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Biological Weapons Convention Must be Fixed, Experts Say

Martin Matishak
Global Security Newswire
October 8, 2009

The Biological Weapons Convention must become stronger or risk falling into irrelevancy, experts said this week.

While the treaty embodies the "necessary" norm against the use of disease as a weapon of warfare "it's not sufficient" and suffers from shortcomings that need to be tackled by member nations, according to Jonathan Tucker, a senior fellow with the James Martin Center for Nonproliferation Studies.

Among the inadequacies that hinder implementation are the "relatively limited" number of states that adhere to the compact and the nonbinding results that stem from the annual meetings of member nations, Tucker said.

The treaty also has no provisions for verification of its rules, which led to the document being "blatantly disregarded" in the past by countries such as Iraq and South Africa, said Gigi Kwik Gronvall, a senior associate at the University of Pittsburgh's Center for Biosecurity.

Both offered their comments Tuesday during a panel discussion at a biodefense conference organized here by the center.

The Biological Weapons Convention entered into force in 1975 and today has 163 member nations. It prohibits the development, production and stockpiling of weaponized disease agents such as anthrax, smallpox or plague.

The pact has not been as widely accepted as other nonproliferation agreements, Tucker said. He compared it to the Chemical Weapons Convention, which entered into force in 1997 -- more than 20 years after its biological weapons counterpart -- and boasts 188 states parties.

A key reason for the divergence in the number of member states the existence of an implementing body, the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons, that has "actively recruited or pressured countries to join" the Chemical Weapons Convention, Tucker said. The biological convention, meanwhile, has an "institutional deficit," he told the audience.

Today, the treaty's Implementation Support Unit, which helps coordinate activities related to the agreement, is composed of three people at the U.N. Office at Geneva, according to Tucker. He said that a congressionally mandated panel on weapons of mass destruction recently urged the United States to support an "appropriate increase" in the "size and stature" of that office.

The U.S. Commission on the Prevention of Weapons of Mass Destruction Proliferation and Terrorism also recommended that Washington propose a new "action plan" for achieving universal adherence to the treaty for adoption at the 2011 BWC review conference. The sessions are held every five years to review the workings of the treaty.

Another problem dates back to the 2001 collapse of negotiations that would have stood up a BWC verification regime, leaving the compact "without a clear direction for future efforts," Tucker said. That year the Bush administration moved to abandon six and a half years of negotiations toward an inspections protocol (see GSN, Nov. 15, 2006).

The "political vacuum" left over about how to strengthen the compact has only been partially filled by the intercessional conferences, separate annual meetings of experts and states parties that have focused on implementation of the treaty, Tucker said.

Those conferences have been useful in focusing the international community's attention on biosecurity issues, but they are reaching a point of "diminishing returns" because they do not have a direct impact on implementation of the convention, he told the audience.

Those sessions address a different each issue year. This year's topic was disease surveillance and next year participants will address investigations of the alleged use of biological weapons.

The convention is also in danger of being overtaken by technology, Kenneth Luongo, president of the Partnership for Global Security, said during the panel discussion.

"We have to figure out how to deal with that because the BWC in a sense was dealing with governments that were producing biological materials for warfare," he said. Today "we're dealing with a primarily private sector owned industry that's producing biological agents for profit and not for warfare."

He added that most private sector biological research is devoted to pharmaceuticals and medical countermeasures.

The arms control model that was applied to the nuclear sector, focused on state production of fissile material, might not be applicable to biological agents, where a far greater number of private institutions are producing materials that might be of concern, Luongo told the audience. "I think we have a lot of different stakeholders here. That's going to be a challenge."

He referred to a report that examined the global biotechnology sector in 2008. More than 4,700 companies were found to have spent about $30 billion on research that year, while the U.S. National Institute of Health spent slightly more than $5 billion.

While U.S. President Barack Obama's statements on nuclear proliferation have been "well-informed" and backed by years of consensus within the scientific community, there is not the same kind of agreement on biological dangers, according to Luongo. He did not elaborate.

The White House in August convened a summit with roughly 40 biological scientists and research analysts to inform the administration's strategy on bioterrorism, including how it should approach the treaty and its 2011 review conference (see GSN, Aug. 28).

Possible Solutions

Luongo said that in the future BWC member states should work on confidence-building measures instead of standing up a verification regime, which would be a "difficult concept" for some states and focused on a "small percentage of the research that we're worried about."

"The idea is to have a framework where we agree on the dangers and a range of solutions, but not mandate behavior," he said.

Another option to strengthen the treaty would be for the United States to prepare a U.N. Security Council resolution similar to one passed last month, according to Luongo. That document, numbered 1887, was aimed at promoting nuclear nonproliferation and disarmament (see GSN, Sept. 24).

"I'm wondering whether or not we need an 1887-B on the bio side," Luongo said during the panel discussion.

He did not say what specifically such a resolution would involve, only that it should outline a range of activities countries could take to adhere to the compact and allow for future negotiations about implementation.

Tucker said that existing confidence-building declarations -- annual reports issued by countries to detail their biodefense activities or disease outbreaks on their soil -- could be made mandatory to enhance transparency.

Fewer than half of the state parties issue the report today and the documents often are printed in a nation's native language and not translated, he said. In addition, the reports are not made public or given to nongovernment organizations that could play a useful "watchdog" role.

Thought is being given now as to how to make confidence-building statements "more relevant," according to Tucker. He added that the 2011 review conference could take up the matter.