A treaty without teeth takes on a bioweapons threat

By Charles J. Hanley
Associated Press
18 August 2003

GENEVA, Switzerland (AP) - In a cramped sixth-floor office above a peaceful Geneva courtyard, a solitary U.N. bureaucrat tends to a global treaty, a piece of paper meant to guard mankind against a nightmare of war waged with anthrax, plague and other microbes-in-a-bomb.

The 1975 Biological Weapons Convention has no permanent body reviewing how it is implemented. No investigators, hunting for hints of weapons work, pore through the government reports that sit on shelves here. Most of the 150 treaty nations, in fact, don't even bother filing the annual disclosures.

Advances in biotechnology make it ever more likely terrorists or military researchers will resort to germ weapons, experts say. "Designer" genes can spawn hardier disease strains to overcome vaccine defenses. Microbial culture collections worldwide are too easily accessible, they say.

The U.S. government already accuses North Korea, Iran and others of having or seeking an offensive biological weapons capability. It says evidence in Afghanistan showed al-Qaida was interested in anthrax. Meanwhile, others worry the secrecy of America's own "biodefense" projects might hide potential offensive work.

"The threat is very, very serious," said Tibor Toth of Hungary, the Geneva-based diplomat who for years led intensive multilateral talks to toughen the ban on bioweapons by equipping the treaty with inspectors to send around the world.

Those Geneva negotiations collapsed nine months ago, after the United States withdrew its support in order to "stop the momentum of this seven-year-long process," as Undersecretary of State John R. Bolton put it.

The treaty protocol that had appeared close to agreement would have stiffened requirements that governments annually detail any biological defense programs and report the specifics of certain kinds of research and production facilities. Inspectors from a new Organization for the Prohibition of Biological Weapons would visit randomly selected sites worldwide.

Bolton's assistant secretary, Stephen G. Rademaker, said the Bush administration considered the treaty "inherently unverifiable," that bioweapons work can too easily be hidden from inspectors. American officials cited other reasons as well for ending the talks, including a fear that inspections might expose U.S. defense measures to an enemy.

Cuba, Iran and others had also balked, demanding, for example, unrestricted access to advanced countries' biotechnology as a tradeoff. All finally rallied to Toth's compromise protocol in the face of U.S. opposition, but without consensus it was doomed.

The Geneva failure was a severe setback to those - most of the world's nations - who favored putting teeth into the treaty, and to those pushing generally for multinational enforcement in arms control. It followed other disappointments in the nuclear and chemical areas: Washington's withdrawal from the landmark Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty, for example, and the prolonged financial crisis hobbling the agency enforcing the chemical weapons ban.

That agency, at least, has a 500-member staff supporting the chemical treaty, advocates note.

"Why wouldn't you want the Biological Weapons Convention to work the same way?" asked Tim Caughley, New Zealand's ambassador to Geneva disarmament talks. "Considering the risk out there of terrorism, we'd want to see a more ambitious approach."

Under the bioweapons treaty, "states have very few tools to monitor compliance in other countries," noted Belgian arms-control scholar Jean Pascal Zanders.

To help fill the gap and monitor what governments are doing in biological research, 24 advocacy and study institutes have formed a Bioweapons Prevention Project headed by Zanders. One of his first targets may be the U.S. program, where he sees "red lights flickering."

Three secret U.S. projects came to light in late 2001, one to produce cluster bombs to carry disease agents, supposedly to study defenses against such munitions. Experts say that would violate the treaty's prohibition on building delivery systems, but American officials say all U.S. projects are defensive work permissible under the treaty.

Such "black" projects, which went unreported in the annual U.S. disclosures, are "probably the tip of an iceberg of work going on in biodefense," said Jonathan Tucker, a specialist at the U.S. Institute of Peace in Washington. Some also suspect Russia of doing offensive biological research.

Multilateral discussions will continue in Geneva - downgraded, infrequent and on limited subjects, with no legally binding decisions. Organized by the one-man treaty office here, an experts meeting this month will review how governments have translated the ban on bioweapons into national law.

Toth, who presided over the arduous protocol talks from their start in 1995, still counsels patience. "This is not a 50-yard dash," he told a reporter. "Wait for the dust to settle."

Some here look toward an eventual change in administration in Washington. But others seem ready to kick up more dust.

A parliamentary committee in London has urged the British government, which backed the bioweapons protocol, to immediately "redouble its efforts" and win an international consensus for enforcement machinery - "with or without the support of the United States."

The angry tone echoed the uproar in Geneva the day the U.S. delegation abruptly called on the conference to "terminate" the talks, language that instantly won delegation chief Bolton the sobriquet "The Terminator" among irate diplomats.

During an interview in Washington, the undersecretary of state was unapologetic about his deep skepticism of treaties and "words on paper." The Bush administration's view of arms control regimes is "a utilitarian view," he said. "Where they work, we support them. Where they don't, we don't."

In Vienna, Mohamed ElBaradei watched in March as an American invasion overrode his U.N. arms inspections in Iraq. Now he hopes the world will find that arms controls, not war, ended Iraq's nuclear bomb program.

As the fighting subsided, ElBaradei wrote asking governments to keep faith in the United Nations, "to try to control weapons of mass destruction through a collective, rule-based system of international security," not through unilateral military action.

The International Committee of the Red Cross, usually a quiet observer of global debates from its hilltop headquarters in Geneva, has joined in this one, expressing "deep regret" over the collapse of the bioweapons talks and taking the rare step of sending direct appeals to all governments, as it did in 1918 when it urged that poison gas be outlawed.

This time the ICRC calls on leaders "to assume their responsibilities as members of a species whose future may be gravely threatened by abuse of biological knowledge."

"Consider the threshold at which we all stand," it says.

Charles J. Hanley is AP Special Correspondent. He has reported on arms control issues for 20 years.