WMD Proliferation, Globalization, and International Security: Whither the Nexus and National Security?

Throughout the 1990s, the United States national security establishment gradually espoused the idea of a growing threat posed by the proliferation of a variety weapons and weapons technologies that could cause mass casualties to combatants and noncombatants alike. Nuclear weapons had long occupied the rhetorical space used by policy makers to describe weapons that could kill on a mass scale, but gradually the result was that the term “weapons of mass destruction” was reinvigorated and quickly became an accepted term in the lexicon of national security policy. The term is believed to have surfaced in the media in the aftermath of the German bombing of Guernica, the Basque seat of power, in April 1937. It reappeared periodically during World War II in reference to the indiscriminate killing of civilians by aircraft.[1] Today, the term is defined in U.S. Code Title 50 as “any weapon or device that is intended, or has the capability, to cause death or serious bodily injury to a significant number of people through the release, dissemination, or impact of toxic or poisonous chemicals or their precursors; a disease organism; radiation or radioactivity."[2] For the purposes of this analysis, the term is defined as weapons that can inflict mass casualties on combatants and noncombatants using nuclear and radiological devices, long range missiles, and lethal chemicaland biological agents.[3]