Sounds of a ticking biological clock

By: Frank Gaffney Jr.
Washington Times, 24 February 1998

Last week’s news flash from Las Vegas should be a wake-up call for the American people.
The
fact that two men were arrested by the FBI and charged with “pos[ing] a chemical and biological
threat to our community” literally brings home the implications of the danger posed by Saddam
Hussein: The burgeoning threat of biological warfare (BW) can no longer be ignored or regarded
as a problem only for those unlucky enough to live in or near Iraq.

This is true even though the Las Vegas episode, like the BW scare at the Washington
headquarters of the B’nai Brith last spring, fortuitously appear to have involved false alarms. The
unhappy reality is that Saddam Hussein is not the only bad guy with large quantities of deadly
viruses at his disposal. In fact, virtually all of this country’s potential adversaries are believed to
have biological weapons in their arsenals. And even without the help of state-sponsors, the
technology to cultivate and disseminate diseases like anthrax and botulism are readily available to
determined terrorists.

This terrifying state of affairs makes several conclusions inescapable, including the
following:

• Arms control can’t address the danger of biological warfare: The Clinton administration’s
  reflexive response to the hemorrhage of biological weapons capabilities — and indeed, most
  other forms of weapons of mass destruction (WMD) proliferation — has been to seek arms
  control “solutions” to the problem. Despite the abject failure in Iraq of the most comprehensive
  monitoring scheme ever undertaken to find, limit and destroy such weapons, President Clinton
  announced in his State of the Union address that he would dispatch a team to negotiate
  amendments to the 1972 Biological Weapons Convention (BWC) intended to “strengthen the
  enforcement provisions of the BWC.”

The unalterable facts of life are that there is no way to make the BWC verifiable or
enforceable. As Alan Zelicoff, a scientist at Sandia National Laboratory who has participated in
the U.S. government’s interagency deliberations on “enhancing” the BWC, recently wrote in The
Washington Post:

“Equipment for pharmaceutical production is identical to that used for bio-weapons
processing,
and even the most toxic of biological materials are used in medical therapeutics and research.
[Furthermore,] in just a few days or weeks, biological weapons can be manufactured in militarily
significant quantities in a site no larger than a small house.”

While reworking the BWC will not improve that treaty, it will add enormously to its costs.
The
initiatives the president unveiled in his State of the Union speech would have a particularly
devastating effect on some of the nation’s most dynamic and productive companies — the
American biotech and pharmaceutical industries. Some of these companies could literally be
destroyed by the loss of billions of dollars worth of proprietary information compromised in the
course of an arms control inspection. Alternatively, they might be irreparably harmed by the
besmirching of a business reputation should competitors use the treaty process groundlessly to
charge that a U.S. concern is now, or has been, engaged in biological warfare programs.

• There is an urgent need for new, effective export controls: Instead of pursuing arms control
  will-of-the-wisps in response to the BW threat, the Clinton administration should be
  strengthening mechanisms whereby rogue states and potential suppliers alike can be convinced
  that there will be real costs imposed upon those who engage in the unauthorized and reckless
  transfer of relevant technology. Unfortunately, the administration has engaged in a wrecking
  operation on the unilateral and multilateral export control regime it inherited.
• The present U.S. posture of “assured vulnerability” must be corrected at once: The most
  troublesome aspect of the threat posed by biological and chemical weapons is that the United
  States lacks any defenses, passive or active, against these weapons. Incredibly, President
  Clinton and to an even greater extent Vice President Al Gore are opposed to active defenses
  (that is, weapons that counter attacking weapons) for the American homeland. They have also
  eschewed to date measures that would provide appreciable passive defenses (for example, civil
  defense measures) for the American people.

The reason: Such programs run counter to the theology of “assured vulnerability”
codified
in the 1972 Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty. Unbeknownst to most Americans, this accord effectively
prohibits the United States from having competent missile defenses. In practice, though, the
Clinton administration has rationalized the assured vulnerability to missile attack dictated by this
so-called “cornerstone of strategic stability” as an excuse for leaving the United States exposed to
all other forms of homeland defense.

Mitigation of this posture of vulnerability must be an urgent priority for the United States.
For
starters, the nation must urgently field effective, global defenses against missile attack (both
ballistic and cruise missiles). The United States must also provide passive defenses for its people
that are at least as capable of responding to an imminent threat as have been Israel’s gas
mask-distribution and civil defense services.

It is ironic that President Clinton has declared in successive Executive Orders that
proliferation
of weapons of mass destruction is “an unusual and extraordinary threat to the national security,
foreign policy and economy of the United States.” The Las Vegas wake-up call reminds us there
is not a moment to lose in making this quintessential bit of empty Clinton rhetoric into a genuine
catalyst for urgent changes in U.S. policy and programs needed to address what truly is an
“unusual and extraordinary threat.”

Frank J. Gaffney Jr. is the director of the Center for Security Policy and a columnist
for The
Washington Times.