Is a Strong, Workable Biological Weapons Convention Feasible?

• Author: Kenyon, Ian R.
• Position: Brief Article

The fact that this question needs to be asked is a sad reflection on the state of international law as it relates to arms control and disarmament. The old-fashioned view enshrined in the legal concept pacta sunt servanda (treaties are observed) is unfortunately not seen as a strong enough basis for States to use for important decisions relating to their national security m the twenty-first century.

Following the extensive use of chemical weapons in the First World War, the members of the League of Nations signed the 1925 Geneva Protocol, prohibiting "the use in war of asphyxiating, poisonous or other gases, and of bacteriological methods of warfare". This simple prohibition of use, weakened as it was by reservations limiting its application to conflicts between signatories, and lacking controls on production of such weapons, has proved remarkably effective, and only a handful of instances of breach have been recorded in its 75 years of existence.

The Biological Weapons Convention (BWC) of 1972 was designed to complement the 1925 Protocol by banning their development, production and stockpiling. This instrument, negotiated immediately following a decision by the United States in 1969 to renounce biological weapons, is also very simple, containing no verification provisions other than a requirement to consult over problems and leaving to the United Nations Security Council the question of how to respond to any breach. This simple approach was accepted at the time because of the perception that biological weapons had little battlefield utility and that nuclear weapons could act as an adequate deterrent to all "weapons of mass destruction". The disclosure 10 years ago that the Soviet Union, a depository power of the Convention, had maintained a massive, secret development and production programme exposed the flaws of this scheme.

Meanwhile, the international community had taken a much more cautious approach to the prohibition of chemical weapons. The Paris Convention of 1993 is complete in itself, reiterating the prohibition of use as well as of the development, production and stockpiling of chemical weapons, and requiring their destruction within a fixed time-frame. It has elaborate provisions for verification, including declarations by a State Party and inspections by a new international agency--the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons--of both weapons and related facilities and civil chemical industry. The ultimate check is...