DISARMAMENT: Verification System for Bio-Weapons, But Only By 2001

By Gustavo Capdevila Reprint | | Print |

Gustavo Capdevila

GENEVA, Dec 8 1996 (IPS) - Northern states used to dub biological weapons the ‘poor man’s atomic bomb’ on the grounds that their ease of manufacture put arms of mass destruction within the reach of almost any state.

Generally overlooked was the ease in which such programmes can be hidden under cover of conventional research, both North and South: Soviet Russia secretly continued manufacture of biological weapons for years after publically co-sponsoring a pact prohibiting it.

This was because the tiniest quantity of a disease organism can be lethal, John Holum, director of the U.S. Arms Control and Disarmament Agency, told a meeting here called to review the 1972 treaty banning the development or stockpiling of biological arms worldwide.

Treaty signatory nations ended the two week review meeting Friday without commitment to rapid establishment of a verification — merely a general commitment to introducing one “within five years,” a 2001 deadline that falls well short of the originally tabled proposal to set a 1998 target.

The 1972 Biological Weapons Convention remains the only multilateral disarmament treaty to lack a system for investigating violations.

The session’s closing declaration would only go as far as endorsing a South African call for a special ad hoc group working on a definition of verification measures to “intensify its work” with a view to completing it as “soon as possible,” before the start of the Fifth Review Conference scheduled for 2001.

But the group, headed by Hungarian ambassador Tibor Toth, which will meet only three times in 1997, still lacks a single negotiating text and has to work with a collection of different documents, noted one diplomat here.

Sir Michael Weston, the British ambassador chairing the negotiations, said there was “broad consensus” that verification procedures should be added to the pact. But there was also wide disagreement on the power of the investigators to call on-site inspections, similar to those run by the U.N. Special Commission on Iraqi Disarmament (UNSCOM) since the end of the 1991 Gulf War.

However there were renewed pledges to the most important principles of the ‘Convention on the Prohibition of the Development, Production and Stockpiling of Bacteriological (Biological) and Toxin Weapons and on Their Destruction’ — particularly the treaty’s key part in ensuring an end to the threat of global warfare.

And delegates did agree that though the pact only specifically refers to development, production, storage and acquisition of bio- war weapons, the signatory nations accepted in principle a ban on their use in warfare.

Iran had called for an amendment to the first article of the Convention to include a ban on the ‘use’ of biological weapons as well as “development, production, maintenance, stockpiling, acquisition and transfer of biological or toxin weapons”.

Non-aligned nations leaned towards Iran’s position, while the countries of eastern Europe remained cautious, a diplomat said. Western countries were divided.

The Conference agreed to refer the amendment to the three trustees of the Convention — Russia, the U.S. and Britain — to consult with the 138 States that have ratified it before calling a fresh session to approve the proposed amendments.

The sessions were also preoccupied by the concerns of two ‘chief suspects’ — Iraq and Russia — who used their effective veto on the consensus run convention review process to ensure that their reported breaches of the convention stayed off the record.

In signing an order bringing them to an end, Russian president Boris Yeltsin disclosed in 1992 that the Soviet Union had maintained bio-war programmes for years after it co-sponsored the treaty. And U.N. inspectors say that Iraq, which had denied that it had a germ war programme, had built up a stock of some 160 bombs and 25 missiles filled with biological agents before the 1991 Gulf War.

Both countries kept references to this evidence off the official documentation. Moscow also objected to any disclosure of conversations being held between the three trustees on the former Soviet Union’s violations of the Convention.

Russia also prevented the declaration from listing countries believed or known to have stockpiles of biological weapons, and requiring them to report on their destruction, said the source.

The United States Arms Control and Disarmament Agency claims that up to a dozen countries could still be running bio-war programmes, including China, Egypt, Iran, Iraq, Libya, Russia and Syria.

Delegates did recognise however that scientific and technological developments since 1972 have raised the threat of terrorist or other criminal acts by individuals or groups.

The conference agreed that the treaty should take account of the considerable advances in biology and biotechnology since the ban took effect in 1975.

“There is more concern today than 20 years ago, when they were considered strategic weapons,” said Chilean ambassador Jorge Berguño, president of the conference’s principal committee.

The so-called ‘doomsday sect’ Aum Shinrikyo, which used the nerve gas sarin in its 1995 attacks on the Tokyo metro planned similar attacks with biological weapons.

Scientist Graham Pearson from Britain’s University of Bradford said that in 1992 members of the sect had been sent to Zaire to collect samples of the lethal Ebola virus with a view to cultivating them as weapons in Japan.