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194  We Can Make a Safer World By Dropping Work on Toxins
     The Washington Post  February 14, 1970

     Last Nov. 25, President Nixon announced a major step in U.S.
policy concerning biological weapons. They "have massive, unpredictable
and potentially uncontrollable consequences," he said.  "They
may produce global epidemics and impair the health of future generations
... The U.S. shall renounce the use of lethal biological agents
and weapons and all other methods of biological warfare.  The U.S. will
confine its biological research to defensive measures such as 
immunization and safety measures."

     The President also asked the Senate to ratify the Geneva protocol
of 1925, which prohibits the first use in war chemical as well as
bacteriological weapons.

     Many scientists, including myself, have urged a still more 
decisive initiative toward the general prohibition of research and 
development in the field of chemical warfare.  This was not done, 
probably in the belief that the Geneva  protocol was a sufficient step
toward driving hard bargains with the Soviet Union on disarmament 
issues. But this reflex, orientation to the Soviets overlooks the 
greater threat to our security from the lack of world system to control 
the proliferation of cheap but nasty and unreliable weapons among 
smaller powers.

    The President's statement has now become the subject of a sharp
debate about its application to toxins.  These are complex chemical
compounds, often proteins, which are produced by many living organisms,
including infectious microbes.  In some diseases like food 
poisoning, diphtheria or tetanus, an easily isolated toxin plays a 
central part in the lethal action of the responsible bacteria.  In more
subtle fashion, a toxin is probably connected with every infectious
disease, but we do not always know enough to be able to isolate the
crucial molecule.  The understanding of toxins is obviously a central
issue in disease research.

     Military research is also much interested in toxins.  Much has
been said about their enormous potency; a half pound of botulinus
toxin "properly distributed" would do in all of North America.  But
their real attraction is the possibility of immunizing the attacking
forces and their allies.

     Our emotional revulsion against such agents should not becloud 
either their classification or the precise reasons to develop better
policies to deal with them.  Toxins are undoubtedly chemical poisons,
not living agents.  President Nixon's principal reason for renouncing
U.S. use of biological agents, the unpredictable chances of epidemics
outside the theater of combat, does not apply to toxins.

     Toxins, nevertheless, are now produced by industrial processes
that can hardly be distinguished from the production of vaccines or of
bacteriological weapons.  It will be impossible to sustain the 
credibility of our renunciation of such weapons if we continue secret 
research and pilot plant development on toxins.  Nor can we visualize
any system of inspection or verification of international agreements
that would expose bacteriological work and leave toxins concealed.

     This is not an argument to redefine the sense of chemical weaponry,
which could have serious side effects in deterring national leaders
from stepwise advances in policy.  Rather, the toxins present a
special problem, separate from biological weapons.  We will help make
a safer world if we set an example by eschewing secret military work
on the production of toxins from microbes, as well as the microbes
themselves.

     The possibility also exists of synthesizing known toxins, and
designing new ones, by chemical methods.  It will be an unhappy day if
we promulgate that art by applying more energy to developing the 
technology than to vital global controls.
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