The Threat No One is Talking About in Iran

24 Mar 2026 01:22 PM

As the conflict deepens, the world must urgently address the risk of biological weapons falling through the cracks.

The intensifying military campaign by the US and Israel has rightly focused the world's attention on nuclear proliferation, regional escalation and the potential for humanitarian catastrophe. But there is another threat – less visible and potentially more dangerous – that demands immediate international attention: what happens to a country's biological weapons programme when the state behind it is involved in active conflict?

For decades, Western intelligence agencies have assessed that Iran has pursued an offensive biological weapons capability. Despite being an early signatory to the Biological Weapons Convention – ratifying it six years before the 1979 revolution – the programme is believed to have accelerated dramatically in the late 1980s, after Iran suffered devastating chemical attacks during the Iran-Iraq War. The lesson Iranian leadership drew then was clear: never again would the country accept an asymmetry in unconventional capabilities. What followed, according to successive public intelligence assessments going back decades, was a sustained effort to develop biological agents under the cover of legitimate civilian research.

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