Intelligence and Biosecurity

This chapter is concerned with the emerging scholarship on intelligence and biosecurity. Using the Covid-19 pandemic as a point of perspective, it traces how threats to collective health have been conceived, responded to, studied and managed from early in the Twentieth Century through to the present day. It provides a historical frame for understanding disease as a national security threat, with a particular focus on the evolution of and the consequent fear of bioweapons. The fear of these new weapons prompted a response, an effort to develop institutions and methodologies to gather intelligence on these new threats, ones that could distinguish between natural outbreaks and deliberate attacks, or outbreaks caused by accidents. As world wars turned to Cold Wars, and then to the campaign against international terrorism, the fear of the proliferation of biosecurity threats grew and led to a shift to a 'preparedness' model of global biosecurity intelligence, monitoring, and scholarship.