ABSTRACT
The philosopher Edmund Burke wrote that ‘no passion, so effectually robs the mind of all its powers of acting and reasoning as fear’.1 The threat of WMD terrorism – or more accurately CBRN terrorism – appears to have had a similar effect on certain governments in relation to the role of arms control and counter-proliferation within a broader framework of managing terrorist attacks. As a concrete example, in 2002 representatives from the US Government Accountability Offi ce (GAO) were discussing the role of the Biological Weapons Convention 1972 (BWC) in the UK. Efforts to strengthen the BWC through an additional legally binding agreement (the BWC Protocol) collapsed in August 2001. GAO offi cials indicated that strengthening the BWC was not important in the new terrorist-led threat environment because ‘the Protocol would not have stopped the anthrax attacks in the US’. Those non-governmental experts discussing the issue with GAO offi cials avoided the obvious retort that US domestic law had also failed to stop the anthrax attacks but no one was thinking about abandoning domestic measures to reduce the risk of terrorism. The example illustrates a short-sightedness in some circles about the full range of measures required to address the CBRN threat.
