Bio-terror is a real threat for the future — the good news is that we can beat it

Reading the news, it would be very easy to get disheartened: 9/11, suicide bombers on the underground and Dame Eliza Manningham-Buller’s assessment of the threat from al-Qaida as ‘serious … growing and … with us for a generation’. On top of this, the UK’s strategy to counter international terrorism has described the threat as ‘genuinely international in scope, involving a variety of groups, networks and individuals who are driven by particular violence… aiming to cause mass casualties, regardless of the age, nationality, or religion of their victims’.

The posting of letters containing anthrax spores in the US suggests bioterrorism is now a real, rather than imaginary, threat and it is not such a leap of the imagination to think that in the future terrorists might take advantage of advances in the life sciences to further their causes.

Given the level of societal vulnerability towards a biological attack it is easy to think that draconian policy measures are needed. However, such pessimism is unwarranted. While the threat is real and serious, the UK government and its global partners are putting a range of policy measures in place which are strengthening an international web of prevention and protection to address the threat from biological weapons.

First, the bad news

There is no doubt that biological weapons are a serious problem and it would be a mistake to underestimate either the threat they pose or what they are capable of. Such weapons use disease to cause harm to humans, animals, or plants and typically rely on the infectivity of pathogenic micro-organisms to spread disease.

What makes them distinct from other weapons, and warrants extra concern, is the possibility that scientific knowledge about human, animal or plant disease mechanism might be used to produce weapons that target specific life processes.

Most weapons crudely destroy their targets, but biological weapons’ potential ability to target life processes such as inheritance, reproduction or cognition opens up the possibility for entirely new biological methods of coercion, repression, subjugation and violence. Biological weapons can cause mass destruction, but they also pose a more sinister species-level threat.

As a result, our sense of vulnerability towards biological weapons is closely connected to scientific understanding of disease. Advances in scientific knowledge together with the global spread of biotechnology through legitimate channels, have broadened the potential means and ease with which these technologies might be abused for malevolent purposes. It is for this reason that in mainstream discussion about the biological threat it is often not a question of ‘if’ biological weapons will be used, but ‘when’.

Now for the good news

Even though this close relationship between legitimate technical and scientific activity, and the development of biological weapons, makes policy-making more complex, effective policy is being formed. The processes involved in producing biological weapons are fortunately long and complex and provide a range of opportunities for intervention and disruption.

This disruption primarily involves criminalising particular activities and preventing access to knowledge and technology. A substantial body of such constraints is already in place to protect the public against the development and use of biological weapons and has recently been reinforced.

At the heart of these efforts is the 1972 Biological Weapons Convention (BWC) which enshrines an international norm against the hostile use of disease. The treaty allows the legitimate exploitation of ‘dual use’ science and technologies whilst suppressing the development, production, stockpiling and acquisition of biological weapons. The BWC thus supplements the prohibition on the use of biological weapons contained in the 1925 Geneva Protocol.

The Sixth Review Conference of the BWC, which has just ended, produced an agreement that reaffirmed the basic prohibitions of the treaty. It also saw the establishment of an implementation support unit, and generated an agreement on a work programme from 2007 to 2010. While these outcomes may appear modest, they involved surmounting a significant psychological barrier as the failure to agree to a verification protocol, and the suspension of the Fifth Review Conference without an agreed final declaration in 2001, had been substantial setbacks.

The implementation support unit may be small, and have only very modest funding, but it marks a significant step towards better implementation of the treaty. Those concerned with reducing the threat from biological weapons should acknowledge the diplomats and civil servants who enabled this, and support them in their future work.

Other encouraging international efforts to counter the bio-threat and strengthen the norm can be found in state responses to United Nations Security Council Resolution 1540 (2001) which created new non-proliferation obligations applicable to all states, not only signatories to the BWC.

While this is no substitute for full and proper national implementation of the BWC, as the UK did through the 1974 Biological Weapons Act, the resolution calls on all states to enact and enforce similar legislation.

The resolution also requires states to adopt and enforce ‘appropriate and effective’ laws to prohibit any non-state actor from manufacturing, acquiring, possessing, developing, transporting, transferring or using nuclear, chemical or biological weapons and their means of delivery. The inclusion of transfer provisions is an important measure in addressing global proliferation: all states are now prohibited from providing support to non-state actors.

The resolution is especially targeted at terrorism and its emphasis on non-state actors goes some way towards holding individuals responsible for their BW actions. Yet another source of norm strengthening action came with the introduction of the Proliferation Security Initiative: PSI was launched in 2004, with the support of over 60 countries, to counter the development of WMD by states of concern and non-state actors, such as terrorists. The initiative involves the interception of shipments of sensitive materials, equipment and technology, typically at sea, from proliferating states.

Whilst some question the legality of stopping shipping at gunpoint in international waters, the signing of boarding agreements with three of the largest flag-of-convenience states (Liberia, Panama and the Marshall Islands) has cleared the legal water somewhat, and made proliferators’ lives substantially more difficult.

These efforts have also been boosted in recent years through the actions of international organisations, such as the EU and G8. In 2002, for example, the G8 set up the Global Partnership against the Spread of Weapons and Materials of Mass Destruction. Highlighting the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction as a pre-eminent threat to international peace and security, the G8 committed themselves to raising up to $20 billion over the next 10 years to fund non-proliferation projects.

These projects currently focus on the destruction of weapons stockpiles, principally in Russia, but, if properly funded (which is a big ‘if’), would open up new organisational routes to address proliferation.

The G8 have also committed themselves to ‘promote the adoption, universalisation, full implementation and, where necessary, strengthening of multilateral treaties and other international instruments whose aim is to prevent the proliferation or illicit acquisition of such items; [and] strengthen the institutions designed to implement these instruments’. This initiative has been opened up beyond the initial G8 with fourteen states joining the Global Partnership as of 2006.

 A final bit of underappreciated good news at the international level has been the number of countries that have decided to abandon their biological weapons programmes. Since 1991, Russia, South Africa and Iraq have abandoned their offensive programmes. In 2003, the Libyan renunciation of its weapons of mass destruction programmes received high profile media attention.

As well as renouncing all parts of the programmes in order ‘to be free from all internationally banned weapons’ Libya also confirmed it would now abide by the Non-Proliferation Treaty, the IAEA Safeguards Agreement, the Biological Weapons Convention and the Chemical Weapons Treaty.

The co-ordinated carrot and stick approach adopted to assist Libya in making this decision seems to have worked, and can hopefully be applied to the small number of states that remain outside the various treaties.

Within the UK, recent positive developments have also been made. A key feature of the current regime to counter the threat posed by biological weapons involves preventing access to, and diffusion of, technologies which are easily misapplied. Over the last decade ‘technology’ has been increasingly understood to include intangible elements such as the skills and knowledge required to create weapons.

After evidence was uncovered that scientists involved in foreign offensive biological weapons programmes had been trained in UK universities, controls were introduced on what foreign students could study. The aim is to ‘stop individuals from certain countries which we [FCO] regard as proliferators or potential proliferators of WMD from taking courses which would help them acquire the knowledge necessary to assist with the production or manufacture (proliferation) of WMD within their home country and which might one day threaten the UK’s national security’.

At the time of writing, plans have been announced to re-launch this once voluntary scheme as a compulsory measure for post-graduate students from outside the European Union who wish to study scientific disciplines which raise concerns about proliferation.

While the introduction of similar measures in the US was reported to have had a negative impact on US science, including a reduction in the number of student applications, the impact on the UK has so far been minimal.

Similar negligible costs were found in research we conducted about the implementation of the parts of the UK’s Anti Terrorism Crime and Security Act (2001) that address scientific research. We failed to find any significant disruption to scientific activity in the UK, even within the parts of the research community most involved with ‘dangerous’ pathogens.

In fact, and in contrast to the negative experiences reported in the US, we found that the vast majority of scientists we contacted were generally positive about the implementation of the provisions, and thought that the balance between scientific freedom and security provisions was fair.  

This was partly because almost all of the laboratories concerned complied with the UK’s stringent health and safety laws and already had provisions for a safe and secure working environment. Many also had the necessary physical security measures already in place because of concerns about animal rights activists.

Securing the future

These modestly positive messages should not be taken as an excuse for complacency. Biological weapons pose a very real, long term threat and more needs to be done to counter the threat. In particular, the UK government needs to:

• Work to strengthen the BWC and the wider regime, and prevent any erosion of the norm against the hostile use of disease;

• Continue its stance that biological weapons pose a global problem that will require global solutions;

• Continue its leading role in plugging the gaps in the international web of constraints, for example, by continuing diplomatic efforts for the international criminalisation of BW related activities at the level of the individual. Currently, the BWC focuses on states rather than individuals because they were the main cause of concern in the 1970s. Today this has changed, and the criminalisation of individuals using international law would help address this weakness;

• Continue to generate realistic risk assessments and exercise effective democratic oversight so that inappropriate policy making is avoided;

• Continue to develop creative national policies and implement them in a way that is responsive to local requirements;

• Continue to consider the impact of legislation on both industry’s ability to access and use knowledge and technology, and academics’ freedom to conduct research. This will help protect the UK’s vibrant pharmaceutical sector and scientific research community from inappropriate controls;

• Finally, it needs to be recognised that in the future the policy problem associated with biological weapons will become more difficult to address. Continuing advances in biological sciences and technology, and their global diffusion, will reduce the costs of development, increase the number of actors with the required technical capabilities and make it easier to hide illicit activity.

Together, these potentially increase the threat we face. However, the actual outcome of these changes will depend on government action to address weaknesses in the current regime.

The good news is that a range of effective solutions are readily available to ensure that the very real threat posed by biological weapons can be contained.

Paul Nightingale and Caitríona McLeish are Research Fellows at the The Science Policy Research Unit, University of Sussex. The article draws on research funded by the ESRC.