Greg Koblentz, member of the Center’s Scientists Working Group on Biological and Chemical Security, wrote an op-ed in Defense One. For the first time since World War II, an adversary managed to knock a U.S. Navy aircraft carrier out of service. Only this time the enemy was a virus, not a nation-state. The fact that we ‘lost’ the […]
Myanmar should finally come clean about its chemical weapons past—with US help
Gregory Koblentz, member of the Scientists Working Group on Chemical and Biological Security, co-authored a piece in the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists on Myanmar’s chemical weapons past. In November 2012, US President Barack Obama arrived at Aung San Suu Kyi’s mansion, the place where the iconic democracy activist had spent much of the last […]
Leveraging Cheminformatics to Bolster the Control of Chemical Warfare Agents and their Precursors
Greg Koblentz, member of our Scientists Working Group, co-authored an article in Strategic Trade Research. Abstract: International frameworks and national legislation contain lists of controlled chemicals that can be employed as chemical warfare agents or precursors for their synthesis. The development and wide adoption of a cheminformatics tool could overcome several practical problems inherent to […]
Op-ed: A biotech firm made a smallpox-like virus on purpose. Nobody seems to care
Scientists Working Group member Gregory Koblentz wrote an op-ed in the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists on manufacturing a bioweapon. In 2017, the virologist David Evans made headlines when he used synthetic biology to recreate the extinct horsepox virus, which is closely related to the virus that causes smallpox, a disease eradicated in 1980. Evans […]
Chemical-weapon use in Syria: atrocities, attribution, and accountability
Gregory Koblentz, member of our Scientists Working Group, wrote an article in The Nonproliferation Review on recent chemical weapons use in Syria. ABSTRACT: International efforts to hold the government of President Bashar al-Assad accountable for the use of chemical weapons in the Syrian Civil War have entered a new phase. For the first time, the […]