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Experts Say Biological Weapons Ban Can Be Monitored By David Ruppe WASHINGTON — International compliance with the Biological Weapons Convention (BWC) can be routinely monitored, a group of U.S. biopharmaceutical industry experts said yesterday in a report challenging some core tenets of the Bush administration opposition to a formal inspections mechanism. The report, Resuscitating the Bioweapons Ban: U.S. Industry Experts Plans for Treaty Monitoring, was co-produced by the Center for Strategic and International Studies and 14 experts from the U.S. pharmaceutical and biotechnologies industries, most with decades of experience in academia and in companies such as Monsanto, SmithKline Beecham and Merck. It recommends a strategy for routinely inspecting commercial biotechnology facilities globally for illicit biological weapons activities, which the industry experts formulated during a series of “workshop” meetings this year. “We feel what we have produced, is a way to address this based on practical experience, ourselves being stakeholders who wanted to get involved and see the U.S. take the lead on this,” said workshop member Jennie Hunter-Cevera, president of the University of Maryland Biotechnology Institute. That approach, outside experts say, appears tougher and potentially more effective than procedures proposed in a treaty “protocol” discarded by the international community in 2001 upon U.S. pressure and insistence that they would have been too weak to be effective and also too intrusive (see GSN, Nov. 20, 2001). The report recommends, for instance, an inspection team of six to eight people, rather than the four that would have been required by the protocol, one week of advance notice of an inspection rather than two, and more aggressive authorities and procedures for obtaining information from facilities. U.S. officials also have argued that inspections could compromise U.S. biological weapons defense programs and put proprietary commercial information at risk, and that the treaty was inherently “unverifiable” because much of the equipment and processes used for legitimate commercial or defensive work can be used for weapons (see GSN, Nov. 15, 2002). The new report disputes that. “The industry experts assert that highly skilled inspectors using their specified monitoring strategies and techniques should be able to discern legitimate facilities from those that mask illicit weapons activities,” it says. The devised monitoring scheme could be conducted while minimizing the burden on a particular facility from the inspections and without compromising proprietary information, the experts said. Trial Inspections UrgedThe report recommends conducting government-funded trial inspections at U.S. biopharmaceutical facilities to test its recommendations and says a 1999 law requiring such trials has never been implemented. The group’s effort won preliminary praise from arms-control experts for its toughness, though there was skepticism about the chances for implementation given the Bush administration’s previous opposition to a biological weapons inspections protocol. The proposed activities in almost every case “are as rigorous, or much more rigorous, than the draft BWC protocol,” said Milton Leitenberg, an arms-control expert at the University of Maryland. He said, though, “The U.S. government over a period of three years kept watering down the [draft protocol during negotiations], making it less rigorous.” “The question becomes if the United States cut down over a three-year period the far more rigorous earlier versions of the draft protocol, how is it going to accept this one?” he said. Amy Smithson, a senior fellow at the Center for Strategic and International Studies who coordinated the working group’s activities, acknowledged a challenge. “Every time I sat down at the table, [the participants] were aware that the current situation internationally and in the United States is not conducive to the government jumping on the opportunity to conduct these field trial inspections,” she said. She said, though, that the trials would provide useful data for U.S. negotiators at the 2006 Biological Weapons Convention review conference. “If we’re not going to start gathering data now in preparation for this, when are we going to do it?” she said. Smithson also acknowledged that the routine commercial inspections proposed by the group would be just one element of several mechanisms necessary for monitoring treaty compliance. Procedures would need to be developed for conducting challenge inspections in the event a country is suspected of conducting biological weapons activities at a facility, she said. In addition, recommendations would need to be devised and tested in the field for routine inspections of university and government facilities that have the capacity to develop and produce biological weapons. “I think what you see in the 1999 law are requests for trials in a variety of facilities, U.S. government facilities and academic facilities as well. … [The working group’s participants are] trying to lead the way for their industry. Hopefully, someone will step up in these areas as well,” Smithson said. Smithson said the United States did not have hard data from field trials to make its assertions during the protocol negotiations and that tests of the report’s plan could provide data on the feasibility of inspections. “My hope is that my country will actually get on with the process of conducting field trials. Actual data is needed,” she said.
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