National Security Watch: Banning WMD, the acronym
By now, WMD—the acronym for weapons of mass destruction—is the widely accepted shorthand for referring to mankind's most deadly weaponry. But Joseph Cirincione, one of the nation's leading experts on weapons proliferation, says it's time to stop referring to WMDs.
"We believe that that phrase confuses officials, befuddles the public, and justifies policies that more precise language and more accurate assessments could not support," he says.
Cirincione says that talk of WMD by public officials and others should be replaced by more-specific references to nuclear, biological, or chemical weapons in order to better reflect the unique aspects of each of those threats. "That phrase 'weapons of mass destruction' conflates threats from very, very different weapons, weapons that have differences in lethality, consequence of use, ease of acquisition, and the availability of measures that can protect against them," says Cirincione, senior associate and director for nonproliferation at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace in Washington.
For instance, chemical weapons are relatively easy to produce, but their damage potentially is limited and transitory. Biological agents, while an alarming possibility, are difficult to make into an effective weapon. And nuclear bombs are the most difficult to produce—and require telltale infrastructure to create the necessary fissile material—but also have the capability for causing widespread death and destruction.
However, the nature of a threat is muddled when the weapon at issue isn't clear. A case in point, he says, was the prewar talk of Iraq's WMD.
"It confused the possibility that Saddam Hussein had some anthrax-filled shells, which was quite possible, with the threat that he had nuclear weapons, [which] was quite unlikely," he says. "But merging them together made the threat seem more imminent than it was."
The same, he says, is true when there is talk of Syria's WMD. That confuses, he says, "the threat from Syria's chemical weapons, which they most certainly have, with the idea that Syria might have a nuclear weapon, which it certainly does not. The chemical threat is a serious one, but it implies very different policies to contain it and eliminate it than does the possibility of a nuclear system in that country."
The Carnegie Endowment this week issued a new edition of "Deadly Arsenals," its authoritative country-by-country assessment of nuclear, biological, and chemical weapons and missile delivery systems:
- Countries suspected of clandestine nuclear weapons programs: North Korea and Iran. (Israel hasn't declared nuclear weapons but is assumed to have 100 to 170 of them.)
- Countries suspected of retaining biological weapons or programs: China, Egypt, Iran, Israel, North Korea, Russia, and Syria.
- Countries suspected of retaining significant chemical weapons programs: China, Egypt, Iran, Israel, North Korea, and Syria.
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