CISAC/ Europeans 6/29/86
revised from
DSB/cisac—bw.1.85

J. Lederberg, Rockefeller University, New York
Towards preventing a biological weapons technology race.

Biological weaponry poses a serious threat to all people,
not just the combatants. As an overhanging anxiety it also
contaminates other efforts at world order.

The BW convention, signed 1972, was a useful partial step
towards controlling biological and toxin weapons, notwithstanding
its well-understood limitations with respect to a) verification,
b) enforcement, and c) its inability to deal with weapons-related
R & D (aS opposed to production and deployment). Intrinsic to
its utility was an expectation that it would foster a climate of
mutually advantageous, cooperative verification and enforcement,
meeting the deeper interests of all sides.

The convention has undoubtedly been helpful in
forestalling a major technology race in BW, compared e.g. to
recent history in cruise missiles. However, the limitations of
the convention perhaps now contribute to other elements of
international competition. The result today is a high degree of
unmitigated suspicion about actions and intentions of 'the other
sides', with grave consequences for 1) the credibility of arms
control agreements generally — especially those not manifestly
verifiable by the grossest of national means; and 2) the
potentiality for fueling a major technology race between the
Superpowers, within the letter if not the spirit of the 1972 BW
convention. Since biological agents could be manufactured in
plants primarily designed for medical or industrial purposes, and
since we have the prospect of still newer and more effective
weapons-agents from biotechnology, anxieties about a threatening
"breakout" in violation of the 1972 convention further poison
international harmony.

Meanwhile, international security is more likely to be
threatened by the proliferation of BW capability to less
responsible powers; the nuclear superpowers have a marginal need,
at most, for BW atop their nuclear retaliatory capability. The
possibility of regulating that proliferation is gravely impaired
by the current lack of cooperation in the enforcement of the BW
convention. The irresponsibility just mentioned is aggravated by
the likelihood that biological weapons will spread infection from
the targets under attack, with potentially unlimited collateral
damage, even retroaction.

It will not be easy to design formal procedures for a
more cooperative approach: the minimum that should be sought
promptly is to enhance forums for candid discussion where
questions can be raised and pressed on matters that are eliciting
anxieties about compliance with the purposes of the BW
convention. The still unanswered questions about the "Sverdlovsk
case" are an example. The "answers" offered in print about the
“foodborne epidemic of intestinal anthrax" at Sverdlovsk were so
lacking in detail, they did not meet the minimum standards of a
scientific or public health report.

In the long run, mutual confidence about the intentions
and capabilities of BW-related research can be built up by more
extensive international cooperation in the study of infectious
disease. All responsible states will also have to be proactive
in their reassurances to other states about their posture on BW
and compliance with the spirit of the BW disarmament convention.
The fabric of international control of BW development is tenuous
indeed.

Within the framework of the bilateral US-USSR Academies
of Science — CISAC discussions, we are just organizing subgroups
of specialists to address the above challenges.