This book has an extended backstory, and I must first and foremost thank my editor, Marie-Claire Antoine, for enabling it to finally come to fruition through her strong support for this project and her valuable suggestions for organizing the material.

The biotechnology revolution will have implications for security that will probably exceed those of the nuclear and information revolutions that preceded it.

In The Tempest, the tale of a man who seeks to build order using a unique knowledge of nature given to him by adept specialists, William Shakespeare wrote, “What’s past is prologue.” This chapter offers an extended prologue to the development of novel advanced military biotechnologies. It examines how actors throughout international history, from great powers to rogue...

The germ warfare arsenals of the twentieth century had little impact on international balances of power because of decisions to pursue more immediate and predictable conventional and nuclear arms. Still, they laid the foundation for new programs for the twenty-first century that could easily dwarf the destructive power of the largest BW usage in history, the low-tech deployment of bacteria that...

Imagine soldiers having no physical limitations . . . water and power being available whenever and wherever they are needed . . . mechanical systems as autonomous and adaptable as living things. What if, instead of acting on thoughts, we had thoughts that could act? Indeed, imagine if soldiers could communicate by thought alone . . . communications so secure there is zero probability of intercept....

While the US military allocated billions of dollars in the first decade of the twenty-first century toward advanced BW defense and augmentation of individual warfighters, an equally dramatic expansion of nominally civilian R&D was also occurring under the rubric of homeland security. Although it had begun in the 1990s, it was propelled by the 9/11 and Amerithrax attacks in the fall of 2001,...

The preceding chapters have covered a wide variety of historical and plausible future effects of biotechnology on both international balances of power and on individual human security. Although concerns over biological warfare, and later bioterrorism, stemmed directly from great power bacteriological weapons programs and then the possibility that the material could be obtained or duplicated by...

A race of devils would be propagated on the earth who might make the very existence of the species of man a condition precarious and full of terror. Had I a right, for my own benefit, to inflict this curse upon everlasting generations?

3-D printing, 1

David Malet teaches international relations at the University of Melbourne. Previously he was assistant professor of political science and director of the Center for the Study of Homeland Security at Colorado State University–Pueblo. From 2000 to 2003 he served as a national security aide to US Senate Majority Leader Tom Daschle. His research includes leading an experimental...