Sir Timothy Garden

Just imagine for one moment what the past 6 months would have been like if Foot and Mouth disease had been readily communicable to human beings and had been lethal as well. The worry for those who study the new possibilities of biological warfare (BW) is that a highly infectious fatal biological agent may become the weapon of choice for enemies who cannot develop nuclear weapons. Biological weapons are not new: the use of smallpox infected blankets as gifts to indigenous American Indians or plague corpses to break sieges are early examples. In modern warfare, BW has been of limited interest. Infecting your enemy with a virus which will cause death in a number of days, is more likely to make him fight more fiercely. For tactical use a weapon needs to be fast acting and incapacitating. However as a strategic weapon against large populations, biological agents could be very effective, and would certainly cause great alarm in the community that was targeted.

In the past natural diseases such as anthrax, plague or ebola have been the feared agents. A US study claimed that a small model aeroplane carrying just 6.5kg of anthrax could kill 100,000 people within 5 days if released in aerosol form over a large city. The same study also pointed out that casualties could be reduced to a few hundred if everyone wore a surgical mask. The Aum cult, which released Sarin gas in the Tokyo underground, had made attempts to collect the ebola virus in Africa. The worry for the future is that genetic engineering techniques will allow biological agents to be developed with very specialised characteristics. Not only can they be made highly infectious and of high lethality, but they might also be designed to be rapidly incapacitating. Perhaps of even greater concern is the idea that they might be targeted to affect particular ethnic groups.

In order to prevent the development of biological weapons, an international treaty banning their production and use was agreed in 1972. Some 143 states have ratified the Biological Weapons Convention (BWC). The difficulty has been in finding a way to police the agreement. Unlike nuclear weapons, which require vast facilities to process the materials, biological agents can be manufactured with relative ease. The production facility that manufactures vaccine or yoghurt can grow less benevolent cultures. Only a physical inspection of suspicious biochemical factories can offer the opportunity to check observance of the treaty provisions. The establishment of an effective verification regime has been the goal of the negotiators at the Conference on Disarmament in Geneva for the past 8 years. It looked as though agreement might be possible this year.

Unfortunately, the United States has now decided that it is not in the US national interest to agree to the verification protocol. Just as the Kyoto environmental protocol on greenhouse gases was seen as against the US economic interest, so the BWC verification protocol is seen as being against the American biotechnology industrial interest. The Bush Administration is concerned that verification inspections could be used for industrial espionage purposes. They also question whether such a regime could ever be effective against potential producers of BW. The UN inspection regime in Iraq was more thorough than anything envisaged by the BWC, but still failed to give total assurance that the production of BW had ceased. Finally the US defence community worries that it might be hampered from developing appropriate ways of defending itself from a biological attack in the future.

One might expect European nations to share some of these US concerns. Europe has a thriving pharmaceutical industrial base. It was involved in the UN inspections in Iraq. It has troops which will need to be defended against possible BW attack. Yet European governments, including the UK, believe strongly in making progress on the BWC verification protocol. They do not believe that the spying risk is the overwhelming factor. While agreeing that no verification regime can provide total certainty, they consider that having some threat of exposure is much better than allowing covert development to go on unchallenged.

If, as seems likely, the BWC fails to make progress because of US antipathy, this will be another division in international policy between Europe and the USA. While the general public and politicians may be less than excited by arcane arms control negotiations, the specialists and officials in this area are taking it very seriously. The USA is gaining an unfortunate reputation in the arms control area. It failed to ratify the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty, would not sign the Landmine prohibition, has called into question the Anti Ballistic Missile treaty and now seems to be drawing the teeth of the BWC. This seems very odd to its allies in Europe: no nation is made more insecure by these moves than the United States itself.