Department of Molecular and Cellular Biology, Harvard
University
[Reformatted from the original in CWC Conventions
Bulletin, vol. 48, p.16-19 (2000)]
Every major technology - metallurgy, explosives, internal
combustion, aviation, electronics, nuclear energy - has been intensively
exploited, not only for peaceful purposes but also for hostile ones. Must this
also happen with biotechnology, certain to be a dominant technology of the
twenty-first century?
Such inevitability is assumed in "The Coming Explosion of
Silent Weapons" by Commander Steven Rose (Naval War College Review, Summer 1989), an arresting article that won awards
from the US Joint Chiefs of Staff and the Naval War College:
The outlook for biological
weapons is grimly interesting.
Weaponeers have only just begun to explore the potential of the biotechnological
revolution. It is sobering to realize that far more development lies ahead than
behind.
If this prediction is correct, biotechnology will
profoundly alter the nature of weaponry and the context within which it is
employed. During World War II and the Cold War, the United States, the United
Kingdom, and the Soviet Union developed and field-tested biological weapons
designed to attack people and food crops over vast areas. During the century ahead, as our
ability to modify fundamental life processes continues its rapid advance, we
will be able not only to devise additional ways to destroy life but will also
become able to manipulate it - including the processes of cognition,
development, reproduction, and inheritance. A world in which these capabilities are widely employed for
hostile purposes would be a world in which the very nature of conflict had
radically changed. Therein could lie unprecedented opportunities for violence,
coercion, repression, or subjugation. Movement towards such a world would
distort the accelerating revolution in biotechnology in ways that would vitiate
its vast potential for beneficial application and could have inimical
consequences for the course of civilization.
Is this what we are in for? Is Commander Rose right? Or
will the factors that thus far have prevented the use of biological weapons
survive and even be augmented in the coming age of biotechnology? After all,
despite the fact that the technology of potentially devastating biological
weapons has existed for decades and although stocks of such weapons were
produced during the Cold War, their only use appears to have been that by the
Imperial Japanese Army in Manchuria more than half a century ago.
A similar history of restraint can be traced for chemical
weapons. Although massively used in World War I and stockpiled in great
quantity during World War II and the Cold War, chemical weapons - despite the
hundreds of wars, insurgencies, and terrorist confrontations since their last
large-scale employment more than 80 years ago -have seldom been used since.
Their use in Ethiopia, China, Yemen, and Vietnam, and against Iranian soldiers
and Kurdish towns are among the few exceptions. Indications that trichothecene
mycotoxins had been used in Laos and Cambodia in the 1970s and 1980s proved to
be illusory. Instead of the wave
of chemical and biological terrorism some feared would follow the sarin gas
attacks perpetrated by the Aum Shinrikyo cult in Japan in 1994 and 1995 or would
be occasioned by the arrival of the new millennium, there has been only an
epidemic of "biohoaxes" and several relatively minor "biocrimes", confined
almost entirely to the US. Nothing has come to light that would contradict the
1996 assessment of the Federal Bureau of Investigation, reaffirmed in July
1999, that:
Our investigations in the United
States reveal no intelligence that state sponsors of terrorism, international
terrorist groups, or domestic terrorist groups are currently planning to use
these deadly weapons in the United States.
Continued surveillance to deter and forestall terrorist
violence and contingency plans to limit and ameliorate the consequences if it
should occur certainly merit the attention and resources of government. But
sensationalist publicity is at odds with the historical record.
Whatever the reasons - and several have been put forward -
the use of disease and poison as weapons has been extremely limited, despite
the great number of conflicts that have occurred since the underlying
technologies of the weapons became accessible. Human beings have exhibited a
propensity for the use, even the veneration, of weapons that bludgeon, cut, or
blast, but have generally shunned and reviled weapons that employ disease and
poison. We may therefore ask if, contrary to the history of other major
technologies, the hostile exploitation of biotechnology can be averted.
The factor that compels our attention to this question is
the possibility that any major turn to the use of biotechnology for hostile
purposes could have consequences qualitatively very different from those that
have followed from the hostile exploitation of earlier technologies. Unlike the
technologies of conventional or even nuclear weapons, biotechnology has the
potential to place mass destructive capability in a multitude of hands and, in
coming decades, to reach deeply into what we are and how we regard
ourselves. It should be evident
that any intensive exploitation of biotechnology for hostile purposes could
take humanity down a particularly undesirable path.
Whether this happens is likely to depend not so much on
the activities of lone misanthropes, hate groups, cults, or even minor states
as on the policies and practices of the worldÕs major powers.
In the United States, there was abrupt and remarkable change
- from nearly thirty years of being deeply engaged in the development, testing,
and production of biological weapons to the dramatic and unconditional US
renunciation of biological weapons declared by President Nixon in November 1969
and the US renunciation of toxins three months later. Today the former US
offensive biological weapons programme and the logic behind its abolition are
largely forgotten, although there are valuable lessons to be learned from both.
During World War II, research, development, and pilotscale
production of biological weapons was centered at Fort (then Camp) Detrick, in
Maryland. Large-scale production was planned to take place at a plant near
Terre Haute, Indiana, built in 1944 for the production of anthrax spore slurry
and its filling into bombs. Equipped with twelve 20,000-gallon fermentors, it
was capable of producing fill for 500,000 British-designed 4-pound anthrax
bombs a month. Although the United
Kingdom had placed a large order for anthrax bombs in 1944 and the plant was
ready to go into weapons production by the following summer, the war ended
without it having done so.
Contrary to the view that biological weapons are easy to
develop and produce, by the end of the war Fort Detrick comprised some 250
buildings and employed approximately 3,400 people, some engaged in defensive
work but many in the development and pilot production of weapons. Several years after the end of the war,
the Indiana plant was demilitarized and leased to industry for production of
antibiotics. It was replaced by a
more modern and flexible biological weapons production facility constructed at
Pine Bluff Arsenal, in Arkansas, which began production late in 1954 and
operated until 1969.
A major effort of the 1950s was encompassed under Project
St. Jo, a programme to develop and test anthrax bombs and delivery methods for
possible wartime use against Soviet cities. In order to determine quantitative
munitions requirements, 173 releases of noninfectious aerosols were secretly
conducted in Minneapolis, St. Louis, and Winnipeg - cities chosen to have the
approximate range of conditions of climate, urban and industrial development,
and topography that would be encountered in the major potential target cities
of the USSR. The weapon to be used was a cluster bomb holding 536 biological
bomblets, each containing 35 millilitres of anthrax spore slurry and a small
explosive charge fuzed to detonate upon impact with the ground, thereby
producing an infectious aerosol to be inhaled by persons downwind.
In later years, a strain of the bacterial pathogen of
tularemia, less persistent and with an average human infectious dose more
reliably known than that for anthrax spores, was standardized by the US
military as a lethal biological agent.
Other agents - the bacteria of brucellosis, the rickettsia of Q-fever,
and the virus of Venezuelan equine encephalomyelitis, all more incapacitating
than lethal, as well as fungi for the destruction of rice and wheat crops -
were also introduced into the US biological weapons stockpile, along with
improved biological bomblets for high-altitude delivery by strategic bombers
and spray tanks for dissemination of biological agents by low-flying aircraft.
According to published accounts, these developments culminated in a major
series of biological weapons field tests using various animals as targets,
conducted at sea in the South Pacific in 1968.
Soon after Richard Nixon became president, a comprehensive
review was undertaken of US biological weapons programs and policies - which
had been unexamined and unanalyzed by policy makers for fifteen years. Each
relevant government department and agency was instructed to present its
evaluation of the arguments for and against each of several options, ranging
from retention of the offensive BW programme to its entire abolition. Following
this review, the president announced that the United States would unilaterally
and unconditionally renounce biological weapons. The US biological weapons
stockpiles were destroyed and the facilities for developing and producing them
were ordered dismantled or converted to peaceful uses. President Nixon pledged
that the US biological programme would be restricted to "defensive purposes,
strictly defined". He also declared that, after nearly 50 years of US
recalcitrance, he would seek Senate agreement to US ratification of the 1925
Geneva Protocol prohibiting the use in war of chemical and biological weapons.
In addition, he announced US support for an international treaty proposed by
the United Kingdom, banning the development, production, and possession of
biological weapons, leading to the Biological Weapons Convention (BWC) of
1972.
It is important to note that these US decisions went far
beyond the mere cancellation of a programme. They renounced, without prior
conditions, even the option to have biological and toxin weapons. What was the
underlying logic?
First, it had become evident through the results of the US
biological weapons programme that deliverable biological weapons could be
produced that, although subject to substantial operational uncertainties, would
be capable of killing people, livestock, and crops over large areas.
Second, it was realized that the US biological weapons
programme was pioneering a technology that, although by no means simple to
bring into existence, could be duplicated by others with relative ease,
enabling a large number of states to acquire the ability to threaten or carry
out destruction on a scale that could otherwise be matched by only a few major
powers. The US offensive programme therefore risked creating additional threats
to the nation with no compensating utility or benefit and would undermine
prospects for combating the proliferation of biological weapons.
The clear policy implication, reinforced by widespread
abhorrence for any use of disease as a weapon, was that the United States
should convincingly renounce biological weapons and seek to strengthen
international barriers to their development and acquisition. The US
renunciation of biological weapons was seen as a major step away from a
universal menace. As wisely expressed by President Nixon, "Mankind already
carries in its own hands too many of the seeds of its own destruction."
The BWC entered into force in 1975 - the first worldwide
treaty to prohibit an entire class of weapons. The Convention now has 143
states parties, the most important holdouts being in the Middle East. Unlike
the Chemical Weapons Convention (CWC) of 1993, it has no organization, no
budget, no inspection provisions, and no built-in sanctions - only an undertaking
by its states parties never in any circumstances to develop, produce, stockpile
or otherwise acquire or retain:
(1) Microbial
or other biological agents or toxins, whatever their origin or method of
production, of types and in quantities that have no justification for
prophylactic, June 2000 Page 17 CBWCB 48
protective or other peaceful purposes;
(2) Weapons,
equipment or means of delivery designed to use such agents or toxins for
hostile purposes or in armed conflict.
The significance of the BWC lies in its statement of a
clear norm - reinforced by international treaty - prohibiting any exploitation
by states of biological agents and toxins for hostile purposes. It is important
to note that its prohibition of biological agents and toxins for all but "peaceful
purposes" and its reference not only to "armed conflict" but, more generally,
to "hostile purposes" make the BWC applicable not only to hostile purposes of a
state directed against another state but also to hostile purposes of a state
directed against its own citizens or anyone else. Thus, the BWC embodies an
international norm and provides a legal bulwark against the exploitation of
biotechnology by states for hostile purposes whether in armed conflict or in
any other circumstance.
While the US renounced biological weapons and abided by
the BWC, the Soviet Union did not. According to statements by officials of the
former Soviet programme, it was believed that the US renunciation was a hoax,
intended to hide a secret offensive programme. Aware of the post-war US
biological weapons programme and of the dynamic US lead in molecular biology
and biotechnology, the Soviet Union continued and intensified its preparations
to be able to employ biological weapons on a large scale.
An example was the standby facility built in the early
1980s for the production of anthrax bombs at Stepnogorsk, in what is now the
independent republic of Kazakhstan.
Recently dismantled in cooperation with Kazakhstan under the US Cooperative
Threat Reduction Program, it was equipped with ten 20,000-litre fermentors,
apparatus for the large-scale drying and milling of the agent to a fine powder,
machines for filling it into bombs, and underground facilities for storage of
filled munitions. According to its Cold War deputy director, the facility
conducted numerous developmental and test runs but never produced a stockpile
of anthrax weapons. Nevertheless, there is no doubt that its purpose was to
provide a capability to commence production on short notice if ordered to do
so.
Field testing of Soviet aircraft and missile delivery
systems for biological agents was conducted on Vozrozhdeniye Island in the Aral
Sea. In a 1998 interview with a Moscow newspaper, the general in charge of
Russian biological defence is quoted as saying that activities at the test site
in the 1970s and 1980s were "in direct violation of the anti-biological
treaty".
The Russian Federation has done little to convince other
nations that the military core of the Soviet biological weapons programme has
been dismantled. The former Soviet biological weapons facilities at
Ekaterinburg, Sergiyev Posad, and Kirov remain closed to foreigners. The
USRussian-British discussions that had achieved agreement on the principle of
reciprocal visits to each otherÕs military biological facilities as a means of
resolving ambiguities have foundered and are in abeyance. Resolving the problem
and establishing conditions that will allow the two nations to cooperate in
fostering global compliance with the BWC will require that the matter be
accorded high priority on the agenda of USÐRussia dialogue.
At present, we appear to be approaching a crossroads -a
time that will test whether biotechnology, like all major predecessor
technologies, will come to be intensively exploited for hostile purposes or
whether instead our species will find the collective wisdom to take a different
course. An essential requirement
is international agreement that biological and chemical weapons are
categorically prohibited. With the
BWC and the CWC both in force for a majority of states, including all the major
powers - and notwithstanding the importance of achieving full compliance and
expanding the membership of both treaties still further - the international
norm of categorical prohibition is clearly established.
The CWC, now with 135 states parties, prohibits the
development, production, acquisition, retention, transfer, and use of chemical
weapons. Like the BWC, its prohibitions are purpose-based, so that a toxic
chemical or precursor intended for peaceful purposes, so long as its type and
quantity are consistent with such purposes, is not a chemical weapon within the
meaning of the Convention. As with the BWC, this criterion for what is and what
is not prohibited, termed the General Purpose Criterion, is intended both to
avoid hampering legitimate activities and to help keep the Convention from
becoming outmoded by technological change. Also like the BWC, the language of
the CWC is applicable not only to prohibited weapons intended for use against
another state but also to such weapons intended by a state for use against
anyone.
The stringent verification provisions of the CWC, designed
with the active participation of the chemical industry, require initial
declaration of chemical weapons and chemical weapons production facilities and
subsequent verification on-site of the correctness of the declarations. Declared chemical weapons and chemical
weapons production facilities must be secured and are subject to routine inspection
until they are destroyed and such destruction must be verified on-site.
Facilities that produce more than designated amounts of certain chemicals
deemed to be of particular importance to the objective of preventing diversion
for chemical weapons purposes must be declared annually and are subject to
inspection. Suspect sites, whether declared or not, are subject to short-notice
challenge inspection under managed access procedures designed to protect
legitimate confidential information and to avoid abuse. All inspections are
conducted by experts of the Technical Secretariat of the Organization for the
Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW), the international operating arm of the
CWC headquartered in The Hague. In the three years since April 1997, when the
CWC entered into force, there have been nearly 700 inspections at declared
sites. These include 60 chemical weapons production facilities in nine states
(China, France, India, Iran, Russia, the UK, the USA, and one other and the Aum
facility in Japan) and 31 chemical weapons storage sites in four states (India,
Russia, the USA, and one other), holding 8.4 million chemical munitions and
bulk containers, most of them in Russia and the US.
In Geneva, the Ad Hoc Group of States Parties to the BWC
is negotiating a protocol to strengthen the Convention, including measures for
verification. There is general agreement that there should be an international
operating organization similar to the Technical Secretariat of the OPCW and
that there should be initial declarations of past offensive and defensive BW
activities and of current biodefence programs and facilities, vaccine
production facilities, maximum containment facilities, and work with listed
agents. It is also generally agreed that there should be provision for
challenge investigation at the request of a state party, including
investigation on-site, of suspected breach of the Convention.
In order to encourage accuracy in declarations and to help
deter prohibited activities from being conducted under the cover of otherwise
legitimate facilities, some states believe that declared facilities should be
subject to randomly selected visits by the international inspectorate, using
managed access procedures to protect confidential information, similar to those
practiced under the CWC. Other states and certain pharmaceutical trade
associations have so far opposed such on-site visits. Other important matters,
including the scope and content of declarations, the procedures for clarifying
ambiguities in declarations, the substantive and procedural requirements for
initiating an investigation, measures for assistance and protection against
biological weapons, measures of peaceful scientific and technological exchange,
and provisions affecting international trade in biological agents and equipment
also remain to be resolved and are the subject of intense negotiation. What can international treaties like
the CWC and a strengthened BWC accomplish? First, they define agreed norms,
without which arms prohibitions cannot succeed. Second, their procedures for declarations and on-site
visits, monitoring, and investigation, including challenge investigation, pose
the threat of exposing noncompliance and coverup, creating a disincentive for
potential violators and increasing the security of compliant states. Third,
these same procedures have the potential to resolve unfounded suspicions and to
counteract erroneous or mischievous allegations. Fourth, the legal obligations and national implementation
measures of such treaties act to keep compliant states compliant, even when they
may be tempted to encroach at the limits, or to ignore violations out of
political expediency. Fifth, treaty-based regimes legitimate and facilitate
international cooperation to encourage compliance and to take collective action
against violators, thereby enhancing deterrence. And sixth, as membership in
the treaty approaches universality and its prohibitions and obligations enter
into international customary law, holdout states become conspicuously isolated
and subject to penalty. In sum, a
robust arms prohibition regime like that of the CWC and the BWC strengthened by
the kind of protocol that one may hope will emerge from the present negotiation
serve both to insure vigilance and compliance by the majority who are guided by
the norm and to enhance the deterrence of any who may be disposed to flout it.
The prohibitions embodied in the BWC and the CWC are
directed primarily to the actions of states, not persons. Both conventions enjoin their states
parties to take measures, in accordance with their constitutional processes, to
insure compliance anywhere under their jurisdiction, including a provision in
the CWC obliging its parties to enact domestic penal legislation to this effect
and to extend it to cover prohibited acts by their own nationals wherever such
acts are committed. Nevertheless, important as such domestic legal measures can
be, neither the CWC nor the BWC seeks to incorporate its prohibitions into
international criminal law, applicable to individuals whatever their
nationality and wherever the offense was committed. Recently, interest has developed in the possibility of
enhancing the effectiveness of the BWC and the CWC by making acts prohibited to
states also crimes under international law. A treaty to create such law has
been drafted by the Harvard Sussex Program, in consultation with an
international group of legal authorities (see CBWCB 42, December 1998). It is
patterned on existing international treaties that criminalize aircraft
highjacking, theft of nuclear materials, torture, hostage taking, and other
crimes that pose a threat to all or are especially heinous. Such treaties
create no international tribunal; rather their provisions for adjudication,
extradition, and international legal cooperation are aimed at providing
enhanced jurisdiction to national courts, extending to specific offences
committed anywhere by persons of any nationality. The proposed treaty would
make it an offence for any person - including government officials and leaders,
commercial suppliers, weapons experts, and terrorists - to order, direct, or
knowingly render substantial assistance in the development, production,
acquisition, or use of biological or chemical weapons. Any person, regardless of nationality,
who commits any of the prohibited acts anywhere in the world would face the
risk of prosecution or extradition should that person be found in a state that
supports the proposed convention.
Such individuals would be regarded as hostes humani generis - enemies of all humanity.
International criminal law to hold individuals responsible
would create a new dimension of constraint against biological and chemical
weapons. The norm against using chemical and biological agents for hostile
purposes would be strengthened, deterrence of potential offenders, both official
and unofficial, would be enhanced, and international cooperation in suppressing
the prohibited activities would be facilitated.
What we see here-the non-use of biological and chemical
weapons; the opprobrium in which they are generally held; the international
treaties prohibiting their development, production, possession, and use; the
mandatory declarations and on-site routine and challenge inspections under the
CWC; the negotiations that may lead to strengthening the BWC with similar
measures; and the possibility of an international convention to make biological
and chemical weapons offenses crimes under international law, subject to
universal jurisdiction and applicable even to leaders and heads of
state-suggests that it may be possible to reverse the usual course of things
and, in the century ahead, avoid the hostile exploitation of biotechnology.
Doing so, however, will require wider understanding that the problem of
biological weapons rises above the security interests of individual states and
poses an unprecedented challenge to all.
Matthew Meselson is the Thomas Dudley Cabot Professor of
the Natural Sciences, Harvard University, and co-director of the Harvard Sussex
Program on CBW
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