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BWC: November Conference Might See U.S.-British Showdown By David Ruppe The United Kingdom has said it supports negotiating a monitoring and verification protocol to the Biological Weapons Convention, but U.S. officials have said they prefer to address weapons proliferation through other avenues. “Our view at this point is that we believe that the issue before the world is not the Biological Weapons Convention. The issue before the world is the biological weapons threat,” a senior U.S. State Department official said today. U.S. proposals for addressing the threat “do not require a Biological Weapons Convention format,” the official said. “We therefore prefer that the world look at that question of the threat and move aggressively to meet it in whatever forum and by whatever means can be most efficiently, effectively and rapidly accomplished.” The official said the United States would oppose further ad hoc negotiations on a protocol. Early next month, treaty parties are scheduled to hold consultations with Hungarian Ambassador Tibor Toth to prepare for the November review conference. Last year, Toth was forced to extend the treaty’s fifth review conference when the United States scuttled consideration of the protocol. U.S. officials said they would not support a protocol, and other parties then concluded it would not be useful to pursue an agreement without U.S. support (see GSN, Dec. 10, 2001). The United Kingdom, which continues to advocate a protocol that would include a mechanism for on-site inspections to verify adherence to the treaty, has not ruled out pressing for one in November even if the United States opposes it, a British official told Global Security Newswire today. “Nothing’s ruled in and nothing’s ruled out. That will depend on what the final U.S. position is,” the official said. Signs emerging from Washington, however, “don’t look promising,” the official added. Whether the United Kingdom would support a protocol, the official said, also would depend on exactly what it would contain and which other countries would support it. “If an agreement is proposed by countries like Iran, Iraq, and China, it’s not likely the U.K. will be sitting in that company alone,” the official said. As the United States was during the Clinton administration, the United Kingdom is considered one of the strongest advocates for a protocol. The British Foreign Office issued a paper in April describing several measures to strengthen the convention and address the biological weapons threat (see GSN, April 29). The paper said that the draft protocol previously under consideration “although not as extensive in some areas as we would have wished, nonetheless represented a substantive improvement on the status quo represented by the convention.” The protocol “would have provided a much more effective investigation mechanism than that available under the convention’s Article VI and the existing United Nations Security General system for dealing with cases of alleged use of [chemical and biological weapons],” the paper said. Regarding the inspection mechanism, the U.S. official said, “we believe that a number of the concepts in that are flawed in the sense that they cannot provide the kind of enhancement to security that the protocol and the convention are asking for.” The official also said that the concept is fundamentally flawed because it would be capable of providing little insight into the true nature of a biological weapons program in a country like Iraq. “Even if you get Iraq to go along, what you can find out about Iraq based on the mechanisms that are contained in that type of protocol are simply not going to be sufficient in giving anybody any confidence that you have come even close to uncovering a weapons of mass destruction program,” the U.S. official said. Bush administration officials, who have said they believe Iraq is pursuing biological weapons, have argued that only removal of Iraqi President Saddam Hussein’s regime would effectively eliminate the country’s weapons of mass destruction threat. Some experts, however, have said that a protocol mechanism might provide useful information for implicating countries such as Cuba. For example, if the country were to block an inspection, that would strongly suggest it had something to hide, said former U.S. State Department Coordinator for Cuban Affairs Dennis Hays. “It is in everybody’s interest to know what is and isn’t being done with respect to weaponizing biological agents, and we should have the strongest treaties to do that,” Hays said.
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