By David Ruppe

Global Security Newswire

Efforts to create a multilateral enforcement mechanism to the 1972 Biological Weapons Convention are “dead,” a senior U.S. official told reporters Monday at a review conference of the treaty in Geneva. (see GSN, Nov. 20).

The United States is looking for other ways to stop biological weapons programs, said John Bolton, the U.S. undersecretary of state for arms control and international security.

“The draft protocol that was under negotiation for the past seven years is dead in our view. Dead, and is not going to be resurrected,” said Bolton, responding to a reporter’s question on whether negotiations should continue on a protocol.

“Simply piling one convention on top of another is not going to solve the problem if the rogue states that we are talking about are prepared to violate the underlined prohibitions of the BWC,” he said.

The Clinton administration and other parties to the convention had for seven years negotiated a protocol that would create a legally binding enforcement regime which would allow countries to conduct on-site inspections to challenge signatories suspected of harboring biological weapons programs. The lack of a mechanism for challenging countries to discover if suspicious activities are legitimate has harmed the convention’s effectiveness, experts have said.

The Bush administration effectively killed the protocol by declaring its opposition in July and earlier Monday, arguing the protocol would not work, and citing potential harm to U.S. commercial and defense interests.

Without U.S. participation, experts have said, the protocol would be meaningless, because the United States has the world’s largest biotechnology industry.

Bolton reiterated the administration’s opposition to the protocol at the press conference, saying it would endanger the viability of biological warfare defense programs, undercut U.S. and West European export programs and put proprietary commercial information at risk.

Unlike another major arms control treaty, the Chemical Weapons Convention, Bolton called the BWC “essentially an ‘intent’ treaty.”

“It’s one of the things that differentiates it from other kinds of arms control,” he said.

He mentioned two alternative U.S. proposals he said would strengthen the treaty, efforts to convince nations to enact national legislation criminalizing behavior barred by the treaty and making extradition easier for people who are believed to have violated the treaty.

The United States also has proposed the U.N. Secretary General be allowed to invoke inspections, a measure that would allow the five permanent members of the U.N. Security Council—the United States, Russia, China, France and the United Kingdom—to veto inspections they oppose.

He said the United States would like to see its proposals included in the review conference’s final declaration.

Naming Names

Bolton did not describe why he, in a speech earlier Monday, named only five countries the United States believes to harbor biological weapons programs, even though officials previously indicated others are suspected (see GSN, Nov. 20).

“In the kind of complex diplomacy that the United States engages in where there are many factors that affect not just preventing proliferation of weapons of mass destruction, there are a lot of things we take into account,” he said, adding U.S. officials will be contacting other countries privately about suspected programs.

Experts said U.S. officials previously have cited Russia, China, Egypt and Israel as having banned programs, and a U.S. official said last summer at least 13 countries were suspected.

Asked whether the United States would initiate procedures provided for in the treaty to clarify the charges against states cited Monday—Iran, Iraq, Libya, Syria and North Korea—Bolton said, “I don’t feel the need to clarify them because our information we believe is sufficient to justify the statements that I made here publicly and many others that we’ve made in classified fashion to Congress and to other friends and allies.”

Will Negotiations Continue?

Bolton seemed to indicate U.S. officials preferred to end the negotiations that have been held since the mid-1990s, saying they “wanted to get away from both the protocol and the ad hoc group to break through that old thinking.”

Even some Bush administration supporters, however, said they hoped the administration would support continuing the multilateral discussions about ways to improve the convention.

“It's my understanding that there is some pretty strong sentiment for that within the administration,” said Michael Moodie, president of the Chemical and Biological Arms Control Institute in Washington.

“I think [ending negotiations] would be wrong both substantively and politically,” he said.  “Some of this debate is about who and how the rules of international behavior are made and I think that it is probably not in the U.S. interest to get ourselves totally at odds with that kind of thinking.”

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