Clinton Warns of Biological Weapons Threat

Clinton Warns of Biological Weapons Threat

December 11, 2011

WorldThreats.com - Hillary Clinton, while addressing a global convention on biological weapons, called for closer international cooperation in preventing terrorists from developing and using biological weapons.

At the convention, held in Geneva, Clinton urged the international community to respond to these threats by bolstering their detection and response capabilities. The wide array of current biological threats include outbreaks of infectious diseases which can be seized by terrorist and used for large-scale attacks.

In stressing to the audience that the warning signs are too serious to ignore, Clinton cited Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula as having urged “brothers with degrees in microbiology or chemistry….to develop a weapon of mass destruction.” She followed that up by explaining that all that is needed is a small sample of a widely available pathogen, inexpensive equipment and “college-level chemistry and biology.”

Technology has advanced to a level at which biological weapons can be created by using the latest advances in synthetic biology. This process, which was originally about reading DNA is now about both reading and writing DNA.

ImpactLab.Net contends that this “opens up a Pandora’s Box of problems. Security futurist Marc Goodman says that synthetic biology will lead to new forms of bioterrorism — opportunities for the bad guys to create never-before-seen forms of bio-toxins. These bio-threats might be nearly impossible to detect because they can be customized to the genome of a certain person or groups of people.

Goodman, who has long worked on cyber crime and terrorism with organizations such as Interpol and the United Nations, believes the potential bio-threat is greatly underestimated.

“‘Bio-crime today is akin to computer crime in the early 1980s,’ said Goodman at the Singularity University executive program this week. ‘Few initially recognized the problem, but one need only observe how the threat grew exponentially over time.’”

Ultimately, terrorists and hostile nation-states will not be limited to mass attacks with biological weapons. They will also be able to target specific individuals based on those individuals’ own unique DNA.