What Would the Founders Do about WMD?

大规模杀伤性武器一直被热爱和平的人所反对，然而，人们真的需要大规模杀伤性武器吗？作者试图探讨杀伤性武器的前前后后以及政府现在面对大规模杀伤性武器的作为。
In the past years, the founders had no notion of atomic or chemical weapons, but they knew one biological weapon: deliberate infection by smallpox.
Actually, there is no smallpox in the Americas in early time. Smallpox was from Europe and it was a kind of endemic diseases. During Revolutionary War, smallpox broke out several times. Reports showed that the British were involved in biological warfare, by deliberately spreading the disease and by sending infected persons to the American army. Fortunately, Washington had caught smallpox when he was nineteen years old, giving him a lifetime immunity. During the Valley Forge winter, he inoculated the American army by infecting his soldiers with smallpox under controlled conditions. Washington saved his troops from nature and from the enemy.
However, today's weapons of mass destruction generally refer to: Nuclear weapons (including radioactive weapons), Chemical weapons and Biological weapons. Weapons of mass destruction do not have practical, because once use means that the other party will also use a similar weapon, the scale of the damage is enough to destroy the entire human civilization. Meanwhile, because nuclear weapons are much stronger and more powerful than biological or chemical weapons, some people think of weapons of mass destruction should only include nuclear weapons. In our current world, it is simply impossible to win a nuclear war. Nuclear states are governed by the theory of Mutually Assured Destruction (M.A.D.), the assumption that launching a nuclear attack on a state with the capacity to strike back will result in a counter attack.
Weapons of Mass Destruction have been pushed to the forefront of public consciousness.In the debate, one of the most problematic assertions is  that nuclear weapons have no value in fact because they cannot be applied. The nuclear disarmament advocates argue and claim that nuclear weapons should be eliminated because they have no value and, are extremely dangerous at the same time. However, according to states which think nuclear weapons are weapons of deterrence, they nevertheless continue to consider them to  have tremendous strategic value.
In 1997, the President of the United States, upon the advice and consent of the Senate, ratified the Convention on the Prohibition of the Development, Production, Stock- piling, and Use of Chemical Weapons and on Their De- struction. S. Treaty Doc. No. 103–21, 1974 U. N. T. S. 317. The nations that ratified the Convention (State Parties) had bold aspirations for it: “general and complete disarmament under strict and effective international control, including the prohibition and elimination of all types of weapons of mass destruction.”
Up to the 1990s, however, chemical weapons remained in use both in and out of wartime, with devastating consequences. Iraq’s use of nerve agents and mustard gasduring its war with Iran in the 1980s contributed to international support for a renewed, more effective chemical weapons ban. Id., at 6, 10–11. In 1994 and 1995, longheld fears of the use of chemical weapons by terrorists were realized when Japanese extremists carried out two attacks using sarin gas. Id., at 6. The Convention was conceived as an effort to update the Geneva Protocol’s protections and to expand the prohibition on chemical weapons beyond state actors in wartime. Convention Preamble, 1974 U. N. T. S. 318 (the State Parties are “determined for the sake of all mankind, to exclude completely the possibility of the use of chemical weapons . . . thereby complementing the obligations assumed under the Geneva Protocol of 1925”). The Convention aimed to achieve that objective by prohibiting the development, stockpiling, or use of chemical weapons by any State Party or person within a State Party’s jurisdiction.
From the government's behavior, we can see that the world is to try to reduce the Weapons of Mass Destruction, strive for world peace, and sustain human civilization and development.
 
Works Cited
“BOND v. UNITED STATES”  Web. 2 June 2014.
http://www.supremecourt.gov/