Threats to the Common Good: Biochemical Weapons and Human Subjects Research‪.‬

Chemical and biological weapons are rightly regarded with a special sense of horror. Their effects can be both devastating and indiscriminate, taking the harshest toll on the most vulnerable classes of noncombatants. A biological attack may not even be discovered until long after a disease has spread through a population. Moreover, chemical and biological weapons are especially attractive alternatives for groups that lack the ability to construct nuclear weapons. The 1995 release of sarin gas into the Tokyo subway by the Aum Shinri Kyo group suggested that effective delivery devices may be harder to procure than the chemical agents themselves, but the 2001 anthrax attack in the United States, which used the postal service as a delivery device, showed there could also be surprisingly low-tech solutions to delivery and dispersal. All this makes chemical and biological weapons uniquely potent tools for insurgency and destabilization. (1) Responding to the threat of chemical and biological weapons raises complex but important ethical questions. In a very real sense, the bulwark of last defense against such agents must be mounted, not atop a wall or in a distant trench, but within the very bodies of military and civilian personnel. Questions about the limits of what can be justified in the name of defense were raised during the first Gulf War. (2) The controversy surrounded a waiver that the Department of Defense sought from the Food and Drug Administration that would allow it to administer pyridostigmine and botulinum toxoid vaccine to U.S. military personnel without their consent. The consent waiver was granted, but the vaccine was made available only on a voluntary basis. As the possibility materializes that chemical and biological weapons could be used as instruments of terror in a domestic context, similar questions are being raised for civilian populations as well. (3)