11 Prospects for the Future: An Assessment of Where Things Stand and
Aspects that May Stimulate Further Interest in BW
If one sketches a very cursory net assessment, one can sort the contributing factors into three groups: those that have brought some beneficial contributions, those that remain essentially a constant, but which can potentially introduce new negative developments in the future, and those which seem clearly likely to result in negative consequences.
In the first group, one can include:
a. The termination of South Africa’s BW program in 1993.
b. At the least, the disclosure of Iraq’s BW program and the temporary dismantling of much of its infrastructure. That discovery may unfortunately have also further stimulated the interest of some other countries, particularly Iraq’s neighbor Iran, which had already initiated its CW program in the mid-1980s in response to that of Iraq. UNSCOM at least put a hiatus of eight years into Iraq’s BW efforts, and possibly more.
c. The disclosure, and for the most part, the significant reduction and suspension of the USSR’s massive BW program. It is possible that the offensive aspects of the program have been totally terminated; it is simply impossible to determine whether that is so or not because of the continued absence of transparency and access to the facilities still controlled by the Russian Ministry of Defense. Concern about the possible contribution to BW proliferation occasioned by the very major downsizing and poor economic circumstances of the R&D institutes that had previously been part of the Soviet BW program was and is appropriate, but certainly the primary fact of the operational end of that program and the reduction in size of its remaining components is beneficial.
It is obvious of course that all three of these “positive” circumstances depend on the disclosure of three national BW programs whose existence was distinctly undesirable. Nevertheless, in the realm of nuclear proliferation, the South African renunciation of its nuclear weapons, and the decision by Argentina and Brazil to end their nuclear weapon development programs were seen as unquestionably positive developments, and the same logic applies in the above cases as regards BW.
Just about ten years ago, there were a rash of publications prophesying that advances in molecular genetics and biotechnology would be likely to produce an expansion in BW among states and non-state actors. Nevertheless, despite the common emphasis on technology, technological advances and technological diffusion as particularly recent contributing and accelerating factors in BW diffusion, these are probably more a constant than otherwise, and in the second group of factors. Just after WWII ended, a US government study stated:
…only a nation with sizable resources in specially-trained scientific personnel and industrial facilities can produce the means to wage open, large-scale biological warfare. In order to utilize successfully the biological warfare potentialities of any nation, a favorable national policy and the support of high governmental agencies are prerequisites….
The following factors serve as criteria of the extent of biological warfare research and development which a country is capable of undertaken and the measure of success that may be anticipated:
a. Number and caliber of scientists.
b. Amount and quality of equipment.
c. Size and number of installations.
d. Extent of cooperation between units and individuals.
e. Over-all
coordination.
f. National policy.
g. Amount of money available.
h. Extent of previous biological warfare effort.[1]
The national offensive BW programs reviewed earlier in the paper all utilized dedicated facilities for BW R&D and production. (That appears to be the case also for Israel; it is not clear from what little is known about China and Iran if that characteristic applies in their cases as well.)
These facilities are usually quite sizable, and in some cases, extraordinarily so. Their costs, both in building the facilities as well as for their operation, is sizable.
Technological advances in BW-relevant science have been nearly continuous from the mid-1940s onward. Similarly, the global dispersion of relevant scientific knowledge is not a new event, and has been occurring for decades.
As for non-state actors, competent assessments made only a year or two ago note relatively similar requirements. In a report to the US President and Congress, the Advisory Panel to Assess Domestic Response Capabilities for Terrorism Involving Weapons of Mass Destruction considered that “terrorism” – that is, the utilization of WMD by non-state actors – was a threat to the United States, but that carrying out such attacks requires “…highly knowledgeable personnel, significant financial resources, fairly sophisticated production facilities and equipment, quality control and testing, and special handling.”
Contrary to a massive amount of disinformation purveyed in
recent years, it is not a simple matter either to obtain or to prepare human
pathogens for use as BW agents. There
are five essential requirements that must be mastered in order to produce
biological agents:
§
One must
obtain the appropriate strain of the disease pathogen.
§
One must
know how to handle them correctly.
§
One must
know how to grow them in a way that will produce the appropriate
characteristics.
§
One must
know how to store them, and to scale-up production properly.
§ One must know how to disperse them properly.
Four of the five requirements are among the tasks frequently dismissed as “easy.” Some experts do emphasize that the last step, aerosolization to the appropriate particle size for efficient inhalation infection, does present difficulties, while still suggesting that the first four steps are simple. That is not correct, and examples from the experiences of several national biological weapons programs substantiate these statements.[2] Most of the agents are not readily available; most of the agents are not easy to produce. The conditions during the preparation and preservation of the agents will critically affect the efficacy of their use, and most of the agents are not easy to disperse.[3]
If one turns to the aspects that produce decidedly negative consequences, one should include the following:
a) the United Nations Security Council fiasco with UNSCOM, already discussed.
b) the possibility that the Ad-Hoc Group negotiations will fail to reach agreement on a Verification Protocol in any way comparable to the regime that was established under the Chemical Weapons Convention, which is now in force. The problem countries have been Iran (with minor assists from India and China), Russia, and the United States. At the moment, the greatest problem is the United States, with reports already available that the new US administration has rejected the AGH Chairman’s draft of the Verification Protocol. All of the Western European states have heretofore favored provisions stronger than those in the newest text, and have successively been modifying their preferences to accommodate the US. If the US maintains its current position, there is the possibility that the result may be a decision by other states to go ahead with an agreement on a Verification Protocol and leave the US out, as occurred in the case of the International Criminal Court and the Landmines Treaty, and appears about to occur with the Kyoto Protocol. As the AHG deliberations operate under consensus procedures, this could happen only if the US does not prevent a Protocol from being referred to the BWC Review Conference in November, and does not actively oppose it at the Review Conference.
c) Another potentially negative outcome is the effects of the “boosterism” and popularization of BW by the exaggeration of threat that has taken place in the US in the past five or six years. There seems little doubt that others watch and learn, and what they learn may not be what was intended. For example, it would seem almost certain that the interest shown in mycotoxins by the South African and Iranian BW programs came about because the false charges made by the United States in the early 1980s of mycotoxin use in Southeast Asia popularized the molecule. Mycotoxins are relatively poor BW agents, and it is difficult to understand its selection as an agent by a BW program for any other reason than mimicry.
An example of a different sort is a study prepared for the US Department of Defense in 1997 by the Center for Counterproliferation Research of the National Defense University. It projects that every potential US military antagonist – large nation or small, state actor or non-state actor – will acquire, threaten, or use all forms of WMD including biological weapons in every possible scenario or circumstance conceivable.[4] And in particular, it states that “Biological Weapons Will Become ‘Weapons of Choice.’ Biological weapons, both as ‘weapons of mass destruction’ and as tailored military instruments, could well become the weapon of choice by 2025.”[5] In 43 pages the words “arms control,” no less the mention of the BWC and the effort to achieve a Verification Protocol is not mentioned a single time. Nor is there any notion or suggestion of its utility in strengthening a regime against BW possession or use as a possible means of thwarting such an evolution, which is otherwise presented as a given.
This brief “net assessment” ends the review of the past century, and we will have to worry about the coming one.
[1] Biological Warfare, Activities and Capabilities of Foreign Nations, A Military Intelligence Service Special Study, War Department, Washington, DC, March 31, 1946, p. 18, Declassified.
[2] Milton Leitenberg, “An Assessment of the Threat of the Use of Biological Weapons and Biological Agents,” July 2000, Conference paper available on the website of the Federation of American Scientists, Washington, DC (www.fas.org) and Analytic Services Corporation (ANSER), Homeland Defense, Arlington, Virginia.
[3] It is interesting to compare some of the
estimates of what might be required to produce “biological warfare agents” or
“a BW capability”. These range from the
most common but ridiculous pronouncements by US defense and intelligence
officials about the work being able to be carried out in garages, bathrooms,
kitchen sinks, home beer or wine brewery kits, by a single high-school student,
etc. One author wrote that
“Manufacturing a lethal bacterial disease agent requires little more than
chicken soup, a flat whiskey bottle, and an available source of seed culture.”
(Edith Kermit Roosevelt, “Germ War,”
International Combat Arms (July 1986), pp. 38-42.) Another wrote that producing biological weapons was “about as complicated as manufacturing beer and less dangerous than refining heroin.” (Douglas and Livingstone, 1987, p. 34 [reference incomplete]. An author in a New York Times wrote that “Biological weapons can be made by anyone with a little training and a few glass jars.” (Tom Reiss, “Now Will We Heed the Biological Threat,” New York Times, February 21, 1998.) Jessica Stern quotes “Kathleen Bailey…concluded that several biologists with only $10,000 worth of equipment could produce a significant quantity of biological agent.” (Jessica Stern, The Ultimate Terrorists, Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press, 1999, p. 50.)
A second category of more competent estimates include the following examples:
1) a quite expert observer who wrote that “a well equipped university or hospital biochemical laboratory is quite adequate for the production of many biological warfare agents” (David Kay, “Denial and Deception Practices of WMD Proliferation: Iraq and Beyond,” The Washington Quarterly 18/:1 (1994), p. 321,
2) an estimate carried out at the Institute of Defense Analysis for the US Department of defense, “Our research suggests that creating such a BW capability would take 1-2 years, require perhaps a half dozen people, and cost no more than a few million dollars” (Victor Utgoff, “Bruce Hoffman’s View of Terrorism by Weapons of Mass Destruction: Another Perspective,” Chapter 9 in Transnational Threats: Blending Law Enforcement and Military Strategies, Carolyn W. Pumphrey, ed., Strategic Studies Institutes, US Army War College, Carlisle, Pennsylvania, November 2000, p. 134),
and compare these to the experience with the Japanese Aum Shinrikyo group:
C Two sizable facilities equipped with optimum equipment
C Front companies to purchase equipment
C About a dozen people working on BW, several with PhD or master degrees
C Work for four years, undisturbed
C Expenditure of around $20 million, and no financial constraints.
With the result of absolute failure. It all depends on who the people are; what professional knowledge base they begin with, and what access they have to various requirements – or – whether they purchase the professional expertise.
[4] The NBC Threat in 2025: Concepts and Strategies for Adversarial Use of Nuclear, Biological, and Chemical Weapons, National Defense University, Center for Counterproliferation Research, February 1997, revised/reprinted May 2000.
[5] The very first reason that this study gives for this conclusion is “extraordinarily small quantities provide extraordinary lethality (for example, 1 gram of anthrax produces the equivalent of 100 million lethal doses.)” This piece of classic ignorance based on a theoretical mathematical calculation is meaningless in operational conditions of use. Although still a small quantity in comparison to high explosives, it would require hundreds of kilos of anthrax, and not “one gram,” to effect 100 million lethalities in the real world.