Biological
Weapons:
A Provocative Conundrum
By JONATHAN POWER
LONDON-- Imagine that the U.S., Russia, China, Britain
and France gave up all their nuclear weapons under
international treaty and next imagine that a "rogue" nation
secretly developed a nuclear arsenal and posed the risk of
threatening one of them with a nuclear attack. But the big
powers, anyway, quietly decided, without fuss or hyperbole,
to take the situation on the chin and continue to live
without the capacity to retaliate in kind. Well, actually,
that is the situation we are already in with another weapon
of mass destruction, one that could, in the right conditions
kill 100,000 people in a city of 500,000.
It is the biological weapon. According to American
estimates eleven nations are now developing them in defiance
of the Biological Weapons Convention, signed into
international law 25 years ago, one of the more benign
legacies of Cold War warrior, President Richard Nixon.
On Monday, the New York Times reported that the General
Accounting Office, the investigative arm of the U.S.
Congress, now believes there is a distinct possibility that
Iraqi biological weapons deployed during the Gulf War might
be responsible for some of the serious ailments reported by
American veterans.
When Nixon unilaterally renounced American use of
biological weapons in 1969 (not least for reasons of U.S.
self-interest) biological warfare was widely thought to have
unpredictable and potentially uncontrollable consequences.
It was believed that the manufacture of biological weapons
presented unsurmountable safety problems for the personnel
involved. There was no feasible way of protecting the troops
using such weapons from infection. And it was impossible to
immediately occupy an area after they had been used; the
after effects could linger for years.
When the convention outlawing biological weapons was
drafted in 1972 the scientific advisers apparently did not
anticipate that anything could significantly change this
picture. No one thought to write in a sentence that would
include the misuse of genetic engineering and other methods
of biotechnology.
Moreover, there is no provision in the original
convention for verification because the negotiators did not
think biological weapons would be produced or used. Now that
they certainly can be produced, detection prior to
full-scale development is a near impossible task, since all
the crucial preparatory work can be done in small, easy to
hide, laboratories. It is a sobering thought that in only 25
years scientific advances can take verification from
irrelevance to obsolescence.
Today we are in a situation, as the International
Institute for Strategic Studies reports in its latest
Strategic Survey, where "preventing determined proliferators
acquiring biological and toxin agents appears to be
virtually impossible." Biotechnology is now so advanced that
recombinant DNA research offers a host of new possibilities
for new types of biological weaponry weapons that can
consistently produce a given effect that will be highly
contagious yet safe for the belligerent to handle and
difficult for the targeted population to identify and take
defensive action against.
Bomb delivery still poses serious problems. The moment of
impact alone is not sufficient to ensure dispersal of the
microbial pathogens and toxins. Present day rockets adapted
for the purpose of delivering biological weapons, such as
those Iraq had available during the Gulf War, could only
contaminate a few square kilometers. But by the first decade
of the next century a number of countries will have the
ability to mount large-scale biological weapons attacks of
major proportions.
Is there a point anymore in maintaining the Treaty? Is
the best that can now be said for it is that the big powers
still adhere to it?
Most important, it provides a moral norm, a symbol of the
world's growing abhorrence not just of biological weapons
per se, but of warfare itself. As with the present campaign
to ban land-mines it is an attempt by people of good will,
including many in the military establishment, to contain,
even to scale back, man's inhumanity to man.
The situation we now confront begs a fascinating
question. If the advanced industrialized/military powers are
prepared to renounce tit for tat with biological weapons why
don't they for nuclear weapons? They have, in effect,
decided that their best deterrent against a biological
weapon attacker is not to reply in kind but to depend on
their much more sophisticated armory of superior
conventional weapons. Logic would suggest they apply the
same rationale to nuclear weapons. It won't stop some rogues
making an effort to become nuclear but it would give the big
powers much more moral and diplomatic leverage. It would
certainly be a major contribution to circumscribing further
proliferation and it would rid the world of the present
growing risk of nuclear bomb detonation by accident or
misjudgment. (One shouldn't lend credence to those who argue
that Saddam Hussein stayed his hand during the Gulf War
because of hints that the U.S. might use its nuclear weapons
post Cold War it never would, short of facing catastrophic
defeat within its national boundaries.)
Whatever the shortcomings of the Biological Weapons
Convention in the short-run, for the long run the big powers
have implicitly decided that their best hope lies in moral
sanction. So let it be with nuclear weapons.
June 18, 1997,
LONDON
Copyright © 1997 By JONATHAN POWER
Note: I can be reached by phone +44 385 351172
and e-mail: JonatPower@aol.com
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