[Congressional Record Volume 141, Number 195 (Friday, December 8, 1995)]
[Senate]
[Pages S18298-S18302]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]




                 RATIFY THE CHEMICAL WEAPONS CONVENTION

 Mr. HARKIN. Mr. President, the Chemical Weapons Convention 
[CWC] is a watershed agreement that will eliminate an entire class of 
weapons of mass destruction. Upon ratification, the CWC calls for the 
complete elimination of all chemical weapons within 10 years.
  This landmark treaty is perhaps the most comprehensive arms control 
agreement ever signed. To begin with, the Chemical Weapons Convention 
requires all signatories to begin destruction of their chemical weapons 
stockpiles within 1 year of ratification, and to complete this 
destruction within 10 years. In addition, the CWC prohibits the 
production, use and distribution of this class of weapons, and provides 
an intrusive international monitoring organization in order to prevent 
the development of these weapons.
  This verification allows not only for the inspection of ``declared'' 
sites, but also permits international inspectors access to any 
suspected undeclared facilities. Signatories do not have the right of 
refusal to deter inspection. Should a member nation request a 
``challenge inspection'' of a suspected chemical facility, the nation 
called into question must permit the inspectors to enter the country 
within 12 hours. Within another 12 hours, the inspectors must have been 
allowed entry into the suspected warehouse. It is very unlikely that 
every trace of the banned chemicals could be eliminated within 24 
hours. 

[[Page S 18299]]

  In addition to providing broader powers to an international 
inspection regime, the CWC includes strong punishment to those nations 
who choose to violate this agreement. The violating nation, as well as 
nonmember nations, could no longer purchase an entire group of 
chemicals from member nations. The chemicals which would be banned are 
necessary for factories to produce products such as pesticides, 
plastics, and pharmaceuticals. So this measure is not only a ``carrot'' 
to induce nations to join, but a ``stick'' to ensure their compliance.
  Obviously, Mr. President, no treaty is 100 percent watertight, but 
the strength of the international monitoring regime, the Organization 
for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons, makes the manufacture of 
chemical weapons difficult to conceal, and the punishment provides a 
strong deterrent to developing this class of weapons.
  Among all weapons of mass destruction--biological, chemical, and 
nuclear--chemical weapons are the most plausible and potent threat 
available to terrorists. These chemical weapons are relatively easy to 
make, and a dosage that can kill thousands is very easy to conceal. 
Recent events in Tokyo and Oklahoma City have provided the wake-up call 
to the international community, showing that the world can no longer 
slumber in a blanket of false security.
  From a historical perspective, agreements to curtail chemical weapons 
use have been largely successful. The best example is the 1925 Geneva 
Protocol. Even during World War II, the vast majority of nations 
observed the Geneva Protocol, which banned the first-use of chemical 
weapons in war. However, the use of chemical weapons by Saddam Hussein 
against Iran and the Iraqi Kurdish population forced the world 
community to realize the danger of these weapons. The production of 
chemical weapons by nations facilitates the proliferation of these 
weapons to state sponsored terrorist groups.
  The United States must place a high priority on the elimination of 
this deadly class of weapons. If the United States wishes to retain its 
position as a world leader, the Senate must provide its advice and 
consent to the ratification of the Chemical Weapons Convention with 
urgency, and persuade other nations to follow our lead.
  Mr. President, to call attention to the proliferation of weapons of 
mass destruction, I would recommend a highly informative article by 
Robert Wright entitled ``Be Very Afraid'', which appeared in the May 1, 
1995 edition of The New Republic. To Quote Mr. Wright:

       All told, the world's current policy on weapons of mass 
     destruction can be summarized as follows: The more terrible 
     and threatening the weapon, the less we do about it. There 
     has never been a more opportune time to rethink these 
     priorities. * * * A good model for reform exists in the 
     Chemical Weapons Convention, which now awaits ratification 
     after more than a decade of negotiation involving three 
     administrations. The CWC has both kinds of teeth that the NPT 
     lacks: A tough inspection regime and real punishment for 
     violation.

  I ask that the text of the article be printed in the Record.
  There being no objection, the article was ordered to be printed in 
the Record, as follows:

                  [From the New Republic, May 1, 1995]

          Nukes, Nerve Gas and Anthrax Spores--Be Very Afraid

                           (By Robert Wright)

       Once you've assimilated the idea that an apocalyptic new-
     age cult with offices on three continents had stockpiled tons 
     of nerve-gas ingredients and was trying to cultivate the 
     bacterial toxin that causes botulism, the rest of the story 
     is pretty good news. The cult, Aum Supreme Truth, employed 
     its nerve gas on only one of the continents, rather than aim 
     for synchronized gassings of the Tokyo, New York and Moscow 
     subways. Only a small fraction of its chemical stock was 
     used, and that was prepared shoddily; the gas seems to have 
     been a degraded version of sarin, and the ``delivery 
     systems'' the emitted it were barely worthy of that name. 
     Rather than thousands dead on three continents we got eleven 
     dead on one. A happy ending.
       On the other hand, a worldwide display of well-run chemical 
     and biological terrorism would have had its virtues. From 
     mid-April through mid-May, on the eve of the Nuclear Non-
     proliferation Treaty's expiration at age 25, representatives 
     of more than 170 nations are meeting in New York to vote on 
     renewing the treaty. Conceivably, this gala event could 
     inspire a broader and much-needed dialogue on the state of 
     the world's efforts to control weapons of mass destruction, 
     including chemical and biological arms. Then again, 
     conceivably it couldn't. So far attempts to take a truly 
     fresh look at this issue have tended to encounter a certain 
     dull inertia within policy-making circles. This is the sort 
     of condition for which 10,000 globally televised deaths on 
     three continents might have been just the cure.
       One salient feature of the world's approach to weapons of 
     mass destruction is perverseness. The Nuclear Non-
     proliferation Treaty--the NPT--is a much weaker document than 
     the recently negotiated Chemical Weapons convention, which 
     now awaits American ratification; yet nuclear weapons are 
     much more devastating than chemical ones. Meanwhile, 
     biological weapons are essentially devoid of international 
     control, yet they're the scariest of the three. They may 
     not be the most potent--not for now, at least--but they 
     have the greatest combination of potency and plausibility. 
     If someone asks you to guess which technology will be the 
     first to kill 100,000 Americans in a terrorist incident, 
     you shouldn't hesitate; bet on biotechnology. And not 
     futuristic, genetically engineered, genocidal viruses, 
     though these may be along eventually. Plain old first-
     generation biological weapons--the same vintage as the 
     ones Aum Supreme Truth was trying to make--are the great 
     unheralded threat to national security in the late 1990s.
       All told, the planet's current policy on weapons of mass 
     destruction can be summarized as follows: the more terrible 
     and threatening the weapon, the less we do about it. There 
     has never been a more opportune time to rethink these 
     priorities.


                                   I

       To its credit, the Clinton administration has lately worked 
     doggedly on behalf of NPT renewal. Officials have traveled 
     the globe, reminding world leaders that they're more secure 
     with the treaty than without it, and promising the more 
     ambivalent ones God-knows-what in exchange for their support. 
     The treaty now seems assured of extension before the New York 
     conference adjourns.
       Extension is certainly better than non-extension. Still, 
     since its inception back in the 1960s, the treaty's 
     structural weakness has gotten sufficiently glaring that one 
     wishes those weren't the only two options.
       The idea behind the treaty was that the nuclear haves--
     Britain, China, France, Russia, the United States--would buy 
     off the have-nots. The have-nots would pledge not to acquire 
     nuclear weapons, and the haves would help them get and 
     maintain nuclear energy for peaceful use. That was the 
     carrot. Once the have-nots had signed on, they would be 
     subjected (along with the rest of us) to the stick: 
     international inspection of nuclear reactors, with the 
     understanding that misuse of the technology would lead to its 
     cutoff. Administering both carrot and stick is the 
     International Atomic Energy Agency, or IAEA.
       One oddity of this arrangement is that the IAEA's job is to 
     relentlessly complicate its own life. As it helps spread 
     ``peaceful'' nuclear materials around the globe, 
     opportunities for illicit use multiply, and so does the need 
     for stringent policing. Thus, the world must get better and 
     better at two things: detecting cheaters, and punishing them 
     with sufficient force to deter others. Recent events show the 
     world to have failed in both regards.
       At the outset of the Persian Gulf war, Iraq was an NPT 
     member in technically good standing. After the war, the world 
     discovered what a meaningless fact that can be. Indeed, as if 
     to drive home the IAEA's impotence, a separate agency, under 
     United Nations auspices, went into Iraq, documented the 
     nuclear weapons program and dismantled it.
       It's true that the existence of this program didn't come as 
     a bolt from the blue. There had long been grave suspicions, 
     but President Bush's aversion to regional Iranian hegemony 
     had given him a certain tolerance for Iraqi excesses. Still, 
     few suspected the scope of Saddam Hussein's nuclear program, 
     or the subtlety of its concealment. Hussein proved that the 
     IAEA's inspection regime--confined to declared nuclear 
     sites--is inadequate.
       The first application of this lesson was in North Korea. 
     After inspection of a declared site revealed nuclear 
     materials to be missing, the IAEA, for the first time ever, 
     asked to look at an undeclared site. The North Korean refusal 
     confirmed everyone's worst suspicions, and thus revealed a 
     second NPT deficiency: once the world knows something fishy 
     is going on, there are no provisions for assured and 
     effective punishment. In theory the IAEA could appeal to the 
     U.N. Security Council for economic sanctions--or, indeed, for 
     the authorization of air strikes against the suspect 
     facility. But often this channel will be blocked by a Big 
     Five veto--possibly China's in the case of North Korea, 
     perhaps Russia's in some future case involving Iran. Of 
     course, the IAEA can stop all further shipment of nuclear 
     materials to outlaw nations. But it may be too late for that 
     tack to keep the bomb out of their hands, and any adverse 
     effect on their energy supply wouldn't be felt for a while.
       Notwithstanding these flaws, the NPT has been pretty 
     effective. Nobody called John Kennedy an hysteric when in 
     1963 he predicted that within a dozen years fifteen to twenty 
     nations would have the bomb. Yet now, thirty-two years later, 
     the best guess is that eight nations have a functioning 
     bomb--the Big Five within the NPT and, outside of it, Israel, 
     Pakistan and India. (In 

[[Page S 18300]]
     addition, Ukraine, Belarus and Kazakhstan were born with the bomb, and 
     say they'll give it up.) A primary reason for this glacial 
     pace is that the NPT eased fears, in large chunks of the 
     world, about the imminent nuclearization of neighbors.
       Still, the Middle East and south Asia have gotten arms-race 
     fever since 1963, and North Korea may yet start a race in the 
     Pacific. So it would be nice to make the NPT more seductive 
     and effective: to raise both the benefits of signing and the 
     costs of reneging. And, though no one is talking about using 
     the present conference to amend the NPT (this would 
     supposedly open up various cans of worms) there is talk of 
     reaching that goal in other ways. For example, the IAEA can 
     interpret its sometimes-ambiguous mandate broadly--as it did 
     in claiming the right to inspect undeclared sites in North 
     Korea--and hope everyone goes along, thus setting a 
     precedent. Or the agency can approach member nations 
     collectively about a generic rewrite of their individual 
     ``safeguard agreements,'' the documents, technically separate 
     from the NPT, which grant the IAEA's power to inspect. In any 
     event, if NPT extension happens early enough in New York, 
     there will be time for the conference at least to open a 
     dialogue about the grave flaws of the current regime.


                                   ii

       A good rough model for reform exists in the Chemical 
     Weapons Convention, which now awaits Senate ratification 
     after more than a decade of negotiation involving three 
     administrations. The CWC has both kinds of teeth that the NPT 
     lacks: a tough inspection regime and real punishment for 
     violation. In the arms-control field, says Berry Kellman, a 
     law professor at DePaul University, it is a ``wholly 
     unprecedented document of international law.'' Were it 
     already in effect, Aum Supreme Truth's attempt to make 
     chemical weapons would have been a lot harder.
       Under the chemical convention, the Organization for the 
     Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (or OPCW, the CWC's version 
     of the IAEA), would be routinely informed about the 
     commercial transfer of substances used to make chemical 
     weapons--and substances used to make substances that are in 
     turn used to make chemical weapons. That covers dozens and 
     dozens of substances. It also covers a lot of sellers and 
     buyers, because those substances tend to have legitimate uses 
     as well. Thiodiglycol is used to make both mustard gas and 
     ballpointpen ink. Dimethylamine makes for good nerve gas and 
     detergent. In an impressive balancing act, CWC negotiators 
     managed to craft a system that (a) monitors the sale and 
     transport of these chemicals and entails periodic 
     inspections; and (b) has the unambiguous support of the 
     Chemical Manufacturers Association.
       Unlike the NPT, the CWC goes well beyond this inspection of 
     ``declared'' sites--factories that avowedly employ the 
     suspect chemicals--and provides explicitly for the inspection 
     of undeclared sites. And here things can happen pretty fast. 
     If the United States request a ``challenge inspection'' of, 
     say, a suspicious-looking warehouse in Iran (a signatory), 
     Iran must let inspectors into its country within twelve hours 
     of being notified. After another twelve hours, it must have 
     escorted the inspectors to the perimeter of the warehouse. 
     (eliminating every trace of chemical weapons manufacture 
     within twenty-four hours is considered quite unlikely.) At 
     this point there can be up to ninety-six hours of 
     negotiations about which parts of the warehouse are subject 
     to inspection. But any vehicles leaving the area in the 
     meanwhile can be searched.
       A country could conceivably keep this standoff going longer 
     by arguing that a search warrant at the national level is 
     required. Indeed, it might even be telling the truth (though 
     for chemical factories, already subject to government 
     regulation, this excuse wouldn't wash). And, what's more, 
     such a warrant might wind up being truly unobtainable--if, 
     for example, the requested search were of your indoor tennis 
     court and the OPCW could provide no evidence of illegal 
     activity there. Still, if such appeals to national 
     sovereignty had an overpoweringly phone air, the country 
     could be deemed in noncompliance with the treaty by a vote of 
     OPCW member-states.
       Nations so deemed would truly be put in the dog-house. 
     There is a whole slew of substances relevant to chemical 
     warfare that treaty violators could no longer buy from OPCW 
     members, a group that would include roughly the whole 
     industrialized world. And the cutoff of these substances 
     could harm factories that make things ranging from 
     pesticides to plastics to ceramics to pharmaceuticals.
       Here the CWC breaks momentously new ground, though less by 
     design than by technological happenstance. Because of the 
     flexibility of chemical technology, the treaty's punishment 
     by denial of ``military'' chemicals amounts to broad and 
     immediately painful sanctions against the civilian economy. 
     And these sanctions are a good reason not just to stay in 
     compliance, but to sign the treaty in the first place. If you 
     don't join the OPCW, its members--just about everybody--won't 
     sell you these chemicals in the first place. That's a carrot; 
     and that's a stick.
       Obviously, no weapons control regime can be foolproof. 
     (That's why, notwithstanding the NPT's high-minded call for 
     the eventual elimination of all the Earth's nuclear weapons, 
     this won't happen anytime soon. A few powerful but reasonably 
     responsible nations must preserve a nuclear arsenal, lest the 
     next, slightly wilier version of Saddam Hussein be empowered 
     to hold the world hostage with half a dozen warheads, or 
     other weapons of mass destruction.) Still, the CWC, given the 
     complexity it confronts, would have a good chance of success. 
     It would make the manufacture of chemical weapons an endeavor 
     with a significant risk of unmasking, and unmasking would 
     bring painful penalties--penalties that no Security Council 
     member would have the chance to veto. If the NPT had the 
     CWC's built-in vigilance, Hussein would have found it much 
     harder to reach the point he reached and still retain NPT 
     membership. And if the NPT had the CWC's membership benefits, 
     it would be much harder for any nation--Iraq, Israel, India, 
     Pakistan--to bear the prospect of nonmembership.
       The irony in this disparity between the NPT and the CWC is 
     that nuclear weapons are much more devastating than chemical 
     weapons. Japanese newspapers estimated that Aum Supreme 
     Truth's many tons of chemicals could theoretically cause 4 
     million deaths, but the key word here is ``theoretically.'' 
     This calculation assumes that the poison gas is spread with 
     perfect efficiency, so that every bit gets breathed by 
     someone and no one breathes more than his or her share (a lot 
     to ask of a dying subway rider). More reasonable figures 
     would be in the hundreds of thousands.
       And even those numbers are inflated. If you discovered a 
     cache of 800,000 bullets, you might say this was enough to 
     kill 500,000 people, even allowing for inefficient 
     application. But inefficiency is only half the problem; 
     fairly early in the application process you'd attract 
     official resistance. So, too, with chemical weapons. Whereas 
     converting a single nuclear bomb into 500,000 deaths is a 
     simple matter of parking a van and setting a timer, 
     converting a single chemical weapon into 500,000 deaths isn't 
     even remotely possible. A thousand deaths is more like it. 
     Racking up large numbers means mounting a well-orchestrated 
     campaign.
       This doesn't mean chemical weapons don't warrant the tight 
     treatment they get in the CWC. For one thing, some of them, 
     such as skin-melting and often nonlethal mustard gas, have 
     uniquely horrifying effects. Second, although a single 
     chemical weapons possesses a tiny fraction of a nuclear 
     bomb's lethality, chemical weapons are much easier to get. 
     The recipe for making them is public, a first-rate chemistry 
     major can follow it (if at some health risk), and the 
     ingredients grow more widely available each decade.
       Besides, chemical weapons, though the least massively 
     destructive weapon of mass destruction, are much more potent 
     than conventional explosives. A conventional warhead might 
     kill ten people in a suburban neighborhood where a chemical 
     warhead could kill 100. The Iraqi chemical arsenal discovered 
     after the Persian Gulf war--100,000 artillery shells, 
     warheads and bombs--was theoretically enough to wipe out the 
     entire Israeli population many, many times over. It is with 
     good reason that chemical weapons are put in a special class 
     of global abhorrence and regulation, along with nuclear and 
     biological weapons.
       Still, chemical weapons aren't nearly as pernicious as 
     nuclear weapons. And what most people still don't understand 
     is that in important respects nuclear weapons aren't as 
     pernicious as biological weapons.


                                  iii

       In one sense, biological weapons are commonly 
     overestimated. People tend to assume they work by starting 
     epidemics, when in fact most biological weapons kill by 
     direct exposure, just like chemical weapons. To be sure, 
     contagious weapons exist. American settlers purposefully gave 
     Native Americans blankets infested with smallpox; more 
     recently, both American and Soviet military researchers have 
     experimented with some readily transmittable viruses. Still, 
     in general, contagious weapons have a way of coming back to 
     haunt the aggressor. So biological weaponry this century has 
     involved mainly things like anthrax spores, which enter your 
     lungs and hatch bacteria that multiply within your body and 
     finally kill you, but don't infest anyone else in the 
     meanwhile.
       Genetic engineering may eventually make contagious weapons 
     more likely. In principle, for example, one could design a 
     virus that would disproportionately afflict members of a 
     particular ethnic group, thus giving some measure of safety 
     to attackers of other ethnic persuasions. And--more 
     realistically in the near term--genetic engineering makes it 
     easier to match a killer virus with an effective vaccine, so 
     that the aggressor could be immunized. Still, the main effect 
     of modern biotechnology to date--and it has been 
     dramatic--is to make traditional weapons, such as anthrax, 
     much cheaper and easier to produce. A basement-sized 
     facility, filled with the sort of equipment found at 
     garden-variety medical labs and biotechnology companies, 
     will do the job; the recipes are available at college 
     libraries; and the ingredients--small cultures of 
     pathogens that can be rapidly multiplied in fermenting 
     tanks--are routinely bought from commercial vendors or 
     passed from professor to graduate students.
       The weapons that can result are phenomenally destructive. 
     An (excellent) Office of Technology Assessment (OTA) report 
     on weapons of mass destruction estimates that a single 
     warhead of anthrax spores landing in Washington, D.C., on a 
     day of moderate wind could kill 30,000 to 100,000 people--a 
     bit more 

[[Page S 18301]]
     damage than a Hiroshima-sized atomic bomb would do, though nothing like 
     the devastation from a modern nuclear warhead. (And a day of 
     fever, coughing, vomiting and internal bleeding is an 
     appreciably less desirable way to die than incineration.) In 
     addition, anthrax spores buried in the soil, beyond the reach 
     of sunlight, live on. Gruinard Island, where Britain 
     detonated an experimental anthrax bomb during World War II, 
     is still uninhabitable.
       But a warhead is not the most likely form in which 
     biological weapons will first reach an American city. A 
     ballistic missile, after all, has a return address: so long 
     as the United States has a nuclear deterrent, Americans can 
     feel pretty secure against missile attacks in general. And 
     there's another problem with missile-delivered biological 
     weapons. The technological challenge of making an explosive 
     device yield a widespread mist is considerable. Iraq, we've 
     learned since the war, has done research on anthrax and 
     botulin weapons, but not with evident success. Still, if 
     you're not attacking from a distance and can deliver the 
     spores in person, the obstacles to biological attack 
     diminish. ``Figuring out how to do it in a terrorist kind of 
     way is trivial,'' says one analyst in the defense 
     establishment. Thus the fact that no nation has used 
     biological weapons since World War II is no reflection of the 
     likelihood of their future use. Only recently has the 
     technology become so widely available that a well-organized 
     terrorist group can harness it.
       Of all the things that might attract terrorists to 
     biological warfare--the relative cheapness, the inconspicuous 
     production--perhaps the most important is the anonymity. A 
     small, private airplane with 220 pounds of anthrax spores 
     could fly over Washington on a north-south route, engage 
     in no notably odd behavior and--by OTA reckoning--trail an 
     invisible mist that would kill a million people on a day 
     with moderate wind. A plane spewing ten times that much 
     sarin would kill only around 600 people--or, on a windier 
     day, 6,000. More to the point: the sarin attack, with its 
     immediate effects, would have authorities hunting for a 
     culprit before the plane landed. Anthrax, in contrast, 
     takes days to kick in; the pilot could be vacationing in 
     the Caribbean before anyone noticed that something was 
     amiss.
       Or consider this charming scenario, courtesy of Kyle Olson 
     of the Chemical and Biological Arms Control Institute. Get a 
     New York taxicab, put a tank of anthrax in the trunk and, by 
     slightly adapting commercially available equipment, arrange 
     for it to release an imperceptible stream of aerosol. (You 
     would be wise to build a special filter for the air entering 
     the cab, though getting an anthrax vaccination might be 
     enough protection.) Then drive around Manhattan for a day or 
     two. You'll kill tens of thousands, maybe hundreds of 
     thousands, of people. And, again, nobody will know. With 
     nerve gas, in contrast, the long line of gagging, writhing 
     people leading to your taxicab would arouse the suspicion of 
     local authorities--even if your gas mask had somehow escaped 
     their attention.
       Note that these scenarios make biological weapons 
     potentially genocidal even in an ethnically heterogeneous 
     city. A taxi-cab can be driven all over Harlem, block by 
     block--or, instead, through Chinatown or through the Upper 
     East Side. Terrorists, who have been known to harbor ethnic 
     prejudice, needn't wait for an ethnically biased designer 
     virus.
       Though biological weapons are the most horrifying terrorist 
     tool today, they are also the furthest from being on the 
     radar screen of any politician who matters. The Biological 
     Weapons Convention of 1975, which commits the United States, 
     Russia and other signatories to forgo any biological weapons 
     program, is so toothless as to make the NPT seem like a steel 
     trap. (When in 1979 the Soviet Union suffered a mysterious 
     outbreak of anthrax in the vicinity of a military research 
     facility, Pentagon officials weren't stunned; but the United 
     States was powerless to pursue its suspicions.) And no 
     remedial proposal from the Clinton administration is 
     imminent. Meanwhile, the most visible result of a series of 
     meetings among BWC signatories about revising the BWC is a 
     series of agreements to keep meeting. There is very little 
     talk anywhere about giving the Biological Weapons Convention 
     a rigor reminiscent of the chemical convention.
       When you ask people to explain this anomaly, they cite the 
     practical problems that make detecting biological weapons 
     harder than detecting chemical weapons. There are so many 
     small, theoretically suspect rooms, at so many medical and 
     biotech facilities. And upon inspection it's so hard to 
     say for sure whether anything illicit is going on. The 
     perfectly legitimate endeavor of making anthrax vaccine, 
     for example, is an excuse for having anthrax around--one 
     of several potential ``masks'' for weapons production. 
     What's more, a small, inconspicuous supply to pathogens 
     can, via fermentation, be turned into a weapon-scale 
     supply a mere two weeks after a satisfied international 
     inspector cheerfully waves goodbye.
       It's true that these things dramatically complicate 
     enforcement of the treaty. It's also true that they 
     dramatically underscore the need for enforcement. Knowing 
     that in thousands and thousands of buildings on this planet 
     some graduate student or midlevel manager could be breeding 
     enough anthrax spores to decimate the city where I live--
     well, somehow I don't find that conducive to a laissez-faire 
     attitude. Using the plausibility of biological warfare as 
     reason not to reduce that plausibility is a bit too rich in 
     irony.
       A few wild-eyed radicals have gone so far as to suggest new 
     approaches to the problem. One idea is to 
     ``internationalize'' the production of vaccines; or, at 
     least, to compress each country's vaccine production into 
     fewer facilities, for easier (and assiduous) international 
     monitoring. That would strip all other facilities of one of 
     the masks for weapons production--so that, say, anthrax 
     spores found during a challenge inspection would be hard to 
     explain away.
       This reform, of course, assumes that there is such a thing 
     as a challenge inspection for biological weapons, which there 
     isn't. Adding such inspections to the BWC is about the most 
     ambitious idea now floating around in the Clinton 
     administration (and it's not floating at the highest levels). 
     The idea hear wouldn't be to make the BWC as comprehensive as 
     the CWC. The degree of routinized inspections envisioned in 
     the CWC is probably impractical for biological weapons, given 
     the sheer number of places that would be candidates for 
     inspection. Rather, a revised BWC might simply have 
     signatories provide data about all such sites and be 
     subjected to an occasional challenge inspection--at these 
     sites, or at undeclared sites. This would make the production 
     of biological weapons an endeavor of at least incrementally 
     increased risk. And with weapons of mass destruction, every 
     increment counts.
       To that end, various other measures--for ``transparency,'' 
     international intelligence pooling and so on--are also 
     bandied about. The collective result of such measures is 
     called a ``web of deterrence'' by Graham Pearson of 
     Britain's Ministry of Defense. Pearson reflects the view 
     of the British government that the BWC is in principle 
     ``verifiable.'' The Clinton administration, in contrast, 
     has yet to amend the official U.S. verdict to the 
     contrary, which it inherited from the Reagan-Bush era of 
     cold-war-think, with its inordinate fear of intrusive 
     inspections by communist masterminds. (The Reagan 
     administration more or less stumbled into a highly 
     intrusive CWC; Assistant Secretary of Defense Richard 
     Perle raised the issue of ``challenge inspections,'' 
     confident that the Soviets would say no, as a means of 
     embarrassment. Then Mikhail Gorbachev assumed power and 
     called his bluff. The rest is history.)
       One idea that has surfaced at the BWC's periodic meetings 
     on self-improvement is to piggyback a new, tougher BWC onto 
     the CWC. The CWC's governing body at the Hague could expand 
     to encompass both chemical and biological weapons, 
     metamorphosing from OPCW to OPCBW. Assuming that a new 
     biological convention emulated the chemical convention in 
     providing penalties for noncompliance, the two sets of 
     penalties could be fused. If a country not complying with 
     either treaty were cut off from some trade in both chemicals 
     and biotechnology equipment, noncompliance would be extremely 
     unattractive.
       For that matter, in theory--and in the long run--the NPT 
     could be thrown in with this mix, so that the illegal 
     development of any weapon of mass destruction complicated 
     one's access to state-of-the-art chemical, biological and 
     nuclear technology. This would give the NPT much of the force 
     it now lacks, and would create a world in which the 
     responsible use of technology is a prerequisite for 
     untrammeled access to it. Needles to say, anyone who 
     suggested such a thing in Washington policy-making circles 
     would be expelled on grounds of hopeless romanticism.


                                   iv

       There are political reasons why biological weapons have 
     been given little of the attention they deserve. For one 
     thing, ratification of the Chemical Weapons Convention is 
     seen as a prerequisite for a new biological weapons 
     initiative. The CWC took more than a decade of arduous 
     negotiating. If it flops, no one is going to volunteer to 
     lead the world on another visionary arms-control campaign.
       Unfortunately, the CWC has been languishing in the Senate 
     for nine months. It has the nominal support of some important 
     people, such as President Clinton and Senator Richard Lugar 
     of the Foreign Relations Committee. (Fortunately, Committee 
     Chairman Jesse Helms--who at last check was getting India 
     mixed up with Pakistan--is said to have ceded control of the 
     CWC issue to Lugar.) But neither Clinton, Lugar nor anyone 
     else of stature has chosen to adopt the CWC as his mission in 
     life. Eleven deaths on a Japanese subway didn't push the 
     issue across the cause-du-jour threshold.
       Just as progress on chemical arms would pave the way for 
     progress on biological arms, extension of the NPT by an 
     overwhelming majority is considered a prerequisite for 
     discussing major reforms in the NPT verification regime. 
     Indeed, NPT extension would provide a quite bright 
     spotlight in which President Clinton could inaugurate this 
     very discussion--or for the matter a broader discussion on 
     weapons of mass destruction. This spotlight would also 
     provide a domestic political opportunity for a president 
     often dismissed as insufficiently presidential.
       Of course, this is boilerplate thinkpiece-ending advice for 
     presidents: give a speech; have a vision. It's easy to say if 
     you don't have to spell out your fuzzy idealism in detail, 
     much less reconcile it with gritty reality. But Brad Roberts 
     of the Center for Strategic and International Studies--not 
     exactly a hotbed of woolly-minded one-worldism--laid out a 
     pretty concrete version 

[[Page S 18302]]
     of a lofty Clintonesque vision in a recent issue of The Washington 
     Quarterly. Roberts extensively invoked internationalist 
     acronyms--not just CWC, BWC and NPT, but GATT and NAFTA. 
     Making some nonobvious connections between trade regimes and 
     non-proliferation regimes, he argued that both must be 
     carefully crafted to attract and enmesh a ``new tier'' of 
     states recently endowed by technological evolution with the 
     capacity to manufacture potent weapons. With all these 
     acronyms now in a critical phase in one sense or another, 
     1995 could ``prove a genuine turning point''; ``basic 
     international institutions will end the year either much 
     strengthened or much weakened''--and if the latter, the 
     prospects for a stable post-cold-war world will sharply 
     diminish.
       If President Clinton ever did decide to exert leadership on 
     the issue of weapons of mass destruction, there is little 
     chance that posterity would deem him alarmist. Not only are 
     the threats he'd be addressing growing; their growth has deep 
     and enduring roots: increasing ingenuity in the manufacture 
     of destructive force; increasing access, via information 
     technology, to the data required for this manufacture; wider 
     availability, in an ever-more industrialized world, of the 
     requisite materials; and the increasing ease of their 
     shipment. The underlying force is truly inexorable; the 
     accumulation of scientific knowledge and its application, via 
     technology, to human affairs.
       Every once in a while the inevitable results of these 
     trends become apparent--in the discovery that Iraq had an 
     extensive nuclear bomb project and enough chemical weapons to 
     murder a small nation; in the fact that the World Trade 
     Center bombers succeeded in a mission that, given slightly 
     more deft personnel and better financing, could well have 
     involved biological weapons rather than explosives; in the 
     news that a nutty Japanese cult with an international 
     presence was busily amassing a chemical and biological 
     arsenal. So far none of these object lessons has been driven 
     home at the cost of tens of thousands, or hundreds of 
     thousands, of lives. But as time goes by, the cost of lessons 
     will assuredly rise.

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