Emerging life sciences: New challenges to strategic stability

Abstract

This chapter explores the potential for new biotechnologically-enabled weapons to compete with nuclear weapons as far as effect on strategic stability, and assesses whether the assumptions in traditional strategic stability models are still valid when applied to such scenarios, and how changing capabilities and adversaries may shape approaches to arms control, verification, and monitoring. When thinking about biotechnology from a security perspective, anticipating the types of security threats that may emerge as science and technology advance, the potential consequences of those threats, the probability that adversaries will obtain or pursue them, adversarial intent, and potential effect on strategic stability is necessary. The range and spectrum of possible capabilities and actors are expanding. The most recent addition to the genome-editing arsenal is CRISPR, a bacteria-derived system that is among the simplest genome-editing tools. The CRISPR-Cas9 system—and emerging variants on the system—enables unprecedented control and ease when editing the genome. With parallels to remote ‘command and control’ of the genome, this is one aspect that makes the technology different from earlier gene-editing methods. Contemporary analyses of emerging technologies often expose tenuous links or disconnections between technical realities and mainstream scholarship. How, when, where, and in what form the shifting nature of technological progress may bring enhanced or entirely new capabilities, many of which are no longer the exclusive domain of a single nation-state, is contested and requires better analytical tools to enable assessment and inform policy choices. This work is hardly the only one to consider the biosecurity implications of CRISPR, gene-editing, and broader issues of biotechnology. As far as is known, it is the only one to address these emerging life sciences technologies in the context of nuclear strategic stability and implications for balance of power, arms control, and international security.