Biological weapons: The unrecognised threat to humanity

The Fukushima nuclear disaster has focused the attention of the Japanese nation and the international community upon the dangers of radiation that can pollute the air we breathe, the water we drink, and the food we eat.

Nuclear radiation is invisible; hence it inspires irrational fears, which is currently informing the agitation in Jaitapur against the nuclear reactor complex being planned here.

However irrational, public awareness about the dangers of nuclear radiation is widespread. No such awareness obtains regarding the threat from biological agents and toxins. Pandemics like SARS and avian flu had disseminated them widely through East and Southeast Asia. Biological agents have also been isolated and used as weapons. Anthrax spores were mailed to American Senators in September 2001, within a week of the 9/11 attacks on the Twin Towers in New York and the Pentagon building in Washington. Fortunately, only some 5 deaths had occurred, but the panic and economic disruption caused was enormous. To date, some rooms in the US Senate remain closed due the fear of anthrax infection.

The danger from biological agents arises from their ability to rapidly spread globally since infected persons can travel around the world while harbouring but not revealing the symptoms of the disease. Public awareness of these hazards is non-existent, despite biological weapons and toxins being classified as Weapons of Mass Destruction.

The international community enacted the Biological and Toxin Weapons Convention (BTWC) in 1972 to prohibit the “development, production and stockpiling” of these agents, and ensure their destruction. All major powers in the world, including India, have joined the Convention. But, several Middle Eastern Arab countries are the holdouts, who feel they need biological weapons to counter the nuclear threat from Israel. Hence, universalising the BTWC has been a consistent goal before the five-yearly Review Conferences of the BTWC — the next (seventh) Review Conference will be held in November this year. Meanwhile, the challenges to the BTWC have been mounting.

The most serious challenge facing the BTWC is that it lacks a Verification Protocol, which was opposed by the US on national security and commercial considerations. There is, therefore, no mechanism to verify that adherents to the BTWC are not “developing, producing and stockpiling” biological weapons and toxins. Faith must be reposed on their voluntary disclosures, confidence building measures and so on, vitiating president Reagan’s basic precept “Trust, but Verify.” This irony increases because the United States wishes to ensure that nuclear weapons usable fissile materials are brought under international control. But, this principle does not ensure that facilities capable of manufacturing biological weapons are brought under international oversight.

This verification issue has become more acute over the last two decades with the rapid advances made in biological sciences, especially genetic engineering, which makes possible the development of synthetic pathogens that are resistant to known drug therapies. For instance, a mouse pox was artificially engineered in Australia some years back, causing great alarm worldwide.

But, all these problem pale into insignificance with the discovery by US Senator Richard Lugar, who visited some African research centres last November, that their safety and security arrangements were appalling. They were, moreover, found to be working with biological agents like anthrax, Ebola and Rift Valley fever that are potential biological weapons. Lugar found the protective measures around these research sites to be defective, even non-existent. One site had a “short concrete wall topped with barbed wire as the only security barrier.” An animal laboratory in Uganda had shattered windows and breached chain-link fencing. Smaller regional facilities, collecting samples from patients, had no security, with these pathogens being stored in facilities with open perimeters. The al Qaeda, incidentally, has interest in acquiring nuclear weapons and biological agents, and is known to be particularly active in Africa.

What could the next (seventh) BTWC Review Conference do in this regard? Apart from other issues, the Conference would do well to reflect on how public awareness on biological weapons and toxins could be heightened.

Of course, care is necessary that public awareness does not lead to public paranoia. For its part, India, with its significant pharmaceutical industry, could pledge support to greater research on developing better vaccines to treat infectious diseases like plague. These vaccines, it would surprise, were discovered over a century back.

The writer is a research professor at the Institute of Peace and Conflict Studies, New Delhi