ABSTRACT
Disease has long been the biggest threat of all to humankind and, despite the unrelenting advances of medical science, looks set to continue to be for the foreseeable future. The Black Death of the fourteenth century claimed more lives than any military conflict before or since, while the great influenza epidemic of 1918-20 killed far more than the Great War that it closely followed. The ‘Plague of Justinian’, which started in sixth-century Constantinople and then spread throughout the Mediterranean, was a classic ‘national security’ issue since it precipitated the fall of the Byzantine Roman Empire (McNeill 1989: 101-106). In addition, the threats posed by diseases, like some environmental problems, tend to be transnational and as such represent a security challenge not easily countered by a human race artificially subdivided into independent, though not impervious, units. Today, AIDS (Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndrome) represents a far greater threat to life than armed conflict for most Sub-Saharan Africans and for many millions more in all of the inhabited continents of the world.
