Germany's blanket-bombing—using conventional weapons—of the city of Guernica, Spain (Mallon 2003). During the Cold War, the Soviet Union adapted the phrase to describe, collectively, nuclear, biological, and chemical (NBC) weapons (Norris and Fowler 1997). The U.S. Department of Defense defines WMDs as "weapons that are capable of a high order of destruction and/or being used in such a manner as to destroy large numbers of people," including high explosives, nuclear, chemical, biological, and radiological weapons. WMDs, however, often refer primarily to nuclear weapons.

Historical accounts of WMDs include the use of toxic smoke during the Peloponnesian War and during the Sung Dynasty in China (Hersh 1968); the Tartars catapulted plague-infected corpses into walled cities. Use of a scorched earth policy (Langford 2004) was also a common battle tactic in which retreating armies would destroy crops, burn villages, and poison wells and water supplies.

Large-scale production and deployment of nonnuclear WMDs was not possible until the beginning of the twentieth century (Hersh 1968), at which time scientists developed a more comprehensive understanding of how various chemicals functioned and of the manufacturing technologies necessary to synthesize large quantities of toxins. Advances in science thus led to the proliferation and stockpiling of numerous chemical agents such as mustard gas, phosgene, and chlorine. Chemical-weapons use during World War I resulted in the death of at least 90,000 people with more than 1.3 million additional casualties (Hersh 1968). Germany was the first nation to use poison gas during the war, but Great Britain, France, and the United States also used chemical weapons.

During World War II Germany and Japan conducted numerous chemical and biological weapon experiments on civilian and prisoner populations, yet such weapons were not used during combat. The United States was the first nation to use nuclear weapons when it bombed Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945. Many historians suggest that the incendiary bombing of Tokyo and Dresden by the United States during World War II, which killed thousands of civilians, also constituted use of WMDs. Use of chemical and biological weapons by several nations continued in the latter half of the twentieth century. One example is the defoliant Agent Orange that was used extensively by the United States in Vietnam to destroy vegetation. Iraq illegally used poison gas against the Iraqi Kurds killing tens of thousands of civilians. Although an exact accounting is impossible, the Federation of American Scientists indicates that dozens of nations possess, are developing, or are capable of developing WMDs.

The September 11, 2001, terror attacks that caused mass destruction and loss of life, however, were not perpetrated with NBC weapons, leading some experts to push for a more expansive definition of WMDs. Everett Langford describes WMDs as "those things which kill people in more horrible ways than bullets or trauma, or which cause effects other than simply damaging or destroying buildings and objects, with an element of fear or panic included" (Langford 2004, p. 1). Using this definition, WMDs would also include the airplanes used in the 2001 terror attacks; fungi used to destroy specific crops; defoliants; large scale incendiary devices; pathogens that kill agricultural animals; and other nonlethal agents. Sohail Hashmi and Steven Lee, however, argue that WMDs are different from conventional weapons because, "when used in war, [they are] inherently indiscriminate, meaning that their use ... would almost certainly result in the deaths of many civilians" (Hashmi and Lee 2004, p 10).

For several reasons WMDs, especially NBC weapons, fall into different moral and ethical categories than conventional weapons. Over millennia, humans developed ethical guidelines and rules for just war. But Michael Walzer argues that nuclear weapons "are the first of mankind's technological innovations that are simply not encompassable within the familiar moral world" (Hashmi and Lee 2004, p 5).

Unlike more conventional arms, WMDs do not stay in the location in which they were deployed; detonation of NBC weapons invariably produce plumes of radiation and toxins that can travel hundreds of miles, well beyond the boundaries of the battlefield. The plume could kill innocent civilians within the country and in neighboring countries not involved in the conflict. Use of WMDs could also render large tracts of land uninhabitable, not only affecting the short term ability of a nation to feed itself after hostilities cease, but also that of future generations.

With conventional weapons, large numbers of people are needed to deploy enough bombs in order to cause widespread damage, so that there is at least some level of checks and balances in the decision process. WMDs, by contrast, may require just a handful of people whose actions can cause large-scale devastation, and thus WMDs are inherently less democratic than conventional weapons. The strongest ethical argument against using WMDs is quite simply that their use could destroy the world, killing billions of innocent people in mutually assured destruction (Hashmi and Lee 2004).

The world community made several attempts to control WMDs after World War I. The most important treaties are the Geneva Protocol (1925), which prohibits the use of both biological and poison gas methods in warfare; the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (1968), which prohibits states from acquiring nuclear weapons if they had not already detonated a nuclear weapon by January 1, 1967; the Biological and Toxin Weapons Convention (1972), which prohibits the development, stockpiling, and acquisition of biological weapons; and the Chemical Weapons Convention (1993), which prohibits the use, development, and stockpiling of chemical weapons.

Proliferation of WMDs during the twentieth century was characterized by the activities of large nation-states that possessed the financial resources, infrastructure, and intellectual capital necessary to research, test, and produce such weapons. Rapid technological advances in biological and chemical science coupled with readily accessible how-to information via the Internet and the collapse of the Soviet Union have markedly increased the risk of proliferation of WMDs. Individuals and small groups now have the capability of producing WMDs such as ricin, anthrax, and radioactive dirty bombs, without state support.

Through even more rapid technological advances in the years to come, the world may see a future with even more dangerous WMDs capable of being produced and deployed by just a few talented individuals, using genetic engineering, nanotechnology, and robotics (Joy 2000). Unlike the old WMDs of the twentieth century that required significant state support to produce, and thus could be controlled to some degree through international treaties, new WMDs pose entirely new problems of control, not to mention ethical and moral considerations that have yet to be fully addressed by the scientific community.

A first attempt in this direction is the "Statement on Scientific Publication and Security" produced by a group of scientific journal editors, scientists, and government officials at a National Academy of Science (NAS) meeting in January 2003. In the statement the authors acknowledge that some scientific information "presents enough risk of use by terrorists that it should not be published" (Journal Editors and Authors Group 2003, p. 1149). Rather than establishing strict guidelines for censorship, however, the authors leave such decisions up to the journal editors, who must weigh the possible security threats against the scientific merit and potential societal benefits of publishing the article. There are many more questions to ask, and actions to take, however, if society is to adequately address the threat of WMDs in the twenty-first century.

Atomic Bomb;; Baruch Plan;; Biological Weapons;; Chemical Weapons;; Limited Nuclear Test Ban Treaty;; Just War;; Military Ethics;; Nuclear Ethics.

Hashmi, Sohail H., and Steven P. Lee, eds. (2004). Ethics and Weapons of Mass Destruction: Religious and Secular Perspectives. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. An excellent resource with views on the ethics of WMDs from numerous religious and other and perspectives.

Hersh, Seymour. (1968). Chemical and Biological Warfare: American's Hidden Arsenal. Indianapolis, IN: Bobbs-Merrill Company.

Journal Editors and Authors Group. (2003). "Statement on Scientific Publication and Security." Science 299(5610): 1149.

Joy, Bill. (2000). "Why the Future Doesn't Need Us." Wired 8(4): 238–262. Also available from http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/8.04 /joy.html.

Langford, R. Everett. (2004). Introduction to Weapons of Mass Destruction: Radiological, Chemical and Biological. Hoboken, NJ: John Wiley. A thorough review of all technical, health-related and medical issues concerning WMDs in the early twenty-first century.

Norris, John, and Will Fowler. (1997). NBC: Nuclear, Biological and Chemical Warfare on the Modern Battlefield. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.

Federation of American Scientists. "States Possessing, Pursuing or Capable of Acquiring Weapons of Mass Destruction." Available from www.fas.org/irp/threat/wmd_state.htm.

Mallon, Will. "WMD: Where Did the Phrase Come From?" History News Network. Available from http://hnn.us/articles/1522.html.

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