Biosecurity 2011: Not a year to change minds

Abstract

Yet another year passed without a biological attack, ensuring that the international community could spend its time focusing on strengthening global biosecurity measures, rather than responding to immediate threats. In 2011, two meetings—the Seventh Biological Weapons Convention Review Conference and the G8 Global Partnership Against the Spread of Weapons of Mass Destruction—made progress on finding ways to deal with biological threats posed by non-state groups. Less progress was made in countering the prospect of nation-state biological weapons programs, which is not surprising, the author asserts, since the life sciences are not amenable to the arms control tools that have been used to monitor state compliance with other nonproliferation agreements. The author looks at how the Biological Weapons Convention is evolving to adapt to the nature of the biological threat, and at how Cooperative Threat Reduction (CTR) inspires global efforts to implement biosecurity programs outside the former Soviet Union. The transition from CTR to global scientific engagement requires the G8 Global Partnership to change its philosophy, the author writes; as the original Soviet-based programs targeted scientists known to have worked in weapons programs, the new goal is not to redirect former weapons scientists, but to establish relationships with scientists who were never in weapons programs. The success of such collaboration depends strongly on treating collaborating scientists as partners, not threats. The central questions for biosecurity in 2012 will focus on the international community’s ability to cooperate and whether it can think creatively and strategically and agree to enter partnerships with scientists from all regions of the world.

• attack
• biological
• Biological Weapons Convention
• bioterrorism
• Cooperative Threat Reduction
• G8
• Global Partnership Against the Spread of Weapons of Mass Destruction
• review conference

Funding

This work was supported by the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation.

Notes

Notes

1 References to the Seventh BWC Review Conference in this essay were projected as of the time of writing, that is, mid-December.

2 The scorecard is comprehensive in scope, adopting an “end-to-end” approach that identifies categories corresponding to the full set of actions required to detect, assess, attribute, and respond to a biological attack, including both development and distribution of countermeasures, as well as managing the medical consequences and cleaning up afterward. It separately assesses six scenarios, differing in the scale of the exposure, whether the agent is contagious or not, and whether it has been made resistant to therapeutics. Given the difficulty of identifying and scoring quantitative metrics for each response category, this report instead establishes for each a set of fundamental expectations, expressed as questions. In answering those questions for each category under each scenario, it assigns a grade for the United States’ current capability—weighing a very complex and extensive set of capabilities against an equally complex set of requirements and expectations—and assesses the direction of progress.

3 This shaping is not been in the literal sense; the so-called “general purpose” criterion in Article I, which bans biological agents or toxins “of types and in quantities that have no justification for prophylactic, protective or other peaceful purposes,” needs no modification to maintain a robust global norm against the offensive use of biology, no matter what technologies might be involved.

4 CTR programs date back to the end of the Cold War, when the fate of the Soviet nuclear, chemical, and biological weapons infrastructures was a matter of great concern. Starting in 1991, these programs have worked to control or destroy weapons materials, delivery systems, and facilities; provide physical security upgrades; and offer research opportunities for former weapons scientists and engineers. The designation of these programs as “Cooperative Threat Reduction” was very important in convincing members of the US Congress to send funds to Russia so that former weapons scientists could work with their US counterparts. Today, the US Defense Department Cooperative Threat Reduction includes programs addressing proliferation threats outside the former Soviet Union (National Academies, 2009a, 2009b), while the State Department’s Biosecurity Engagement Program, which also grew out of programs originally focused on the former Soviet Union, develops cooperative international programs to promote the safe, secure, and responsible use of biological materials that might be at risk of accidental or intentional misuse, and integrates scientists in these at-risk areas into the world scientific community.

5 These collaborations are likely to be even more effective when they are not focused primarily on security. With support from the State Department’s Biosecurity Engagement Program, the American Association for the Advancement of Science has been working to foster collaboration between US life scientists and counterparts from the Middle East, North Africa, Afghanistan, and Pakistan (Coat et al., 2011a, 2011b). By treating safety, security, ethics, and responsible research conduct as enablers that all parties to a collaboration need to share a common understanding of, a greater degree of ownership and sustainability can be built around these concepts than if any of them were the principal focus of a stand-alone engagement. Although it is difficult to quantify, mutual security is enhanced when regional scientists are engaged in the international scientific community, when they build relationships and establish trust with distant colleagues, and when—having been sensitized to the possibilities of misuse—they may be more inclined to contact a colleague, an institutional official, or someone in government if they ever become aware of activities that do not appear to be in accordance with global norms.

Additional information

Author biography

Gerald Epstein is the director of the Center for Science, Technology, and Security Policy of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, the world’s largest general-purpose scientific society. He previously served as senior fellow for science and security in the Center for Strategic and International Studies Homeland Security Program. Before this, he worked at the Institute for Defense Analyses, where he was assigned to the Defense Threat Reduction Agency. From 1996 to 2001, he worked at the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP), serving for the last year in a joint appointment as assistant director for national security at OSTP and senior director for science and technology on the National Security Council staff. From 1983 to 1989 and again from 1991 until its demise in 1995, Epstein worked on the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction and other international security topics at the Office of Technology Assessment. From 1989 to 1991, he directed a project at Harvard University’s Kennedy School of Government on the relationship between civil and military technologies. He has also taught at Princeton and Georgetown Universities.