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In this podcast, Schar School associate professor Sonia Ben Ouagrham-Gormley discusses why policy makers and security experts tend to underestimate just how hard it is for rogue governments and nonstate actors to acquire biological weapons. The reason that policy experts fail to recognize the immense challenges incumbent in creating biological weapons, according to Ouagrham-Gormley, is that they tend to inaccurately apply a framework from nuclear weapons, in which the main challenge is acquiring scarce materials. It turns out that, for biological weapons, the obstacle is acquiring the necessary knowledge, and this turns out to be a more significant barrier. Fortunately, even a comprehensive understanding of civilian uses of biological agents does not easily translate into expertise in creating and using bioweapons. Ouagrham-Gormley discusses the various kinds of knowledge that are required for building biological weapons and the reasons that this skill set is so hard to obtain. Much of the challenges have to do with how scientists share practices and expertise with and learn from one another. Even the use of new technologies and AI does not overcome this barrier, as the new tools themselves require new forms of expertise to solve the problems that they create.
Listen to the podcast, Sonia Ben Ouagrham-Gormley on Barriers to Bioweapons