The aff’s logic is rooted in a white scientific masculinity that presumes it is above the consequences of its actions and actively prevents the eradication of disease out of fear of “future attacks” – turns the entirety of case

Post-9 / 11 acceleration of such risky research reveals the logic of state protectionism in U.S. biological warfare research. Like other militarized sciences, the industry embodies a protectionism infused with white masculinity and technoscientific authority. 33 I have in my previous work on U.S. biodefense argued that it is a form of institutionalized “white scientific masculinity”: institutions of science and security associated with white males (e.g., defense sciences) get construed as infallible founts of knowledge and expertise.34 The post-9 / 11 regime of biosecurity thus garnered the U.S. biodefense industry, a trusted institution of “white scientific masculinity,” an even greater ability to conduct risky research without significant scrutiny. But no case better illustrates U.S. impudence in pursuing new avenues of risky research than that conducted with smallpox. Smallpox is known for its historical devastation—it has an approximately one-third mortality rate and was responsible for almost half a billion deaths worldwide in the twentieth century. It wreaked havoc in Native America centuries ago when European settler-colonists—in an early example of biological warfare— intentionally infected native populations who, without prior exposure, were decimated by the disease (Christopher et al. 1997; Duffy 2002; USAMRIID 2004). In 1979, smallpox became the first disease to be successfully eradicated from the world.35 Neither the warfare genealogy of smallpox—as a deplorable tool Europeans had used to commit Native American genocide—nor its status as an internationally eradicated disease and thus a minimal threat—seemed to influence the resurgence of attention the United States gave smallpox at the end of the Cold War. In the context of the breakup of the Soviet Union, U.S. national security circles feared its deployment by so-called terrorist networks and rogue states. The triumph of eradication, moreover, had birthed a new dilemma: whether stocks of variola (the virus that causes smallpox disease) existed outside of World Health Organization (WHO) knowledge, and thus whether it should retain a few guarded stocks for prophylactic, research purposes.36 The WHO would allow the United States and the former Soviet Union to hold onto stocks of variola—for research purposes—in their high-containment labs (the CDC and the Russian Research Institute for Viral Preparations, respectively).37 Thus, the public health triumph of smallpox eradication contorted, within the U.S. national security community, into a problem of U.S. vulnerability—a population with little immunity to smallpox and thus highly susceptible to a smallpox bioweapons attack. The post-9 / 11 era drastically escalated this post-eradication specter, painting Iraq in particular as a looming threat.38 This was extraordinarily ironic since the only military deployment of smallpox has been by Europeans against Native Americans (not to mention the false victimhood the United States adopted to justify the 2003 invasion of Iraq). This incongruity notwithstanding, the United States embarked on hazardous research on the variola virus—namely, genetic engineering of novel strains. These are strains to which—by virtue of their novelty—humans would have little or no immunity. As with other instances of pathogen proliferation in the name of biodefense, the strategy was to prepare for and pre-empt others who may be doing the same thing. In 2004, the United States put forward a request to the WHO, in charge of overseeing smallpox studies, for approval to conduct genetic engineering experiments with variola, including creating cross-species hybrids by splicing variola genes into the genomes of other orthopoxviruses; if approved, it would change the 1994 WHO guideline banning such work (WHO 2004). This request was considered at the World Health Assembly meeting in May 2005. It met with substantial opposition from many countries expressing concern about this escalation of research and potential accidental escapes. Nevertheless, the WHO approved all but the most extreme genetic engineering activities (i.e., the splicing of variola genes into other orthopoxviruses) (Enserink 2005). In 2007, the WHO finally banned all research involving genetic engineering of the variola virus, after pushback by many member countries and NGOs, particularly from the Global South, including the Sunshine Project and the Third World Network, a transnational development and environmental policy NGO based in Malaysia (Third World Network 2007b). The U.S. push for genetic engineering highlighted once again a faith in technoscience—as long as it remained under the purview of U.S. state biosecurity. The United States, moreover, relaxed its overall restraints on smallpox research in the post-9 / 11 climate—by continuing to postpone destroying variola stocks. Soon after the WHO agreed to allow the United States and the former USSR to hold onto stocks of the variola virus for research purposes in 1984, it had recommended their destruction once sufficient information had been garnered. In 1990, the WHO assessed that enough research had been conducted (e.g., genome sequencing and clone fragment libraries39) and set a date for the destruction of the remaining stocks—1993. Yet, when that time came, the WHO postponed destruction to 1995 due primarily to pressure from the United States and Russia, both of which argued that they still needed the stocks for further research and to develop new countermeasures. Proponents of postponement even cited the achievement of full genome sequencing—intended to obviate the need for preserving viral samples—as presenting a new danger: scientists could use this to re-create the variola virus (Mahy et al. 1993; Hammond 2007). Technoscientific advancement had generated more risk, yet remained the mainstay of U.S. decision making in its pursuit to control variola. Over the years many nations and independent organizations internationally as well as within the United States have argued for the destruction of these remaining stocks to stem potential proliferation of variola. But in the post-9 / 11 climate, the U.S. biodefense community has only further entrenched its position to retain the stocks in the name of national security. In 2002, after two subsequent postponements, destruction of the stocks was postponed indefinitely (Third World Network 2007b; WHO 1999). The biosecurity regime has been successful in shifting attention away from the dangers that the research industry internally generates—in the form of lab accidents, leaks, and other mistakes, as well as mal-intended deployment by industry insiders like Bruce Ivins, the white male biodefense scientist who was the FBI’s final suspect in the anthrax mailings of 2001. It is precisely the buildup of domestic U.S. biological warfare capacity that poses a tangible, grave danger, domestically and internationally, to those intentionally targeted by the U.S. national security regime—Arabs, Muslims, and other negatively racialized groups and nations—as well as those affected by the biohazards of the research process itself—lab workers and others in physical proximity of dangerous biological agents. That the buildup continues despite these severe costs attests to the power exerted by U.S. bio-imperialism and the national security state and industry interests that drive it.