Milton Leitenberg

Milton Leitenberg is an American academic specializing in arms control. He is a senior research associate with the Center for International and Security Studies at Maryland (CISSM), a division within the School of Public Policy at the University of Maryland.[1]

He received a bachelor of science degree in biology and chemistry from the City College of New York in 1955. He did graduate work in biochemistry at Johns Hopkins University and Brandeis University.[1] After several years of research he taught at Vassar College, Northeastern University and Washington University in St. Louis. He transitioned to full time specialization in arms control in September 1966. In January 1968 he became the first American to work at the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute. Upon return to the United States, he became associated with university arms control research institutes, and published a series of books and papers on nuclear weapons, biological weapons, and arms control.[1]

News agencies call upon him as an arms control expert, most recently to comment upon the possibility that the Covid19 virus had escaped from one of the two virology laboratories in Wuhan, China.[2] In a June 2020 article in the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists he examined the evidence for an accidental escape of the virus from a laboratory. He concluded that such an escape is "a plausible, if unproven, possibility", as is the alternative explanation of a natural evolution in the field, and that the true source of the virus is currently unknown.[3]

In 2012 Leitenberg and Raymond A. Zilinskas co-authored "The Soviet Biological Weapons Program: A History". A review in the journal Microbe described the book as "a significant source document for microbiologists, policy makers, historians, and students interested in this important subject".[4] Tim Trevan writing in Nature called the book "an authoritative take on the Soviet Union's vast, covert and costly bioweapons programme" and "a major contribution to the field".[5] Michael D. Gordin said in The Historian, "This is a magisterial history of something that was not supposed to exist."[6] In a 15-page monograph from the Harvard-Sussex Program, John R. Walker said "Undoubtedly The Soviet Biological Weapons Program: A History will be the standard and definitive reference source on this issue for years to come... a thoroughly impressive achievement by any standard."[7]