Can a 1975 bioweapons ban handle today’s biothreats?
By Matt Field, March 6, 2023, the Bulletin

Over the years, BWC countries and civil society groups have worked to increase the transparency of biodefense and dual-use biological research activities. In 1987, the convention implemented a system of self-reporting known officially as Confidence-
Building Measures. Using a form, countries submit information about research centers, biodefense programs, disease outbreaks, and other issues pertinent to biological arms control. France proposed the concept of “peer review” compliance assessments,
whereby other countries could review how well a country is adhering to the BWC through visits and other means. More recently, Filippa Lentzos and Gregory Koblentz, biosecurity experts at King’s College London and George Mason University, respectively,
produced a system for tracking the proliferation of the BSL-4 and BSL-3+ labs where researchers conduct dual-use research on dangerous pathogens like Ebola or smallpox virus.

James Revill, the head of the weapons of mass destruction program at UN Institute for Disarmament Research (UNIDIR), an autonomous research institute within the UN, said the goal of a verification system for the BWC would not be a 100% guarantee that no
one is violating the treaty; the goal should be to increase confidence that no country is doing so. That’s been the thrust of the Confidence-Building Measures and other efforts to boost BWC transparency, of which there will likely be more in the future.

Meanwhile, biological attacks have been few and far between since 2001. That’s when a disaffected US Army researcher allegedly stole anthrax from a biodefense lab and sent tainted mail to politicians and media figures. And Unit 731’s atrocities and
the major offensive bioweapons programs of the Cold War are even further in the rearview mirror. So is the bioweapons treaty working as is, or does it need a more concrete verification mechanism, like other weapons treaties?

A verification arm of the BWC could be useful in sorting out allegations about biological weapons—and debunking disinformation campaigns that involve bioweapons allegations.

As the Russian invasion of Ukraine materialized, Putin’s government and its media proxies waged a massive public relations campaign aimed at convincing people that a network of labs in Ukraine with links to the US military’s Biological Threat
Reduction Program was part of a US-Ukraine bioweapons program. The US and Ukrainian governments—and many outside experts—insist that the labs are public and animal health facilities, and that the Russian PR campaign is false propaganda.

Indeed, many of the allegations about the labs have been easily and widely debunked. Media figures like Dilyana Gaytandzhieva, a Bulgarian journalist, cherry picked from legal documents to paint a picture of Ukrainian and American malfeasance. And the
Russian propaganda campaign drew from clearly selective readings of data presented at public symposia and in published reports to claim it had evidence of an offensive program.

As fact-free as it appears to be, the Russian campaign spread ably in the early days of the Ukraine war; it even found a receptive audience among right-wing outlets and QAnon adherents in the United States.

But all bioweapons allegations aren’t as easily debunked as the Kremlin’s claims. The United States currently accuses Russia and North Korea of maintaining offensive bioweapons capabilities, and it’s expressed worries about other countries,
including Iran and China. “The public record strongly suggests that Russia has maintained and modernized the surviving parts of the Soviet biological weapons program,” Robert Petersen, an analyst for the Danish Centre for Biosecurity and
Biopreparedness, wrote in a piece in the Bulletin last year.

The claims highlight the lack of a verification mechanism in the BWC. An independent, official system could, at least theoretically, arrive at definitive resolutions of allegations. “Whatever the real intention or veracity of Russian allegations, they
underline the value of functioning clarification and compliance mechanisms in the BWC,” a 2022 UNIDIR report on verification said.

What Revill said was a shift came in November 2021. Under the Biden administration, Ambassador Bonnie Denise Jenkins, the top US official for arms control, nudged the door open a bit on the BWC verification issue. In a speech before BWC members, she
called for an expert working group that would explore methods to strengthen the agreement, including measures that would “enhance assurance of compliance.”

At last year’s Ninth Review Conference, Jenkins doubled down: “We need to examine how technology has changed and what the bioweapons threats of today and tomorrow looks like. We also need to explore what measures—yes, including possible
verification measures—might be effective in today’s context,” she said.

Although modest, observers say BWC delegates made a breakthrough in December, agreeing to form the working group that will examine verification and other issues.

Falling behind on science
-----------------------
The drafters of the BWC had one particularly strong insight: It would be difficult to predict what exactly might constitute a biowarfare agent in the future. They also knew that few if any biological agents had no peaceful purpose whatsoever. It’s
important, for example, that scientists have access to even the deadliest viruses if they are to develop vaccines against them. In addition to banning delivery systems for bioweapons, the first article of the convention, known as the general purpose
criterion, simply requires that countries don’t “develop, produce, stockpile or otherwise acquire or retain” biological agents such as microbes or toxins (usually chemicals produced by organisms) “of types and in quantities that have no
justification for prophylactic, protective or other peaceful purposes.” Experts say this provision future-proofs the convention.

Science hasn’t stood still since the convention went into effect in 1975, and it hasn’t taken a pause since the verification talks failed to gain traction 20 years ago. The human genome was mostly decoded by 2003. Now many companies have moved past �
�reading” genes to “writing” or synthesizing them. Researchers could soon have gene synthesis technology at their desks. New CRISPR gene editing technology is making it easier to accurately insert genes into genomes. And beyond progress in genetic
engineering, AI-based systems can now churn out the recipes for novel proteins and toxic chemicals. In terms of bioweapons delivery devices, uncrewed aerial vehicles are becoming increasingly capable.

And some new knowledge is opening doors to misuses of biology-related technology that might not be covered by the convention. Lentzos, the King’s College London expert, pointed to areas such as surveillance technology that can track gait and other
physical characteristics as even more of a concern to her than new biological weapons. These technologies “should be classified as ways of using biology to cause harm,” she said, but they wouldn’t fall under the purview of the BWC.

“It’s now easier to make pathogens, find pathogens, [or] tweak pathogens, but it's essentially the same logic of: What is a biological weapon?” Lentzos said. “[The technology is] more readily accessible to a larger number of people, we can
produce them quicker and tweak them, but it's the same sort of logic. Where my bigger concern is, is in these other ways of using biology to suppress and surveil people.”

To deal with how advances in science and technology might impact the BWC, the original convention text called for members to meet in Geneva five years after enacting the treaty. The conferences have continued almost every five years since. At them,
treaty members have gradually included so-called “additional understandings” and an article-by-article review section in final conference documents.

But BWC members have fallen off in explicitly describing the science and technology developments that could affect the treaty. A BWC review conference hasn’t had a solid article-by-article review since 2011. In 2016, delegates essentially copied and
pasted from the previous review conference, adding very little in the way of additional understandings. Last December, states didn’t include the article-by-article review section at all and didn’t even bother to rehash a previous version. One result
of this neglect: The final document from the December conference doesn’t include language that specifies that gene-edited agents could also be bioweapons, something the United States hoped to include. (Given the generalized definition of what is
prohibited under a convention meant to encapsulate current and future threats, it’s debatable whether any specific technology needs to be mentioned in additional understandings; nonetheless, over the years BWC delegates have specified, for example,
that the convention applies even to artificially created biological agents.)

“It is worrisome that states parties can't agree on relatively simple propositions that would ensure that the Article 1 prohibition on developing biological weapons includes biological agents produced or modified via emerging technologies such as
genome editing,” Koblentz, the George Mason University biosecurity expert, said.

As with the verification issue, however, the latest review conference managed to push another door open, too, seeking to achieve a long-held goal: a science and technology review mechanism. The working group that will consider verification will also
weigh how to develop a formalized system to keep the convention up to date on science and technology.

Micrograph photo of mild meningitis and hemorrhage in a fatal case of human anthrax. (CDC, Marshall Fox)

Along with risks, opportunity
-------------------------------
While advances in science and technology and other trends create potential risks, they also come with opportunities to improve compliance with the BWC.

Some of the verification proposals that the VEREX group made in the 1990s could be more effective today than they were then. Hundreds of satellites now circle Earth, meaning that the information one provides can be validated through redundancy. New types
of sensors—for instance, those that can detect volatile organic compounds associated with bacterial growth—can enhance on-the-ground, but off-site assessments, according to the UNIDIR report on verification. And the internet makes it much easier to
track academic studies, national legislation, and industrial statistics. “Since the 1990s, the science and technology of relevance to assessing compliance has significantly enhanced the potential of the 21 verification measures VEREX considered,” the
report said.

Henrietta Wilson, a researcher at King’s College London who studies open-source research and its applicability to arms control, told me that access to data has skyrocketed in the decades since verification was originally considered. Now a researcher
interested in weapons issues can comb through social media feeds, local media stories, government pronouncements, and more, with ease.

As Wilson sees the situation, the goal of open-source research, as it relates to the BWC, is to establish a baseline. Do researchers have LinkedIn profiles that have suddenly gone dark? That could mean something. Is certain equipment being ordered in
excess of normal levels? Again, it’s a situation potentially worth digging into more deeply.

“What verification looks like in that context is less about finding the smoking gun of a violation and more about understanding what normal is and looking for aberrations from that normal,” Wilson said. “Some people call that red flag monitoring.
You're kind of constantly looking at normal patterns of things. And then you might think, ‘Wow, that looks a bit strange.’ And you investigate further.”

Even if a beefed up BWC could better verify treaty compliance and identify violators, that may not change much. It might not be enough to settle allegations. Lentzos cited the example of Syrian chemical weapons attacks. While international investigations
by the UN and OPCW concluded that the Syrian government had used chemical weapons, Syria’s ally Russia was able to veto a 2017 Security Council resolution to impose sanctions. The country was able to escape accountability then and, in fact, chemical
attacks continued. Likewise with the output of any BWC verification mechanism, “at the end, the judgment will be a political judgment, not a scientific technical judgment,” Lentzos said.

At the Palais
------------
The Swiss city of Geneva is known for a few things: its lake, chocolate, famously private Swiss banks, and international diplomacy. Some 32,000 diplomats and associated personnel work in the international civil sector of the city, according to the Swiss
mission to the UN. The city is also the site of BWC review conferences, held at the Palais des Nations UN complex. The Palais, as it’s often called, is a massive collection of art deco buildings, completed in 1938. Sitting on a sprawling hilly campus
on the shores of Lake Geneva, it is one of the world’s large diplomatic venues, hosting some 5,300 meetings a year.

The three-week RevCon, as the abbreviation- and acronym-loving international diplomatic set calls such meetings, took place last December in a massive circular room at the Palais. Beneath a giant screen, the conference president, Leonardo Bencini of
Italy, sat at a rostrum rising above a sea of desks that spread out toward the back the room, each with video screens, buttons for voting, and headphones for listening to simultaneous translations. The whole arrangement suggested that important business
was being taken care of at the highest levels.

And the conference did tackle the weighty matter of biological disarmament with appropriate gravitas. UN Secretary General António Guterres beamed in on the large video screen behind the rostrum to urge on the conference delegates “The Biological
Weapons Convention affirms the conscience of humankind,” Guterres said. “The COVID-19 pandemic brought the world to its knees. Now imagine a different kind of disease one that is most deliberately designed and can race though the global population
even faster. Biological weapons are not the product of science fiction, they are a clear and present danger.”

But a review conference also has its housekeeping. The treaty members set meeting dates and decide when to have another review conference. They vote on whether to retain the three people hired to support the convention. Had things gone sideways at the
end, which some feared might happen last year, the BWC could have lost its already bare-bones staff, at least until the next review sometime in Geneva before the end of 2027.

Until BWC members agreed to a slight expansion, Daniel Feakes, the chief of the Implementation Support Unit (ISU), held one of just three staff positions managing the day-to-day functioning of the treaty. After the conference, Feakes gained a single
colleague. It wasn’t hard to believe him when he said the unit had been working 12-hour days during the review conference.

“We also have to support countries to implement the BWC,” Feakes told me. “And for a small team of people of only three, and, as you said, with 184 states parties and lots of demands and requests coming in—doing that with only three people is
quite challenging, to say the least. Obviously.”

In comparison, about 500 people work at the OPCW, which had a roughly $76 million budget in 2021 and maintains a headquarters building at The Hague. And 2,500 people work at the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), which administers the Nuclear Non-
Proliferation Treaty.

The small staff of the BWC is partly a product of the treaty itself, which does not include a verification protocol. Verification would likely have required a larger permanent staff. As it is, the BWC billed its members less than $2 million for
operations in 2021 and 2020. By the fourth day of the review conference, funds for having the UN audio visual operation broadcast the meetings live had run dry.

A large mural by Norwegian artist Per Lasson Krohg symbolizes the promise of future peace and individual freedom in the UN Security Council's meeting room. (j0e_m. CC BY-NC-SA 2.0)

What’s the point?
----------------
With no legally binding way of ensuring countries are following the bioweapons rules and an outdated understanding of scientific and technological developments, is the BWC relevant? The threat of pandemics is on the rise, focusing attention on natural
disease outbreaks. And other serious emerging risks—for instance, new tools for surveillance and oppression—rely on biological processes but may have nothing to do with the BWC.

A member of the UN Security Council investigative team in Iraq once said the comprehensive bioweapons verification effort in Iraq happened right at a “sweet spot,” as geopolitical tensions briefly thawed as the Soviet Union collapsed and the Cold War
came to an end. These days world events regularly invite comparisons to the Cold War era; the sweet spot has long since soured. This year, for example, Ukraine’s delegation at the review conference railed against the Russian invasion and its violation
of the “universal principles” that underpin the UN; Russia repeatedly short-circuited discussion of the war by invoking a review conference rule that limits debate to matters relevant to the treaty.

Against this backdrop, the consensus-driven process of decision-making in the BWC means that one country can grind progress to a halt.

Frustrating as the slow momentum is, the middle-aged BWC still has value. It’s carved out a space to discuss bioweapons and risks in the life sciences more broadly. Perhaps more importantly, it’s created a norm. Despite the BWC’s lack of a strong
verification system and its other flaws, having countries get together every five years and publicly commit to not weaponize biology might be a powerful preventative.

"The international norm is so well established that currently no state will admit to having a biological weapons program because they don't want to be associated with any suggestion of development or use of biological weapons,” Revill said

Norms, however, aren’t written in stone.

Russian and North Korean agents have allegedly used chemicals several times in attempted and successful assassinations. The Syrian regime has used chemical weapons repeatedly. And Putin has made menacing threats about nuclear weapons—despite what some
scholars have called a “nuclear taboo.” Under Putin, Russia is “increasingly trying to upend the entire UN system,” Weber, the former Pentagon official, said. The surge of bioweapons disinformation that came with the Ukraine war, could, some say,
give the impression that biological weapons are acceptable.

Instead of concrete steps like creating a verification mechanism or a scientific and technical advisory process—or any other would-be critical element of a revitalized Biological Weapons Convention, the latest review conference simply formed a working
group to consider these items. Modest though that result may seem—given that the search for agreement on a BWC enforcement mechanism has gone on for three decades—in today’s environment, some insiders contend it counts as significant. “You might
say it’s no big deal,” Bencini, the conference president, told Arms Control Today, "but it is a big deal, actually, because we really had to break this deadlock so that we could still say that we do have a convention on biological weapons.”

https://thebulletin.org/2023/03/biological-weapons-convention/

--- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05
* Origin: fsxNet Usenet Gateway (21:1/5)