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Current conversations surrounding unconventional weapons — chemical, biological, radiological, and nuclear — have become so fantastical as to be unserious. As the Chinese military fundamentally rethinks biological warfare and Russia continues to use chloropicrin in Ukraine, hypothetical scenarios of AI-enabled bioweapons dominate the headlines. If national security leaders and unconventional weapons experts continue to prioritize latent potentialities of emerging technology over current trends, U.S. national security will once again run the risk of being unprepared for an actual chemical, biological, radiological, or nuclear incident.
Executive agencies and Congress have drastically cut down opportunities for successful unconventional weapons policy formation by eliminating annual reports, scaling back trained staff, and reducing subject-matter forums. Given this trend of downsizing and eliminating unconventional weapons expertise, overblown hypotheses on future threats have overtaken sound analyses. While expanding government funding for data collection projects and reinstituting offices have been traditional solutions, the current political environment does not afford this. Therefore, the unconventional weapons policy community should develop new solutions to avoid perpetuating old cycles. These solutions include, but are not limited to, better defining private sector and research collaborations and more frequently incorporating data on current unconventional weapons trends into decision-making.
It was not unusual to find top U.S. national security leaders discussing the challenges of unconventional weapons during the Cold War, given the size and scope of the Soviet Union’s stockpile. Political leaders recognized that the United States required defense policy that anticipated, deterred, and responded to various potential scenarios involving these weapons. One can argue as to the soundness of the underlying arguments regarding proposed U.S. actions during the Cuban Missile Crisis or the threat of biological attacks in a hypothetical Warsaw Pact invasion, but conversations were guided by technical advisors with experience in the respective weapons.
As the Cold War ended, there was a lull in unconventional weapons policy discussions. The threat of non-state actors seeking a “weapons of mass destruction” capability after 9/11 reinvigorated policy discussions, but senior defense officials and policy analysts did not lead these debates. Instead, speculative narratives and research often from adjacent or unrelated areas of expertise became the authoritative voice. This resulted in widely publicized, redundant, and untested hypothetical scenarios that drowned out unconventional weapons (and terrorism) expertise.
After the 2003 Iraq War failed to reveal any unconventional weapons, U.S. policymakers put the issues behind them. Continued reduction of unconventional weapons discussion in national security guidance became the norm. Russia, Syria, North Korea, and Iran continued to develop and use unconventional weapons, with little to no review by U.S. leadership. The cycle of unanticipated attacks, improvised military actions, and commissions analyzing U.S. leadership unpreparedness continues, as it has uninterrupted, as seen in the ad hoc approach to Syria’s chemical weapons and Iran’s nascent nuclear research program, both of which continue today. Meanwhile, outside experts and officials once again grab at the steering wheel of unconventional weapons policy, as resources to help corral the conversation towards effective policy erodes.
Previously, there were agencies responsible for integrating technical discussions into policy discussions and helping define priorities, but they are no longer active. Congress terminated the Counterproliferation Program Advisory Committee’s annual report on activities and programs for countering proliferation in 2013. The Department of Defense folded the Defense Threat Reduction Agency’s Threat Reduction Advisory Committee in 2019. The annual countering weapons of mass destruction symposia once hosted by the U.S. Strategic Command between 2008 and 2017 was an example of successful collaboration. They allowed action officers across policy and technical communities to meet and address high-priority challenges to recommend courses of action to the Joint Requirements Oversight Council, the Pentagon body that advises on evaluating global threats and prioritizing joint military capabilities. When the U.S. Special Operations Command took over the responsibility of coordinating counter weapons of mass destruction issues in 2018, the conferences lost steam and ultimately were cancelled after 2023.
Recently, the Trump administration has exacerbated the issue by taking steps to downsize and eliminate several federal agencies that directly addressed unconventional weapons policy challenges, including: the Department of Homeland Security Countering Weapons of Mass Destruction Office, the National Counterproliferation and Biosecurity Center, and the Federal Bureau of Investigation’s Weapons of Mass Destruction Directorate. The National Defense University downsized its Center for the Study of Weapons of Mass Destruction and moved it under the Institute for National Strategic Studies. The Air Force’s Center for Strategic Deterrence Studies was shut down in 2025 for budgetary reasons, despite its small budget. As expertise continues to shrink at the federal level, it creates an experience vacuum that makes it easy to ignore the nuances of technical expertise, the value of historical knowledge, and the various organizational decision-making frameworks.
U.S. policy increasingly relies on exaggerated predictions of superweapons, but the response has been unfocused and ad hoc. This cycle of unreadiness seems haphazard. Unconventional weapons policy seems uniquely susceptible to noise that naturally overrides signals. Uncertainty over adversary stockpiles, capabilities, and intentions abound. The United States doesn’t have a solid track record of incidences by which to refine threat profiles. Secrecy is understood to be a chief component to unconventional weapons capabilities, but this can be so oppressive as to muffle healthy debate and deliberations with academia and industry. This often renders analysis on the subject so abstract that any scenarios could be considered plausible, even the “bolt from the blue” nuclear attack that justified huge nuclear stockpiles in the past. But on closer inspection, there are other recurring themes.
These themes include budget-to-strategy mismatch, widespread mission creep, new actors in a new information environment, and jargon abuse. First, by budget-to-strategy mismatch, we suggest that budget priorities to address unconventional weapons neither match the concern voiced in national strategy documents, whether it be any of the recent National Security Strategies or the Biodefense Posture Review, nor do they reflect military service requirements. For example, despite the headlines about the threat of Iraq’s chemical and biological weapons program in 2002, and while Syria’s chemical weapons use caused great concern to the United States, the Defense Department’s budget for chemical-biological defense has remained largely flatlined for the past 20 years. This mismatch can lead to reactive decision-making that is poorly thought out and susceptible to the loudest voices, both at the budget and strategy levels.
Widespread mission creep is the second theme. Offices working on unconventional weapons issues are increasingly expanding their research beyond their intended mandate to appease political aims, but without drawing Congressional attention (or gaining additional funds). This is not new. Yet, more scrutiny should be placed on exactly what the U.S. government’s chemical and biological defense program’s budget accomplishes to identify any hidden drivers. The continued lack of clarity on what a modern unconventional weapons threat looks like only amplifies this challenge. For example, the general (mis)use of the term “biothreat” in acquisition program plans and security guidance allows for a broader use of defense funds to develop countermeasures for natural disease outbreaks instead of deliberate biological threats.
Third, as emerging technologies have become a central focus in defense, new voices have entered the debates concerning AI, synthetic biology, and drone swarms. Fevered debates over the “convergence of artificial intelligence and biotechnology” have caused some to suggest that any person with access to a large language model can become a bioterrorist, causing mass casualties through the dissemination of an engineered disease organism. These concerns may be valid, but this hypothetical threat ought not replace current and existing threats of unconventional weapons developed during the Cold War until either a threat assessment or decision framework beyond proof of concept can ground government analysts in their work. Without rigorous scrutiny and balanced assessments from technical experts, these concerns end up pushing the same level of funding on a greater number of potential unconventional weapons, thus diminishing fielded defense capabilities.
Finally, the term “weapons of mass destruction” has become a floating signifier. Current debates attempting to redefine chemical weapons and biological weapons run the risk of rendering these terms empty, too. Examples include classifying some emerging technologies and capabilities as a weapon of mass destruction, expanding the definition of biological weapons, and more recently, classifying fentanyl as a chemical weapon. As noted in National Defense University’s Occasional Paper 8:
The United States is party to three treaties that refer directly to controls on ‘weapons of mass destruction’ in addition to those limiting specific types of [weapons of mass destruction] … Given that these treaties impose specific obligations on the United States and other adherents to them, it is inconceivable that treaty negotiators thought [this] was an ‘amorphous’ term that could mean whatever anyone wanted it to mean.
The term “weapons of mass destruction” is deeply embedded into national and international legal frameworks, which complicate expanding the definition to meet the needs of newer technologies. Classifying fentanyl as a weapon of mass destruction only confuses the discussion because it is only meant to justify controversial U.S. military operations. Aside from the term “biological weapon” being used nearly interchangeably with biorisk and biothreat, any expansion untethered to a real-world threat assessment could backfire and dilute the ability to implement sound policy, while missing actual threats.
So, how does the U.S. government allow for outside technical experts from other industries to advise and participate in defense policy discussions without losing the confidence of senior policymakers?
Disrupting this cycle in unconventional weapons policy starts with addressing the experience vacuum. Assuming federal options are limited in re-filling the vacuum by re-establishing offices and forums, the unconventional weapons policy community needs to find new solutions — however small — to address the problem the vacuum creates. To start, better and more frequent communication between the corresponding technical communities, be it in medical, intelligence, or chemical-biological defense, can help more concretely identify knowledge gaps and smooth over various misinterpretations.
All three communities, and others addressing unconventional weapons, have their distinct and narrow scientific approach to analyzing policy challenges. But policymakers don’t understand technical jargon well enough to ask the right questions, and the individual technical communities often don’t understand the full scope of the politics of the issue to provide the right data. As a result, the repeated use of phrases simplifies a complicated threat that actually requires thorough and detailed evaluation. Vague bumper sticker phrases such as “the convergence of artificial intelligence and biotech” and “the inevitability of nuclear war” are no longer sufficient at addressing a risk or advancing the conversation. While think tanks are natural facilitators for these conversations, it should become a matter of practice beyond seminars and roundtables in each room where major unconventional weapons issues are discussed.
Second, the role of historical knowledge and data should become central to unconventional weapons issues. The dearth of data and information in unconventional weapons policy does not mean technical silos, now including in the private sector, should forgo the data that is there. One project filling the empirical evidence gap is the University of Maryland’s Violent Non-State Actor Chemical, Biological, Radiological, and Nuclear Data Portal. Unfortunately, the U.S. government stopped funding the project in 2024, and the team no longer has the resources to maintain the database, though they still collect data.
If private companies are truly interested in risk reduction, funding and collaborating with projects like the data portal could bridge the data gap where possible. Separately, personalities can influence policymaking much more than evidence that a problem exists. Policymakers could adopt evidence-based policy development to construct more feasible and cost-appropriate solutions, which ensure that rigorous research and analysis support the development of defense policy.
As the past has shown, it is not sufficient to simply develop and adopt future nightmare scenarios without stress-testing all major underlying assumptions, especially ones that are new and originate without robust empirical evidence in real-world incidences. While concerns over the exclusion of highly specialized expertise may be part of a wider issue, what distinguishes unconventional weapons policy as particularly important is the magnitude by which narratives tend to gain control over the subject and result in poor policy.
Therefore, it is equally important that senior government officials and other executive decisionmakers reject the notion that hypothetical scenarios alone can serve as sweeping statements about defense strategy. This is not risk reduction. Rather, it is a poor strategy, and it could be costly if this pattern of analysis and decision-making continues. Those costs will likely not go unnoticed by Congress or the public, especially if large sums of taxpayer dollars are involved. Unconventional weapons policy mistakes are rarely quiet.
Additionally, academics outside national security and industry representatives may need to learn how to approach national security topics, like unconventional weapons, and not simply what to think. Just because a scenario is possible does not mean it is plausible. Conflating the two could cost technology companies millions of dollars and public trust without meaningfully reducing any national security risks. Recent research on distinguishing between knowledge and weaponization has begun to close this gap.
Another option has seen companies establish advisory councils composed of former national security officials. For example, in 2025, Anthropic announced its National Security and Public Sector Advisory Council. To improve, they could add biology or biological weapons experts, given their recent publication proposes biological risks and weaponization as a leading risk. Regardless, this council starts to bridge the gap.
While acknowledging federal limitations, the above recommendations should not be mistaken for a long-term solution that replaces government downsizing. Additional steps in government are necessary to be prepared for future unconventional weapons crises. The Assistant Secretary of Defense for Nuclear Deterrence, Chemical and Biological Defense Programs is an appropriate agent to advocate for these issues, as this office answers to both policy and acquisition chiefs. This includes developing and mentoring chemical-biological technical experts on defense policy debates, possibly through a revitalization of the National Defense University center or return of the Global Synchronization Conferences, for meaningful engagement on policy issues with technical advice. Experts need to educate policymakers on how to question and avoid “worst-case” scenarios, a task best suited for the Defense Threat Reduction Agency. If these technical analysts can engage in the larger national security community’s defense debates, it may be possible to tone down the rhetoric behind the “worst-case” risk scenarios involving unconventional weapons development and use.
Threats from unconventional weapons have not gone away, nor have they become more complex and dangerous. They have changed form, and future adversaries will be watching to see whether new technologies and shifting international norms offer an opportunity to use them. By prudently taking these steps and continuing to discuss weapons of mass destruction policy challenges, the U.S. national security community can be better prepared to counter such adversaries. A more engaged and educated network of technical experts, national security analysts, and policymakers can minimize vulnerabilities and oversights that have often come with unconventional weapons.
April Arnold has 15 years of experience in U.S. implementation and compliance for various arms control agreements and nonproliferation programs. This includes over a decade supporting the Chemical Demilitarization Program, dealing with matters such as highly political first-of-a-kind technology deployment, environmental risks and remediation, and public safety and emergency preparedness. She has also worked on U.S. implementation of the Biological Weapons Convention, on nearly a dozen conventional arms control agreements, and nuclear material security as a contractor for various offices across the U.S. government.
Al Mauroni is a senior policy analyst with 40 years of experience with U.S. military chemical and biological defense and is the author of BIOCRISIS: Defining Biological Threats in U.S. Policy (Praeger, 2022).
The views expressed here are solely those of the authors in their private capacity and do not in any way represent the views, positions, or policies of the U.S. government, including any of its constituent departments, agencies, or entities.
**Please note, as a matter of house style, War on the Rocks will not use a different name for the U.S. Department of Defense until and unless the name is changed by statute by the U.S. Congress.
Image: Oliver Nisbet via DVIDS
