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News | July 21, 2025

Bold New Bioweapons: Part 1 - The Burdens of Detection and Attribution

By Dr. James Giordano Strategic Insights

Revisiting the BWC in the New Biotech Landscape

It has been more than fifty years since the ratification of the Biological Weapons Convention (BWC) in 1972, which sought to provide a formalized venue for international control and prohibition of development, production, and stockpiling of biological and toxin weapons. While the BWC remains foundational to global biosecurity governance, we have argued that the evermore rapid pace of biotechnological innovation has surpassed the scope and specificity of its provisions. Today, the convergent and synergistic integration of gene editing, synthetic biology, and artificial intelligence (AI) has transformed the landscape of biological research, dramatically expanding the diversity, capabilities, and accessibility of tools that could be weaponized for use in both covert and overt operations.

Unlike the state-focal context of the relatively centralized scientific infrastructures that were the norm when BWC was first enacted, current domains of bioscience and technology are multinational in their enterprise, increasingly decentralized, global in their potential effect, and digitally enabled. These changes challenge traditional notions of biowarfare detection, deterrence, and defense, and require renewed effort toward revising regnant postures and policies to instantiate more realistic approaches to recognition of risks, responsible oversight, readiness of response, and operationally viable – and valuable - deterrence.

Definitional Ambiguity of Today’s Dual-Use Biotechnology

The BWC prohibits development of biological agents “…of types and in quantities that have no justification for prophylactic, protective, or other peaceful purposes.” However, such phrasing, while intentionally broad enough to have captured the scope of agents that were deployable when the BWC was established, now seems operationally far too vague for any genuine attempt to surveille the current biotechnological milieu.

For example, several emerging techniques and technologies are already in use as therapeutic, agricultural, and ecological interventions. These very same methods and products can be employed as-is, or modified to enhance pathogenicity, affect host susceptibility and patterns of response, and/or induce stealthy latency to evoke a “fog of engagement”. The BWC does not specify thresholds for what constitutes an “illicit” versus a “legitimately” gene-edited, or synthetically developed substance or microbe.

By enabling the design and assembly of modified, new and/or entirely artificial biological agents (including viruses, bacteria, fungi or toxins) that bear no recognizable signature in current pathogen detection databases (and against which there is no natural immunity or antidote) the discrimination of what constitutes legitimate exploratory research and bioweapon production becomes increasingly difficult. Machine learning (ML) and artificial intelligence (AI) introduce additional complexity to this space by enabling rapid modeling of target specificity, virulence, toxicity, biochemical interactions, and inter-individual and population-level spread. Taken together, these approaches can both guide design of pathogens capable of precise phenotypic outcomes, and be used to model patterns of public health response, thereby facilitating more deliberate offensive engagement(s). 

Moreover, it has only been since the 2016 Australian Group’s prompt that the BWC has considered and addressed the viability of biotechnological devices as having dual-usability in non-kinetic and/or kinetic operations. And to date, the BWC lacks any mechanism for scientifically or legally adjudicating such nuances of dual-use, thus creating gaps in oversight (and governance) that can be readily exploited by peer-competitor and adversarial nations and their proxies.

The Difficulties of Detection

Unlike the manufacture of conventional weapons that require physical infrastructures and logistical supply chains of considerable size, a modestly scaled laboratory equipped with a benchtop synthesizer and computational resources that could be accommodated by a laptop could produce a bioengineered agent capable of tactical disruption and strategic influence. Furthermore, synthetic pathogens can be developed to evade standard detection protocols, by incorporating genetic barcodes that mimic the sequences of naturally occurring substances. This could enable the targeting of specific individuals and/or niche populations with unique biological signatures. As well, AI-guided pathogen design can afford production of “gray zone” agents: microbes and toxins that induce ambiguous, and/or delayed onset of sign and symptom profiles that would facilitate clandestine, and/or covert use, and complicate rapid diagnosis and/or attribution. In short, the biological threat spectrum has moved from the battlefield to the biosphere; yet the tools of detection and attribution remain largely rooted in 20th-century frameworks.

Such developments undermine the defense postures of the current biotechnological ecosystem in three fundamental ways:

First, detection and attribution of such bioagents is becoming hindered by the modular nature of synthetic biology. If a microbial or toxic agent is composed of gene sequences derived from multiple natural organisms (or wholly developed from synthetic genes), its identification, and tracing it to a specific origin become exceedingly difficult if not nearly impossible without comprehensive global data-sharing agreements and insider knowledge of technical capabilities and “fingerprints” (viz.- particular characteristics of genotype and/or phenotype that are traceable to unique manufacturing processes).

Second, state and non-state actors can exploit decentralized scientific and technological platforms. A talented (or informationally supplied and technically enabled) biohacker, or a biotechnology contractor in a nominally neutral country, could be recruited and engaged to design or test components of a novel weaponizable bioagent without awareness of the larger operational scheme.

Third, covert cyber-biotechnological convergence (i.e.- whereby AI systems are used to develop or direct biological experimentation) renders traditional deterrence doctrine outdated. Deterring a faceless, digitally diversified, and plausibly deniable actor requires new forms of attribution, signaling, and interdiction.

Forging Opportunity from Challenge

In the complex and evolving landscape of weaponized biology, challenges—ranging from ambiguity of intent to rapid technological advancement—can serve as catalysts for opportunity. By leveraging advanced biosurveillance, precision bioinformatics, and convergent AI-enabled threat detection, uncertainty can be transformed into actionable insight. Strategic investment in adaptive biodefense platforms and collaborative international oversight can shift the paradigm from reactive posture to proactive preparedness—thus turning biological risk into a domain of viable deterrence, and strategic resilience and advantage.

These approaches will be the topic of next week’s Strategic Insights.

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Disclaimer

The views and opinions expressed in this essay are those of the author, and do not necessarily reflect those of the United States government, Department of Defense, or the National Defense University.

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Dr. James Giordano is Director of the Center for Disruptive Technology and Future Warfare of the Institute for National Strategic Studies.