The July 26 edition of the Bangor Daily News carried an AP story by Alexander Higgins to the effect that the United States was withdrawing from talks designed to ratify a protocol for the 1972 United Nations Biological Weapons Convention of which this nation was a signatory. Negotiations over the protocol have gone on for seven years and the Bush administration’s action has thrown the process into disarray.

The United States’ chief negotiator, Donald Mahley, gave two reasons for the withdrawal. One is that commercial trade secrets of U.S. companies could be exposed to the scrutiny of foreign competitors and the other that vital national security aspects could be compromised. Ironically it was the beefing up of one of the weakest provisions of the 1972 treaty that has led the United States to take the unilateral, and what has proven to be an internationally unpopular, stand.

The original BWC treaty, signed in 1972 by the majority of United Nations members and which took effect in 1975, consisted of 15 articles. In essence, these prohibited signature nations from developing new biological weapons, required the immediate destruction of existing ones, and placed a ban on any international trade in materials that could be used in the development of bioweapons. The latter included all agents, toxins, manufacturing equipment, and means of delivery.

Richard Stone reviewed the BWC in the July 20 issue of Science before the Bush administration made its announcement. Stone points out that the enforcement aspect of the treaty was its weakest link, as it did little more than allow signatory nations to complain to the U.N. Security Council if they believed violations were taking place. Stone points to the examples of the former Soviet Union and Iraq to show that many nations simply paid lip service to the provisions of the treaty.

In 1974, dozens of people died from an outbreak of anthrax near the Soviet city of Sverdlovsk. At the time, Soviet authorities blamed the outbreak on contaminated beef but, in 1992, Russian president Boris Yeltsin admitted that it had been caused by anthrax spores that had escaped from a bioweapons manufacturing facility. Stone says that information obtained after the breakup of the Soviet Union shows that over 25,000 scientists and workers were employed in a dozen Soviet bioweapons facilities by the end of the 1970s.

Fresher in people’s minds, and what may have helped power the latest drive to put teeth in the BWC, was the discovery at the end of the Gulf War that Iraq had a developing bioweapons program. It was supposedly halted but Shaw says that one of Hussein’s sons-in-law, who defected in 1995, indicated that the program is still going on.

The new 210-page protocol to the BWC is designed to curb such abuses but, according to the United States, will only open complying nations to economic and security risks while nations such as Iraq will simply continue to ignore its provisions. Under the new protocol, any specific manufacturing or military facility could be visited by up to 30 inspectors from other nations on the basis of undocumented charges from a signatory nation. The visit could last anywhere from 84 hours to 30 days depending upon the nature of the allegations.

The Bush administration fears that a member nation could register a complaint merely to gain access to research laboratories, in particular those of pharmaceutical firms that often mask bioweapons programs in other nations. “Illicit biological warfare work can easily be concealed by those with something to hide,” says Edward Lacey of the U.S. Department of State, “leaving legitimate economic secrets at the mercy of outsiders.”

Stone, and Steven Block in the January-February issue of American Scientist, paint a scary picture of the kinds of biological weapons now available to rogue nations. These include bacterial diseases such as anthrax, typhus, and bubonic plague and viral ones as smallpox, Ebola hemorrhagic fever, and viral encephalitis. There are also what Stone calls the “old stand-bys” such as botulinum toxin and ricin. The latter was used by Soviet agents in 1978, says Stone, to murder a Hungarian defector named Georgi Markov.

A new type of biological weapon, not necessarily harmful to humans but capable of destroying crops and herds, is now becoming an increasing threat. Johannes Rath and Jochen Burgel warn in the July 20 issue of Science that these “socioeconomic biological weapons” could be used to destroy a nation’s economy and food supply and point to the devastation caused by “mad cow” disease and foot-and-mouth disease in the United Kingdom. They also point out that infecting grain crops with a

variety of fungal diseases, such as rice blast or wheat rust, could bring starvation to heavily populated nations dependent on these crops.

Higgins says that Tibor Toth, the Hungarian diplomat chairing the BWC protocol committee, hopes to find a compromise that will bring the United States back as a partner to the agreement. One can only hope this is the case for, given the types of bioweapons available today, even an agreement that simply slows their proliferation is better than none at all.

Clair Wood taught chemistry and physics for more than 10 years at Eastern Maine Technical College.