Fighting biological warfare

Humanity's battle against disease is a constantly evolving struggle. Throughout history bacteria and viruses have attacked people, animals, and plants, often with devastating effect. As if this were not challenge enough, we now face the prospect of disease being deliberately applied for military or terrorist purposes through biological warfare. The way of countering such threats is through international law and painstakingly negotiated treaties and verification mechanisms.¹ An important piece of protection in the battle against biological weapons is currently being negotiated in Geneva.

The widely held assumption that the use of agents such as anthrax, plague, and smallpox has only a limited utility in war is false: disease has already been turned into a weapon. The former Soviet Union, for example, undertook an extensive biological weapons programme, arming some of its ballistic missiles with anthrax and targeting them at Western cities. After the Gulf war United Nations inspectors uncovered a well advanced programme in Iraq, involving aircraft bombs and missile warheads filled with biological agent.² Another handful of states are believed to possess biological weapons,³ and certain terrorist groups may be interested: the Japanese sect that released poison gas into the Tokyo subway in 1995 was also developing biological weapons. Furthermore, the present revolution in biotechnology could see new and more efficient biological weapons being developed, including perhaps genetic weapons, targeted at particular groups of people.⁴

Potentially capable of inflicting casualties on a scale akin to nuclear weapons, yet easier and cheaper to produce, biological weapons might become an attractive option, especially for states seeking a counter to Western nuclear and conventional military superiority. It is therefore easy to see why biological weapons are increasingly being identified as one of the key future challenges to international security.

A network of international treaties, agreements, and controls already exists to tackle the spread of weapons of mass destruction. Indeed, biological weapons are already prohibited under the Biological and Toxin Weapons Convention, which came into force 25 years ago. Unfortunately, the treaty contained no verification provisions to check that states were not cheating on their undertakings. We know that at least one party flagrantly contravened the treaty.⁵

Since chemical weapons were outlawed by the Chemical Weapons Convention in 1993, which did include extensive verification provisions, negotiators in Geneva have attempted to inject similar provisions into the Biological and Toxin Weapons Convention through a special, legally binding protocol. These negotiations are now nearing completion, with only a handful of issues still to be resolved.⁶ The aim is to adopt the new protocol before the next treaty review conference in 2001, which means it needs to be agreed before the end of this year and preferably by the summer.

Under the protocol states will be required to declare relevant activities. These declarations will then be subject to follow up procedures to check their completeness and accuracy. Suspicion of non-compliance can trigger short notice investigations. Partly to induce less developed states to embrace the protocol, it also contains provisions for states to enjoy the benefits from cooperation in biotechnology. As much of this verification architecture is similar to that already used in the Chemical Weapons Convention, there should be no new surprises for governments or industry.

Obstacles do remain, however, perhaps the most important of which centres on the need to conduct infrequent random visits to check declarations. The United States maintains that this will place an unnecessary burden on industry and the military and that secrets will be revealed. It prefers that verification should be enforced through challenge investigations alone. The Europeans, on the other hand, believe that without adequate procedures to verify declarations the incentive for states to declare relevant activities completely and accurately would be removed. They also point out that the politically charged challenge investigations will be few and far between. And, although there are genuine concerns about commercial confidentiality, the protocol already contains adequate provisions to deal with this issue.

Clearly, the protocol alone cannot prevent the development and proliferation of biological weapons. It is impossible to achieve 100% assurance that cheating will be uncovered. But what it can do is to significantly strengthen the “web of deterrence”—a mutually reinforcing series of non-proliferation measures, also comprising coordinated export controls, active and passive protective measures, and determined international responses to non-compliance.⁷

There is a danger that loss of political momentum, elections in the US and Russia, and squabbles over other arms control issues could lead to the negotiations running into the sand (like so many others at present⁸). The negotiations, which resumed on 13 March, need a high level injection of political will to ensure that the final hurdles are overcome and a vital piece of the legal non-proliferation framework is securely put in place.