Biological Arms Control and Disarmament
The international community has laid down clear red lines about the misuse of biology. The two biological cornerstones of the rules of war are the Geneva Protocol (G) and the Biological Weapons Convention (G). Together, they prohibit the development, production, stockpiling and use of biological weapons.
The following slides provide overviews of the two agreements.
The video in this slide provides more details about the Biological Weapons Convention and the challenges of verifying compliance with the treaty.
There is a dedicated learning unit on export controls.
The cornerstone of the biological arms control and disarmament regime is the Biological Weapons Convention.
The BWC is an extraordinary treaty. Negotiated in a relatively short period of time, it was the first treaty to outlaw an entire class of weapons. The political atmosphere in the late 1960s, early 1970s when the BWC was negotiated was dramatically different from the international political situation today. The Cold War was severely limited progress in arms control and disarmament. Occasionally, however, there were windows of opportunity to advance arms control. BWC negotiators took advantage of one of these windows to successfully draft and approve the final text of the Convention.
The BWC opened for signature in 1972 and entered into force in 1975. The UK, U.S. and USSR acted as depository powers. Unusually for an arms control treaty, the BWC was agreed without routine on-site verification mechanisms to enhance assurance of compliance. Some states argued that the nature of biological weapons is such that they are inherently impossible to verify: not only can significant quantities of biological agents be produced in small and readily concealable facilities, but most of the equipment required—the fermenters, centrifuges and freeze-dryers—is ubiquitous in public, private and commercial laboratories. Other states argued that, while the same level of accuracy and reliability as the verification of, for example, nuclear arms control treaties is unattainable, it is possible to build a satisfactory level of confidence that biology is only used for peaceful purposes.
The lack of a verification mechanism had immediate impacts on the treaty. Shortly after the USSR signed the treaty in 1972, analysis of CIA spy plane photographs raised suspicions that the Soviet Union was defying its obligations to dismantle its BW program.
These photographs and U.S. suspicions continued after the Convention entered into force in 1975. What the spy plane photos appeared to show was that the Soviets were constructing new structures at their BW installations rather than getting rid of BW agents and munitions.
The first conference to review the operations of the BWC was held in March 1980, in the period often referred to as the ‘second Cold War.’ At that conference Sweden proposed establishing a Consultative Committee to investigate issues of noncompliance with the treaty. The Committee would have the ability to conduct fact-finding missions with on-site inspections. The USSR objected, arguing that a review conference was not the appropriate forum to introduce amendments to the Convention.
The Soviets may well have had other reasons to object to the Swedish proposal. In the spring of 1979 there was an outbreak of anthrax in the Soviet city of Ekaterinburg, then known as Sverdlovsk. Because the city was home to a facility the U.S. long suspected was a BW lab, intelligence analysts in the West suspected that a leak or explosion at the facility caused the outbreak.
The U.S. made its suspicions public at the first BWC review conference and raised allegations that the outbreak was due to a biological weapon accident, charging the Soviets with treaty violation. The Soviets responded to the allegation by acknowledging the existence of the anthrax epidemic and blaming it on the ingestion of tainted meat.
Ultimately, the controversy was resolved by abandoning the efforts to establish a Consultative Committee to investigate noncompliance. The anthrax outbreak controversy lingered until independent scientific investigations conducted after the collapse of the Soviet Union revealed that the U.S. suspicions of a leak at a biological weapons facility was indeed the cause of the outbreak.
A much larger second attempt to address the lack of verification provisions in the treaty, by adding a legally binding compliance protocol, took place between 1994 and 2001. This attempt failed too. The U.S. rejected the draft protocol on the grounds that it did not offer rigorous enough verification measures to detect clandestine bioweapons activities, but that it was invasive enough to compromise classified and proprietary information form the U.S. biodefense program and pharmaceutical industry. Several other states who also had concerns with the draft protocol were happy to hide behind the formal rejection by the U.S.
A legally binding mechanism with measures to verify compliance with the BWC is a long-term goal for the European Union. In the meantime, the BWC remains an arms control treaty whose provisions are notoriously difficult to verify, and one that provides very few traditional tools to carry out the process of verification and to make an informed and accurate verification judgment.
The 1935 Geneva Protocol
Full name: Protocol for the Prohibition of the Use in War of Asphyxiating, Poisonous or Other Gases, and of Bacteriological Methods of Warfare
Date of adoption: 17 June 1925 Date of entry into force: 8 February 1928 Depository: Government of France States Parties: 145 (as in April 2021) Signatory States: 0
…the use in war of asphyxiating, poisonous or other gases, and of all analogous liquids, materials or devices, has been justly condemned by the general opinion of the civilised world… …this prohibition shall be universally accepted as a part of International Law, binding alike the conscience and the practice of nations…’
The Biological Weapons Convention
Full name: Convention on the Prohibition of the Development, Production and Stockpiling of Bacteriological (Biological) and Toxin Weapons and on Their Destruction
Date of adoption: 16 December 1971 (UN General Assembly) Date of opening for signature: 10 April 1972 (London, Moscow, Washington) Date of entry into force: 26 March 1975 Depository: Governments of Russia, United Kingdom and United States States Parties: 183 (as in April 2021) Signatory States: 4 (as in April 2021) More info: www.unog.ch/bwc
…Determined, for the sake of all mankind, to exclude completely the possibility of bacteriological (biological) agents and toxins being used as weapons, Convinced that such use would be repugnant to the conscience of mankind and that no effort should be spared to minmise this risk…’
Cooperative Threat Reduction
The Cooperative Threat Reduction (CTR) programme was established by the United States to provide former USSR states with assistance to destroy their unconventional weapons.
This video describes the biological CTR programme and how it has evolved over the past twenty-five years.
The creation of the Cooperative Threat Reduction program in 1991 was a historically rare innovation in international problem-solving. Prior to the early 1990s, states accomplished the reduction of arms through laboriously negotiated treaties such as the 1991 Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty or the 1990 Conventional Forces in Europe Treaty. Or, states withdrew weapons unilaterally—usually in tandem with the introduction of improved versions of the weapons being retired.
The disintegration of the Soviet Union left several of the fifteen successor states with major nuclear, chemical and biological weapons capabilities. However, they had limited resources to deal with them. The Cooperative Threat Reduction programme was established by the U.S. to provide these states with the necessary assistance to destroy their unconventional weapons; ensure the security and safety of the weapons in storage, and put verifiable safeguards in place against the proliferation of unconventional weapons.
The original focus of CTR was primarily to help Russia and the other Former Soviet Union states meet their obligations under various arms control treaties. The Biological Weapons Convention prohibits biological weapons, but permits research to develop vaccines and therapeutics like antibiotics.
Yet, the treaty offers little specific guidance about when such research, testing and other biological activities crosses over into the military realm. Since the BWC lacked the kind of concrete destroy-this/reduce-that/definitely-do-‘x’ definitions that you find in the nuclear accords, the biological mission for Cooperative Threat Reduction was not as easily defined or executed in the early 1990s.
A big impetus for the biological CTR work was to transparency and getting Moscow to open up about its bioweapons programme. The Russians did not see a downside to having CTR assistance at the Biopreparat facilities, but Ministry of Defense officials drew a red line and refused Western requests to visit the military biological facilities. The Ministry of Defense also blocked collaborative research grants to military scientists.
Despite this, biological CTR programming in the former Soviet Union was very successful. It upgraded the physical security of a number of facilities and trained staff in more rigorous safety and security practices. It enabled the destruction of Steponogorsk, the main BW production facility in the Soviet Union, and cleaned up much of the BW test site in the Aral Sea so that it poses less of a health threat to local populations, both human and animal—and, of course, the clean-up also limits access to potential BW agents. CTR ‘brain drain’ prevention grants, through the International Science and Technology Center, kept a lot of bioweaponeers in Russia with gainful work so they did not have to look for other employers who might have exploited their expertise or access to various genetically-engineered pathogens.
The European Union and other Western states began adding funds and projects to the U.S. CTR initiative. This was formalized in 2002 through the Global Partnership, which by 2015 had 26 contributing states.
When the CTR program started, the funds for nuclear and chemical weapons threats far outstripped funds to address the biological threat. Now, biological programs are the largest part of the overall CTR budget, and the focus is on providing states with the capabilities to tackle a disease outbreak, regardless of whether it is naturally occurring or deliberate introduced.