A case Study: Critics of Secret U.S. Biodefense Research Underscore Mindless Arms Control’s Perniciousness- Timely Insight into Fight over Missile Defense

(Washington, D.C.): Yesterday’s New York Times gave front-page, above-the-fold treatment to a news article revealing that the Clinton and Bush Administrations have been pursuing secret research into the sorts of biological warfare threats the Nation confronts in the 21st Century. The importance of such research if the United States is to have any hope of protecting its forces and population against what has long been called “the poor man’s atomic bomb” is self-evident. So is the insidiousness of arms control agreements whose proponents contend they disallow our government from providing for the “common defense.”

A Secret Program Revealed

It turns out that even the Clinton Administration understood that the BWC was not going to rid the world of bioterrorist threats. This is somewhat surprising insofar as its policy concerning biological warfare issues was largely driven by zealous arms controllers like then- NSC staffer Elissa Harris and was largely subordinated to her determination to conclude and secure U.S. accession to a verification protocol to the Biological Weapons Convention (BWC) — even though it would not be effective and its costs would have been excessive.¹

Accordingly, the Clinton Pentagon instituted a classified program to ensure that the nature of that threat was properly understood and that such prophylactic measures as could be taken were initiated. Importantly, a determined effort was made to ensure that such work was done in a manner consistent with the latitude afforded by the BWC for research and development on biological defensive technologies. Successive reviews by both Clinton and Bush lawyers vetted and approved the programs run by the Central Intelligence Agency and the Defense Treat Reduction Agency.

Highlights of these programs included the following valuable initiatives:

• An experiment to see whether a covert bioproduction facility could be cobbled together using exclusively commercially available materials and technology. DTRA established it could, and the resulting microplant was shown to be capable of fermenting sufficient quantities of lethal germs to kill many thousands of people, although it was never used even experimentally for that purpose.

  This initiative also demonstrated that such a facility — whose main component is a vat the size of an industrial strength coffee percolator — could be concealed from even highly sophisticated sensors and intrusive monitoring schemes.

• Research into gene-splicing that would allow the deadly anthrax virus to be combined with germs that induce food-poisoning. This project was initiated after accounts that Russia’s illegal biological weapons program — which continues to produce and stockpile vast quantities of deadly BW agents in contemptuous violation of the Biological Weapons Convention — had engineered such an anthrax “superbug” and that existing vaccines against the disease were ineffective against it.
• Development of components of a Soviet/Russian BW “bomb” like that which might be available for purchase on the international arms black market. This step was needed to address such practical question as: what sorts of devices might be used against us; how they would work; what their “signatures,” if any, might be; etc. It was not an operational device nor was it meant to be.

Arms Control Uber Alles

It is often said by those who oppose the U.S. development and deployment of effective missile defenses that a far more likely threat is that biological weapons will be smuggled into and used in this country by terrorists. Amazingly, some of those same people — including Spurgeon Keeney, president of the Arms Control Association and Mary Elizabeth Hoinkes, a former U.S. Arms Control Agency lawyer, who are quoted in today’s Washington Post — are sharply critical of even these modest efforts to understand and begin to address the threat that they purport to regard as a serious one (at least when opposing missile defenses).

Importantly, the question with respect to the secret American biodefense program does not appear to be whether the United States has the right under the Biological Weapons Treaty to conduct research for BW defensive purposes. In fact, the BWC clearly contemplates such activities; its Article I makes clear that states parties are even entitled to retain and utilize “microbial or other biological agents, or toxins whatever their origin or method of production, of types and in quantities…justifi[able] for prophylactic, protective or other peaceful purposes.”

What is not permitted are the sorts of activities we know the Soviet Union/Russia and Iraq (from high level defectors formerly responsible for those programs) and that we suspect China and virtually every other rogue state are engaged in, i.e., production and stockpiling of deadly biological agents and toxins.

Unfortunately, in their zeal to promote a wholly unverifiable, unenforceable and widely violated Biological Weapons Convention, arms controllers are suggesting that the American government has breached, if not the letter of that accord, certainly its spirit. This is not the case. And it is a grievous disservice to the public that our government is constitutionally obliged to protect and to our nation’s standing internationally to have such charges blithely made by those who should know better.

The Bottom Line

Regrettably, the thinking behind such criticisms is all-to-common in an arms control community that has invested incalculable intellectual capital and other human and financial resources in promoting the idea that pieces of paper signed with regimes that have nothing but contempt for the rule of law and international agreements are a better basis for American security than actual defenses.² As it happens, this peculiar syndrome is much in evidence at the moment in the halls of Congress, the media and academe with respect to President Bush’s efforts to end the tyranny of the 1972 Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty which — unlike the BWC — did explicitly prohibit the United States from defending.

In fact, such untoward, immoral and increasingly reckless sentiments are likely to find expression today as the Chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee, Sen. Carl Levin (D-MI) proposes to slash funding for and/or impose new legislative impediments to the President’s missile defense program. It can only be hoped that the majority of his committee will reject such measures in favor of an approach to U.S. security that is rooted in a clear understanding of the threat and the development of capabilities needed to address it — precisely the approach both the Clinton and Bush administrations have taken with regard to the growing danger of biowarfare.

¹See, for example, the Center’s Decision Briefs entitled A Pox on Our House: Will Clinton’s N.S.C. Compound America’s Vulnerability to Biological Warfare? (No. 99-D 36, 17 March 1999) and Soviet Defector Offers Timely Warning on Bioweapon Threat; Ex-CIA Director Woolsey Rejects On-Site Visits as Rx (No. 98-D 53, 27 March 1998).

² Matters are made worse by the studied indifference of the professional arms controllers to evidence in hand of systematic treaty violations. Rather than confront the hard realities associated with enforcing existing agreements, they indulge in the “arms control process” in pursuit of still more agreements, as though the problem is inadequate verification rather than a failure of will. For this reason, among others, President Bush was absolutely right to have rejected Elissa Harris’ BWC Protocol (See, Why Bush Is Right to Reject a Defective B.W.C. Protocol ( No. 01-F 61, 20 July 2001)).