BioWarfare and Cyber Warfare a new Kind Of War: Biowarfare And Info warfare

5.4Quick Counter Jabs

Making the vaccine is only half the problem, however. Soldiers can be ordered to take shots, but immunizing the rest of the population is another matter. Civilians are unlikely to volunteer for the dozens of vaccinations that would be necessary to protect them against every conceivable biological threat during peace time. An attack would make many change their minds, but in such circumstances there might not be enough to go around.

Kanatjian Alibekov, now reincarnated as the American resident Ken Alibek and author of Biohazard,¹⁹ was a former second-in-command of the Soviet germ warfare program. Alibek, who revealed in 1997 that the Soviets had weaponized tons of smallpox, argues that it is short-sighted to put too much effort into developing vaccines. Instead, Alibek, who is now at the Battelle Institute in Virginia, argues that researchers should concentrate on ways to treat victims of biological weapons. Today’s antibiotics may be useless because germs could be equipped with genes resistant to all of them. For example, Russian scientist Andrey Pomerantsev is believed to have already created such a strain of anthrax.

For any treatment to be effective amid the potential chaos of a bioterrorist attack, speed will be of the essence. Researchers are developing drugs that work against a wide variety of infections and so can be used even before definitive diagnosis. Some are trying to develop broad-spectrum drugs by taking advantage of recently identified similarities in the way many pathogens produce disease. For example, Ebola, anthrax and plague all kill their victims by inducing a widespread inflammatory reaction similar to toxic shock syndrome. A team in Cincinnati is testing an anti-inflammatory drug that could stop all of them. Another gang of bacteria, including plague, Salmonella, Shigella and Pseudomonas aeruginosa (one of the bacteria that can cause pneumonia and meningitis), relies on very similar proteins to latch onto human cells and inject toxins. Drugs that block this system might save people from all these germs.

6BTWC Treaty – Firm But Unfair

However, most governments agree that as it stands the convention is ineffective. Unlike the treaties that ban nuclear and chemical weapons, the BTWC provides no legal means to check if countries are complying. Treaty members are now trying to strengthen the convention to include a system of verification. Europe and many developing countries want UN inspectors to make random visits, at short notice, to any factory or laboratory in any country capable of producing lethal organisms.

But the U.S. government, under pressure from its drug and biotechnology industries, rejects this idea. The companies fear that such visits would expose trade secrets. Supporters of random inspections point out that while the U.S. is willing to go to war to back the UN’s right to inspect any sites it chooses in Iraq, it will not grant the UN the same right to inspect itself or the other members of the BTWC. This is the double standard most countries complain about.

Once Iraq had joined the BTWC after its defeat in 1991, the only legal way to find and destroy the biological weapons that its own generals had claimed it had was for the UN Security Council to set up a special commission, UNSCOM. Through its inspections over the past decade, UNSCOM has tested many of the ways in which a verification regime would work for the BTWC. These include the compulsory declaration of all research and development involving biological weapons, and of any facilities that could be used to make them. An inspection team then compares this declaration with other evidence, such as government documents, trade records, interviews with scientists and visits to laboratories and factories.²⁰

All signatories to the BTWC accept this approach in principle. The sticking point is how extensive the inspections should be. Everyone, including the biotechnology industry, agrees to what are known as “challenge” inspections. If there is “substantial and convincing evidence” of a breach, such as an unexplained outbreak of anthrax, a majority of treaty members can demand an inspection. But challenge visits will never be frequent enough to be a sufficient deterrent. They require too much evidence and political risk for the country making the charge.

Europe and most developing countries want random, “non-challenge” inspections. Officials would be able to visit any biological facility at short notice merely to check that everything was in order although this would still not solve the problem of secret facilities. Negotiations on the BTWC have been stuck in a deadlock for four years because the U.S. and the world’s biotechnology and drugs industries will not agree to this. In late January of 1998, as the Iraqi crisis deepened, American President Bill Clinton announced he would support limited non-challenge inspections to clarify unclear declarations. But he explicitly rejected random visits.

The Pharmaceutical Research and Manufacturers of America (PhRMA), which represents American drugs companies, maintains random inspections would expose industry to the loss of its legitimate competitive trade secrets. It is also worried that an inspection for biological weapons would be disastrous for a company’s public relations.

Some wonder if the U.S. is trying to hide more bioweapons research than it cares to admit by refusing random inspections. The only way to prove it is not, in Los Alamos as in Al Hakam (home of Iraq’s anthrax bomb), is to let the inspectors in. The U.S. is ready to go to war to impose inspections on Iraq. It must set a good example and allow the UN to impose them on everyone, including U.S. industry.

Inspection techniques exist that could protect legitimate secrets without hindering verification. DNA probes that screen for specific DNA sequences, possibly coupled with polymerase chain reaction, as well as immunoassays, which use antibodies to reveal specific molecules, are the leading candidates for use in a compliance regime.

These techniques would need to be developed further before the BTWC could use them. But once they were ready, factory managers could supervise the tests at every step, protecting legitimate secrets without hindering the inspectors. For example, instead of taking live microorganisms out of the plant, a company would kill sampled organisms in front of inspectors and scramble the DNA enough to protect proprietary genes without disguising the species. The inspector could then run either PCR or immunoassay tests on the dead organisms with portable kits.

The Chemical Weapons Treaty, which came into force in 1997, already allows random inspections, with “managed access” guidelines to protect the industry. These guidelines could be adapted for biological plants.