Weapons of mass destruction > Related Articles
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Contents |
Parent topics
- Biological weapon [r]: Living organisms, or substances produced by living organisms, used as weapons to produce death or disease in human or agricultural populations [e]
- Chemical weapon [r]: A weapon that cause death or disease by means of chemical interaction with the metabolism of the victim, as opposed to causing injury through blast, thermal, or other effects not on a molecular level [e]
- Nuclear weapon [r]: A weapon that produces extremely powerful explosions from principles involving subatomic particle reactions, rather than the chemical reactions among atoms that power conventional explosives [e]
- Radiological weapon [r]: A weapon that uses explosives or other mechanical means to disperse radioactive substances that present a hazard of producing acute radiation syndrome or other harmful effects, such as contaminating an area and making it unusable [e]
Subtopics
Use and plans
- Aum Shinrikyo [r]: A Japanese religious organization that conducted weapons of mass destruction operations inside Japan, principally sarin chemical weapon releases in 1994 and 1995 [e]
- Biopreparat [r]: Add brief definition or description
- Chemical Corps [r]: A branch of military service concerned with detection and decontamination of chemical, biological and radiological agents; smoke generation; and, in the past, offensive chemical warfare and biological warfare [e]
- Iraq and weapons of mass destruction [r]: Threats, development programs and actual use, of weapons of mass destruction by Iraq, from the 1970s through the Iraq War [e]
- Iran-Iraq War [r]: Add brief definition or description
- French support for Iraq during the Iran-Iraq war [r]: French technical assistance and sales of military and dual-use equipment, beginning in approximately 1975, to Iraq, and continuing through the Iran-Iraq War; France and the Soviet Union were the leading military suppliers to Iraq [e]
- Soviet support for Iraq during the Iran-Iraq War [r]: Soviet technical assistance and sales of military and dual-use equipment, beginning in approximately 1975, to Iraq, and continuing through the Iran-Iraq War; the Soviet Union and France were the leading military suppliers to Iraq [e]
- U.K. support for Iraq during the Iran-Iraq War [r]: Most support to Iraq was without the knowledge or approval of U.K. government, but through covert Iraqi purchasing; some authorized dual-use sales were made, but largely ceased with the UN embargo [e]
- U.S. support for Iraq during the Iran-Iraq War [r]: Technological aid, intelligence, the sale of dual-use and military equipment, but no direct combat against Iran, in the 1980-1988 Iran-Iraq War [e]
- World War I, poison gas [r]: Any of various toxic gases sometimes used in warfare between 1914 - 1918 because of their poisonous or corrosive nature. [e]
- Single Integrated Operational Plan [r]: The U.S. plan and doctrine for the use of nuclear weapons in a large campaign, prepared for all services by the United States Strategic Command, based on Joint Chiefs of Staff guidance [e]
- United States Strategic Command [r]: The U.S. unified headquarters for the missions of worldwide nuclear and conventional precision strike; command, control, communications, intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance in support of strategic operations; global network operations of the Global Information Grid, information operations, ballistic missile defense, and reduction of Weapons of Mass Destruction threats [e]
- Unit 731 [r]: Add brief definition or description
Enablers
- Ballistic missile [r]: A guided missile which, once its engines stop firing, follows a generally parabolic path to its target, defined by momentum, aerodynamic resistance, and gravity [e]
- Bioterrorism [r]: Add brief definition or description
- Chemical terrorism [r]: Terrorism that uses the toxic effects of chemicals to kill, injure, or otherwise adversely affect its targets. [e]
- Cruise missile [r]: A guided missile that uses aerodynamic forces, as well as active jet or rocket propulsion, to stay airborne and to adjust its course. [e]
Nonproliferation
- 1925 Geneva Protocol [r]: A widely ratified international treaty banning the use, as opposed to the manufacture, of chemical weapons and biological weapons [e]
- Arms control [r]: Treaties and implementation agreements to restrict the development, production, deployment, or transfer of specified weapons or weapons technologies. [e]
- Arms Control and Disarmament Agency [r]: A former U.S. independent agency with responsibility for arms control, now part of the U.S. Department of State [e]
- Biological Weapons and Toxins Convention [r]: International agreement banning the production and use of biological weapons, recognizing that there are also legitimate medical, research, and industrial uses for organisms that have potential use in biological warfare [e]
- CDC Bioterrorism Agents-Disease list [r]: Add brief definition or description
- Chemical Weapons Convention [r]: Arms control treaty which prohibits the production, use and possession of chemical weapons and related assets. [e]
- Commission on the Intelligence Capabilities of the United States Regarding Weapons of Mass Destruction [r]: A bipartisan commission that, after the failure to find weapons of mass destruction after the Iraq War, conducted a broad assessment of the capabilities and deficiencies of the United States intelligence community to detect future threats, and made recommendations for improvement [e]
- Counterproliferation [r]: The set of activities that detect and monitor the threat of weapons of special concern against one's own nation and one's allies. [e]
- End user certificate [r]: A document that certifies the ultimate recipient of military or dual-use goods being sold, and attests to compliance with all relevant international arms control agreements, as well as compliance with national policies of the sending and receiving nations, as well as any intermediate countries involved in the shipment [e]
- Missile Technology Control Regime [r]: Informal and voluntary association of countries which share the goals of non-proliferation of unmanned delivery systems capable of delivering weapons of mass destruction. [e]
- National technical means of verification [r]: Euphemism principally for imagery intelligence satellites and other means of strategic arms control verification, principally because the Soviet Union did not want its public to know that they could not prevent Western observation of the state [e]
- Select Agent Program [r]: Pathogens or biological toxins which have been declared by the US Department of Health and Human Services or by the US Department of Agriculture to have the potential to pose a severe threat to public health and safety. [e]
- Strategic Arms Limitation Talks [r]: Add brief definition or description
- Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons [r]: The principal worldwide agreement for controlling the spread of nuclear weapons and nuclear weapons technology, without inhibiting the peaceful use of nuclear energy [e]
- UNSCOM [r]: A United Nations agency, created in April 1991, to inspect Iraq for weapons of mass destruction and long-range guided missiles, and to supervise destruction of weapons and production facilities [e]
- U.S. intelligence and transnational counterproliferation activities [r]: An overview over activities of the United States intelligence community, specifically dealing with arms control, weapons of mass destruction and weapons counterproliferation. [e]
- Wassenaar Arrangement on Export Controls for Conventional Arms and Dual-Use Goods and Technologies [r]: A voluntary international cooperation agreement to reduce the proliferation of weapons, both conventional and weapons of mass destruction [e]
Consequence management
- Acute radiation syndrome [r]: Disease or death caused by whole-body irradiation, over a short period of time, with a significant quantity of penetrating radiation [e]
- Decontamination [r]: The efforts to safeguard property and people that have been exposed to chemical, nuclear, or biological agents. [e]
- Federal Emergency Management Agency [r]: Under the U.S. Department of Homeland Security, the lead operating agency for emergency response to disasters, accidents and attacks affecting the civilian population [e]
- Mass casualty incident [r]: A medical emergency where the number and severity of victims is expected to overwhelm available resources, requiring a decision to defer treatment and provide comfort care only to those who have no realistic chance of survival [e]
- Preventive medicine [r]: A medical specialty concerned with recognizing and reducing health hazards to populations and individuals, with specialties that include the emergency recognition of infectious or environmental hazards, and the treatment of adverse effects of high (undersea) and low (aerospace) medicine, social behavior (e.g., drug abuse) and poisoning [e]
Prevention and preemption
- Counterforce [r]: Military targeting doctrine, historically associated with nuclear warfare and now with precision-guided munitions. [e]
- Osirak reactor [r]: Add brief definition or description
- Gulf War [r]: The conflict started by the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait in 1990, and ended with the liberation of Kuwait and major damage to Iraqi forces, by a US-led UN coalition in 1991. [e]
- Preemptive attack [r]: A military attack intended to neutralize an attack imminently being prepared by one's opponent, and justified as self-defense [e]
- Preventive attack [r]: A doctrine in which an actor uses military force on an opponent who is not believed to be preparing an attack on the actor using prevention, but whose activities, such as taking control of territory or building weapons of mass destruction pose a long-term threat to the critical interests of the actor. The attack may signal the start of a war, or be a strategic move within an existing war. [e]
- National Security Strategy of the United States of America (2002) [r]: The key public document on national security strategy, issued by the George W. Bush Administration between the 9-11 Attack and the Iraq War [e]
- George W. Bush [r]: (1946–) 43rd U.S. President (Republican), elected in 2000 and re-elected in 2004. [e]
- George Tenet [r]: Director of Central Intelligence from July 1997 to July 2004, heading the United States intelligence community and the Central Intelligence Agency [e]
- Colin Powell [r]: A retired general in the United States Army who served in high political office, first African-American to be Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff and U.S. Secretary of State; minimally partisan although he considered himself a moderate Republican, not a neoconservative [e]
- Douglas Feith [r]: An American strategic analyst, associated with neoconservatism, who held posts including Under Secretary of Defense for Policy in 2001-2005, when he advised Donald Rumsfeld on the Iraq War; fellow of the Hudson Institute [e]
- Paul Wolfowitz [r]: An American political scientist and policy-level foreign affairs official, of a neoconservative ideology; resident American Enterprise Institute and on International Security Advisory Board; Deputy Secretary of Defense in the George W. Bush Administration; advisor, Project for the New American Century [e]
- Office of Special Plans [r]: A small office, formerly in the U.S. Department of Defense, created by Douglas Feith, under general supervision of William Luti and directly headed by Abram Shulsky, which took unprocessed intelligence and bypassed independent analysis, to present evidence supporting policy positions; this was a conscious "top-down" methodology contrasting to the traditional "bottom-up" of intelligence analysis [e]
- Abram Shulsky [r]: An American national security policy expert, generally associated with an interventionist foreign policy, who headed the Office of Special Plans in the U.S. Department of Defense of the George W. Bush Administration; theoretician of intelligence analysis [e]
- William Luti [r]: A retired Naval aviator and national security policy analyst, who held significant staff jobs in the George W. Bush Administration under Douglas Feith and then Stephen Hadley, and now is in private industry; hawk and Monty Python devotee [e]
- Iraq War [r]: Invasion of Iraq by a coalition of countries, led by the United States, in 2003, and subsequent occupation [e]
- War on terror [r]: A major policy of the George W. Bush Administration, defining global terrorism, as opposed to nation-states as in the Cold War, as the focal point of national security policy [e]
- Michael Scheuer [r]: Former head of the Osama bin Laden/al-Qaeda unit in the Counterterrorism Center of the Central Intelligence Agency; critical of U.S. policies but with insightful analysis on what he sees as a complex enemy [e]
- al-Qaeda [r]: International islamist terrorist network. Responsible for the 9-11 attack and other terrorist attacks. [e]
- Ibn Sheikh al-Libi [r]: A Libyan member of al-Qaeda whose interrogation results, later recanted, were a large part of the U.S. justfication for starting the Iraq War because Iraq had weapons of mass destruction; he was in various CIA programs of extraordinary rendition and interrogation [e]
Other related topics
- Accidental release source terms [r]: The mathematical equations that estimate the rate at which accidental releases of air pollutants into the atmosphere may occur at industrial facilities. [e]
- Convention on Certain Conventional Weapons [r]: A treaty limiting the use not of weapons of mass destruction, but of types considered especially inhumane to individuals [e]
- Solution Unsatisfactory (short story) [r]: A science fiction story by Robert Heinlein, dealing with an alternative history in which the U.S. develops and uses radiological weapons in the Second World War [e]
- SS-1 SCUD [r]: A Soviet-designed short range and inaccurate ballistic missile, a near-copy of the Second World War V-2 missile, that was widely exported, copied, employed as a base for new development, and used in combat by Iraq [e]
- Saddam Hussein [r]: (1937–2006) Deposed and executed ruler of Iraq. [e]
- Security organization of Saddam Hussein [r]: The multiple security organizations that protected the person, government, and sensitive projects of Saddam Hussein, also cross-checking one another [e]
- Thermobaric warhead [r]: Add brief definition or description

