Brad Roberts

The Road Ahead for Arms Control

The momentum that drove arms control in the 1990s is dissipating. Challenges lie ahead, but since arms control cannot be taken for granted, what should we do?

Proliferation and nonproliferation in the 1990s: Looking for the right lessons

Brad Roberts is a member of the research staff at the Institute for Defense Analyses in Alexandria, Virginia, and a member of the editorial board of The Nonproliferation Review. He also chairs the research advisory council of the Chemical and Biological Arms Control Institute. The views expressed here are his own and should not be attributed to any of the institutions with which he is affiliated or their sponsors. Some aspects of the arguments presented here have been published in other venues, including principally Weapons Proliferation and World Order After the Cold War (Kluwer Press, 1996). Early in the 1990s, pundits claimed that proliferation would prove to be little more than a passing fancy of security specialists and the Clinton administration. It didn’t work out that way. Today, the problem is broadly seen as one of enduring importance for US national security and global stability in the post-Cold War era. Accordingly, we have worked for roughly a decade now to come to terms with the proliferation problem without the Cold War as context. As a community of policymakers and analysts, we have had a rough time doing so. We began with what we thought we knew, which turned out to be not enough. We reinvigorated traditional policy approaches, only to have to improvise and innovate as the world changed. Moreover, our community has steadily expanded, as the proliferation issue has begun to cut across an ever broader array of foreign and defense policy interests and as more and more people— many with very different backgrounds—have had to learn about the proliferation of nuclear, biological, and chemical (NBC) weapons and their missile delivery systems.

Revisiting Fred Iklé's 1961 question, “after detection—What?”

Dr. Brad Roberts is a Research Staff Member at the Institute for Defense Analyses in Alexandria, Virginia. He is also an Adjunct Professor at George Washington University, Chairman of the research advisory council of the Chemical and Biological Arms Control Institute, and a member of The Nonproliferation Review’s editorial board. He is the author of Weapons Proliferation and World Order After the Cold War (Kluwer Press, 1996).

Controlling the proliferation of biological weapons

Brad Roberts is a Research Fellow at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, Washington, D.C., where he also serves as Editor of The Washington Quarterly. His recent publications include Biological Weapons: Weapons of the Future? and Ratifying the Chemical Weapons Convention. An earlier version of this article was presented to a symposium of the American Bar Associations Committee on National Security. In the panoply of global security interests as they have emerged after the Cold War, biological weapons are nearly an afterthought. It is common to hear such weapons lumped together with nuclear and chemical weapons—and their delivery systems—in descriptions of the emerging proliferation challenge, but with little or no differentiation of the biological aspect from the larger context. Why, in fact, do biological weapons (BW) merit any specific concern? After all, despite the high potential lethality of such weapons, their use in modern warfare has been virtually unknown. Moreover, there has been a global arms control regime in place in the biological domain for over two decades—the Biological and Toxin Weapons Convention (BWC)—with more than 100 states parties. The answer is straightforward: the biological warfare problem appears to be growing worse. There are four reasons for thinking so.