Technologies Underlying Weapons of Mass Destruction (Part 3 of 8)

his background paper explores the technical pathways by which states might acquire nuclear, chemical, and biological weapons and the systems to deliver them. It also assesses the level of effort, commitment, and resources required to mount such developments. The paper is a companion to the OTA report Proliferation of Weapons of Mass Destruction: Assessing the Risks, which describes what nuclear, chemical, and biological weapons can do and how they might be used. That report also analyzes the consequences of the spread of such weapons for the United States and the world, surveys the array of policy tools that can be used to combat proliferation, and identifies tradeoffs and choices that confront policymakers. A forthcoming report will analyze specific sets of nonproliferation policy options in detail. The technical hurdles that must be surmounted to develop nuclear, chemical, and biological weapons are s ummarized in table 1-1, which also appeared in OTA’s earlier report. Those steps that are particularly time-consuming or difficult for proliferants to master without outside assistance can be exploited to control proliferation. Conversely, steps that are relatively easy, or that make use of widely available know-how and equipment, make poor candidates for control efforts. Understanding the extent to which ‘‘dual-use’ technologies or products—those also having legitimate applications-are involved in the development of weapons of mass destruction is important, since both the feasibility of controlling dual-use items and the implications of doing so depend on the extent of their other applications.