Katharine Diamond and Robert P. Kadlec
Four years ago, President-elect Barack Obama told the country that
“conventional thinking has failed to keep up with new nuclear, chemical,
and biological threats.”
[1]
Upon taking office, he immediately began working toward ambitious
nuclear disarmament goals, making his first major foreign address a vow
to “seek the peace and security of a world without nuclear weapons.”
[2]
Speaking before a packed public square in Prague, Obama told the
world that “there is no end to what the consequences might be—for our
global safety, our security, our society, our economy, to our ultimate
survival.… One terrorist with one nuclear weapon could unleash massive
destruction.”
[3] His words were clear, his argument was compelling, and his administration’s actions since then have been consistent.
The past four years have been markedly different with regard to
efforts to address the risks from biological weapons. Although it
occasionally has repeated the rhetoric acknowledging the severity of the
threat, the Obama administration has not shown the same willingness to
counter it aggressively. Since entering office, Obama has personally
remained quiet on the subject of biological weapons. In a pattern that
has repeated itself across Republican and Democratic administrations
alike, the issue has been entirely eclipsed by the focus on nuclear
proliferation. Although a number of structural and cultural factors keep
it just below the radar of the country’s top policymakers, there are
urgent reasons why the second Obama administration should reconsider the
current course and pursue a proactive approach to countering the threat
of biological weapons.
During his first presidential campaign, Obama spoke clearly and
forcefully about the need to address biological weapons. “Just as we
must guard against the spread of nuclear terrorism, it’s time for a
comprehensive effort” to address bioterrorism he told voters in July
2008. “And we know that the successful deployment of a biological
weapon—whether it is sprayed into our cities or spread through our food
supply—could kill tens of thousands of Americans and deal a crushing
blow to our economy.”
[4]
As the science and technical components behind biological weapons
become ever more accessible to states, groups, and even individuals, it
is crucial to have a strategy that keeps pace with the evolving risk.
Experts, including current and former Obama administration officials,
have sounded alarms that biological weapons pose a serious threat to the
country, perhaps even greater than the one from nuclear weapons.
[5]
In light of these concerns, U.S. strategy should move beyond
responsive policymaking to become forward-thinking and clearly directed
from the top. Encouragingly, the Obama administration has shown a
willingness to lead on major issues, even when that means going against
history. The Prague speech was a dramatic and inspiring departure from
the nuclear status quo. Obama now must find the motivation and
demonstrate the leadership to tackle the threat from biological weapons
similarly and to advance bold ideas into the global debate about the
risks these weapons pose.
Muted Beginning
Reinforcing the stakes that Obama recognized when running for office,
the National Security Council issued its strategy document on
biological weapons in November 2009, the first national strategy
document to come out of the Obama administration. It starkly
characterizes the impact of an attack on the United States.
The effective dissemination of a lethal
biological agent within an unprotected population could place at risk
the lives of hundreds of thousands of people. The unmitigated
consequences of such an event could overwhelm our public health
capabilities, potentially causing an untold number of deaths. The
economic cost could exceed one trillion dollars for each such incident.
In addition, there could be significant societal and political
consequences that would derive from the incident’s direct impact on our
way of life and the public’s trust in government.
[6]
Given these risks, the strategy document explicitly declares that “we
must reduce the risk that misuse of the life sciences could result in
the deliberate or inadvertent release of biological material in a manner
that sickens or kills people, animals, or plants, or renders unusable
critical resources.”
[7]
It outlines a threefold prevention-based approach for minimizing the
threats posed by natural and manmade biological agents: improve global
access to the life sciences to combat infectious disease regardless of
its cause, establish and reinforce norms against the misuse of the life
sciences, and institute a suite of coordinated activities that
collectively will help identify, inhibit, or interdict those who seek to
misuse the life sciences.
[8]
The strategy was unveiled with no fanfare nearly a full year into
Obama’s term by an undersecretary speaking to a roomful of diplomats in a
nondescript conference room in Geneva, a sharp contrast to the
administration’s nuclear vision and strategy unveiled on the world stage
before tens of thousands in Prague just 75 days into his
administration. That difference, although seemingly superficial, speaks
volumes about the administration’s efforts to counter biological
threats, efforts that, time and again, have fallen short of addressing
the danger at hand.
A key part of the strategy is its call for “detailed guidelines” to
manage the risks involved in publicizing or otherwise sharing “dual-use
information of concern.”
[9]
The need for such guidelines and the failure thus far to develop them
became apparent last winter as the National Science Advisory Board for
Biosecurity struggled with whether the publication of two prominent
studies on the H5N1 virus, both funded by the National Institutes of
Health, would result in the dissemination of potentially dangerous
information on how to increase the virus’ potential transmissibility.
Last December, the advisory board at first recommended that
Science and Nature,
the journals that were to publish the studies, censor portions on the
methods used to modify the virus to enhance transmissibility. This
March, however, the board reversed itself and supported publishing the
studies without modification.
The confusion, compounded by the fact that these studies had had
government support and funding from their start, highlighted the fact
that “almost at every step the system isn’t working very well for these
projects,” according to one expert.
[10] “The most pressing question,” according to
Nature’s
in-depth report on the decision, “is why the research wasn’t flagged up
earlier for scrutiny. The answer: the policy simply wasn’t in place.”
[11]
The episode reflects a persistent criticism of the strategy—that its
key elements, including fostering risk awareness among the scientific
community, “are conceptually flawed or too weak to make much of a
difference,” according to the late biological arms control expert
Jonathan Tucker.
[12]
Senators Jim Talent (R-Mo.) and Bob Graham (D-Fla.), the chairman of a
2008 panel on weapons of mass destruction, add support to Tucker’s
claim. The two led a separate bipartisan review of U.S. biodefense
measures that, in October 2011, found that regardless of what documents
are coming out of the White House, the policies being effectively
implemented are few and far between.
[13]
Incrementalist Strategy
The Obama administration is hardly the first to be stymied by the
risks posed by biological weapons. Since 1969, when the United States
first struck out in an attempt to end the development and use of these
weapons, one administration after another has floundered in the face of
the unique policy challenges that they pose for arms control regimes.
That year, President Richard Nixon unilaterally renounced biological
weapons and terminated the country’s offensive biological warfare
program.
His strategy had three elements: deter the use of biological weapons
with nuclear weapons, commit to a global ban on the weapons, and develop
robust biodefenses to hedge against the risk of noncompliance and
surprise. In a telling sign, the third element was never implemented.
The ban would never include verification provisions, turning Nixon’s
bold new framework into little more than a nuclear umbrella and a treaty
with no teeth.
Three years later, the international community agreed to the
Biological Weapons Convention (BWC), the first arms control treaty to
ban an entire class of weapons. Despite the Cold War, the world’s
superpowers agreed to ban the production and development of biological
weapons while preserving the right to pursue biodefenses. The treaty,
first heralded for its vision, was quickly mired in practical realities:
When the same technologies can be used in peaceful life science
research and in biological weapons development (the dual-use dilemma),
how can the international community differentiate between the two in
order to uphold the BWC? Lacking any organizational capacity supporting
the treaty, much less any enforcement mechanism, how can the BWC detect
violations and verify compliance?
[14]
With these questions lingering over the single biggest step forward
in efforts to counter the spread and use of biological weapons, progress
quickly stalled. Interest within the U.S. policy community diminished
as well, as other security crises came to eclipse the importance of
these weapons over the next several decades.
Throughout the 1990s, occasional developments sparked renewed
interest in biological weapons: the recognition that the Soviet Union
(before its dissolution), Iraq (before the 1991 Persian Gulf War), and
various radical terrorist and apocalyptic organizations had developed or
expressed interest in acquiring a biological weapons capability. Once
the initial shock of those events faded, however, so too did the impetus
to counter the threat. Meanwhile, the means to develop biological
weapons have become more widely available. In 1969, biological weapons
were limited to superpowers; by the late 1980s, any state could
potentially acquire them; and since the late 1990s, terrorist groups and
individual extremists have made attempts to obtain them.
The October 2001 anthrax attacks, which appear to be the work of a
single scientist, mark the latest event to spur lawmakers and
strategists into action. Coming so soon after the September 11 attacks,
the anthrax incidents prompted a slew of presidential directives,
studies, and legislation meant to bring U.S. biological weapons policy
into the 21st century, largely through greater preparedness and response
capabilities.
Interestingly, even as Congress has been perceived as increasingly
polarized in the post-September 11 era, measures to improve biodefense
and biosecurity have remained above the partisan fray, with some of the
most important pieces of legislation enjoying broad bipartisan support
in the House and Senate. In 2006, for example, Senators Richard Burr
(R-N.C.) and Edward Kennedy (D-Mass.) came together to co-sponsor the
Pandemic and All-Hazards Preparedness Act, which established a policy to
develop medical countermeasures and boost the Department of Health and
Human Services’ emergency response capabilities. Even during the harsh
partisan fights today, the House and Senate have passed their own
versions of the reauthorization of that legislation and are negotiating
to resolve differences between the two versions.
A Stalled Treaty
In December 2009, when U.S. Undersecretary of State for Arms Control
and International Security Ellen Tauscher announced the administration’s
biological weapons strategy in Geneva, she put particular emphasis on
the BWC, which she said was “the premier forum for dealing with
biological threats” and the very basis of the administration’s strategy.
[15]
She told her audience that the United States wanted to “reinvigorate”
the BWC, and the treaty’s 2011 review conference—a once-every-five-years
session where states evaluate treaty compliance in the preceding five
years, assess ways to improve implementation, and respond to changes in
the fields of biological and life sciences—offered an opportunity to do
just that.
The conference was billed beforehand as a turning point in
determining how to address some of the longest-lasting issues hampering
the BWC’s implementation, namely, how to effectively monitor and verify
compliance with the treaty. Given the challenge at hand, Tucker argued
that, “to a considerable extent,” the review conference’s success would
“depend on constructive leadership from the United States after several
years of paralysis and drift.”
[16]
The United States sent a strong signal to the international community
by sending Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton, the first
secretary of state to attend a BWC review conference.
[17]
The Obama administration’s support of the conference was, for
participants, a welcome departure from the Bush administration’s
perceived antagonistic approach to its first review conference. At that
2001 conference, the administration withdrew its support for an
elaborate compliance protocol, leaving the direction for future
negotiations uncertain.
In spite of its welcome gestures and Clinton’s presence, the United
States fell short of offering a new vision for how the BWC could remain
relevant or become more effective in the 21st century. While calling for
“bolster[ing] international confidence that all countries are living up
to [their] obligations” under the BWC, Clinton told the conference that
“it is not possible, in our opinion, to create a verification regime
that will achieve this goal.”
[18] Instead, she called for new reporting requirements, more transparency, and more dialogue.
Although the Obama administration is correct in assessing the
practical limitations of any potential BWC verification protocol,
Clinton’s recommendations are hardly enough to fill the gap left by
taking verification off the table. Ultimately, the strategy the United
States laid out offered little hope and no substance for moving the
global biological weapons agenda forward in a way that addresses the
hurdles that have limited its progress in the past, even as key
officials continue to laud the BWC for the role it plays in sustaining
the nonproliferation norm.
Different Approaches
For any number of reasons, international and domestic efforts to
address the risk from biological weapons have stagnated since the boom
days of the late 1960s and early 1970s. Those reasons help explain why,
even as the Obama administration is able to pursue a paradigm-shifting
nuclear strategy, its biological weapons strategy remains stalled.
Although the overlap between the technologies and materials used in
nuclear power and weapons development can stymie experts, this issue of
dual use is even greater for biological weapons. Unlike nuclear weapons,
which can be made from only a very limited number of elements, there
are dozens of potential biological weapons agents that are ubiquitous in
nature. Additionally, processes to cultivate pathogens for malicious
purposes are significantly cheaper and require less time and effort than
nuclear weapons production, and they largely mirror the processes used
to manufacture beneficial vaccines and medicines. Countries cannot
simply “lock up” pathogens as they can in the case of special nuclear
materials. Moreover, biological weapons development does not produce the
telltale signatures that are critical for monitoring nuclear
developments.
[19]
Further, new scientific discoveries and technologies are creating a
new discipline in the life sciences: synthetic biology. As this field
becomes more mature and available, there is an increasing risk that new
or novel pathogens may be created that could circumvent traditional
medical preventive approaches or treatment.
The UN Special Commission on Iraq (UNSCOM) demonstrated how difficult
it can be for even the most well-informed, technologically able
inspectors to verify the true intent behind dual-use technologies.
UNSCOM was “the most intrusive arms control regime ever devised,”
[20]
but its inspectors were still limited in what they were able to learn
about Iraq’s biological weapons activities. In a notable example, the
testimony of Hussein Kamel, one of Saddam’s sons-in-law who defected,
was required before UNSCOM had confirmation that a particular facility
had been built solely for the purpose of producing biological weapons,
even though inspectors had visited the site numerous times.
[21]
These critical differences between nuclear and biological weapons
underscore the importance of having trained, knowledgeable biodefense
experts as part of any comprehensive policy effort. Yet, nuclear weapons
specialists, policymakers, and strategists far outnumber those working
on biological weapons, even at crucial senior levels. Tucker went so far
as to say that a main reason for the Obama administration’s successes
in nuclear weapons policy and stagnation in biological weapons policy is
that “the senior arms control officials in the Obama administration are
all nuclear experts with little knowledge of biological and chemical
weapons issues.”
[22]
This shortfall in expertise matters, especially given the influence
that just one person can have on strategy. When the Bush administration
took office, it dismissed the senior biodefense adviser to President
Bill Clinton—arguably the first president since Nixon to focus on
biodefense—until the anthrax attacks convinced the Bush administration
that such a position was necessary after all. When the Obama
administration came into office, however, it once again eliminated this
senior advisory position.
Now, in place of a single person coordinating all biodefense work in
multiple departments and agencies, there are three senior-level White
House officials whose large portfolios include biodefense among many
other issues. The change has left the administration in a sort of
catch-22. Admiral Kenneth Bernard, the former biodefense adviser to
Clinton and Bush, told
The New York Times that “the only way that
you can get all of those people in the room is to call them into the
White House, and to have a coordinating group under a single person.”
[23]
Yet, in the absence of any single person in charge of the portfolio, it
seems unlikely that there will be the kind of coordination necessary to
give biostrategy and its implementation the prominence and focus they
require to be successful.
[24]
A Call to Action
Obama entered office with an ambitious agenda to tackle the threat of
unconventional weapons in the 21st century. Although his
administration’s biological weapons strategy was grounded in good
intentions, its implementation has fallen short of the
whole-of-government approach it recommended. Moreover, in spite of
lauding the BWC, it reaffirmed the Bush administration’s position on
verification while offering no clear alternative of how best to ensure
compliance. In his second term, Obama must take measures to strengthen
domestic biosecurity and biodefense and to revitalize international
cooperation on the ongoing challenges facing the BWC.
First, it is essential that Obama establish, both in words and deeds,
that the risk from biological weapons is commensurate with the threat
from nuclear weapons. Obama could offer no clearer signal than
establishing a senior biodefense adviser within the White House to
ensure overall leadership for a whole-of-government approach across the
health, security, diplomacy, and life sciences communities. Such an
effort simply cannot succeed without a prominent representative at the
top overseeing the wide range of biodefense and biosecurity efforts
being undertaken by any number of departments, agencies, and offices.
The adviser will need to take stock of current efforts to determine
which ones are ineffective, duplicative, or outdated and must play a
central coordinating role for ongoing and future work to counter
biological threats. An advocate in the White House could build the kind
of issue awareness, commitment, and focus that puts policy at the
cutting edge. More broadly, the creation of this position could help
bring the risk of biological weapons out of the shadow of nuclear
policy, focusing increased attention on what has become a rapidly
evolving threat.
The Obama administration also will need to strengthen its scientific
capacity to tackle the biological threat. Government alone cannot do
this; it simply is not equipped to stay at the scientific forefront of
the field on its own considering how quickly the landscape of biological
risk is changing. Every few months, there is a “bio-Sputnik,” a
dramatic advance that leaves the policy community scrambling. Just this
year, U.S. and Dutch scientists published groundbreaking research on the
how to make the deadly H5N1 virus more transmissible; the Human Microbe
Biome Consortium announced that its researchers had mapped microbial
DNA; and scientists in Silicon Valley brought down the cost of mapping
the human genome to its lowest level ever by using widely available
commercial technologies.
To adapt to that rapid pace, the government must do more to promote a
public-private partnership with the life sciences community to build a
culture of responsibility. Much of the focus so far has been on keeping
dangerous pathogens locked up in secure facilities. Security is an
important element but is not by itself sufficient. The approach must
ensure ethical, safe practices in this rapidly expanding field. More and
better cooperation with academia and industry would not only help
prevent misuse, but also could help contribute to U.S. defenses against
possible biological attacks. Denying an adversary the intended effect of
biological weapons use remains an important priority in any
comprehensive approach. Advances in human immunology and in the
development and manufacture of medical countermeasures, such as
more-effective vaccines and broad-spectrum antibiotics, now permit
enhanced defenses that were impossible even as recently as the 1990s.
There is a wealth of successful and unsuccessful experience on which
to draw as the next administration works to bolster public-private
cooperation. Since 2001, the Department of Health and Human Services has
worked with industry to stockpile enough smallpox vaccine to protect
the entire country in case of an attack. The effort has greatly reduced
the risk of smallpox. With further cooperation, the threats posed by
anthrax, plague, tularemia, and viral hemorrhagic fevers could be
mitigated as well. Unfortunately, attempts to engage private industry in
developing new medical countermeasures often have been limited by
economic realities: The profit margins are slim, and contracting with
the government is not easy. Importantly, those hurdles have not proven
universal. The government was able to build the necessary partnerships
with the commercial pharmaceutical industry to develop medical
countermeasures and build the capacity for manufacturing vaccines for
pandemic influenza in response to the 2009 H1N1 outbreak.
Clearly, more could and should be done to improve cooperation and
consultation on biological threats across industry, academia, and
government. The new administration should therefore ensure that the
president’s science adviser is someone from the life sciences community,
to act as a bridge between private knowledge and public interest. He or
she must work with industry and academia and do so in a manner that is
sufficiently clear and transparent to minimize conflict-of-interest
concerns. Effectively bridging the confidence gap will be essential but
difficult, given the growing divide that has spread between government
and the life sciences field over the past several decades, with private
industry closely guarding its scientific prowess and the government
fumbling in past attempts to engage academia and industry.
Finally, in addition to strengthening its hand at home, the United
States must pursue international cooperation under the BWC more
aggressively. In an interconnected world, a pathogen can cross borders
and bring an international dimension to a formerly domestic problem in
an instant. Encouragingly, through the biological security component of
the historic Cooperative Threat Reduction program that Senators Sam Nunn
(D-Ga.) and Richard Lugar (R-Ind.) launched two decades ago, the Obama
administration has emphasized working with countries to improve their
ability to manage and secure their pathogen collections and to detect,
diagnose, and report disease outbreaks.
The Obama administration should continue this kind of partnership,
but it should not let such bilateral efforts eclipse the importance of
continued progress through the BWC. The United States simply must do
more to strengthen the treaty. For too long, numerous administrations
have failed to show leadership in tackling the persistent challenges
facing BWC implementation.
Such challenges persist because they are incredibly complex to
resolve, especially within the current framework that brings
states-parties together for binding negotiations only once every five
years. The BWC intersessional process—annual meetings of country
representatives that lack binding authority and have limited
mandates—has shown promise in keeping the BWC relevant to 21st-century
threats.
Whether there should be a permanent BWC treaty organization is part
of that future agenda. The establishment of a fully funded and staffed
organization tasked with actively carrying out the requirements of the
BWC and with maintaining its influence in a changing world could be an
important adjunct. A permanent Biological Weapons Convention
Organization could evaluate practical, technical, and scientific lessons
already learned—for example, by UNSCOM in Iraq, the trilateral process
that addressed the former Soviet Union’s offensive biological weapons
program, and the United States’ own experience evaluating on-site
inspection measures with private industry—to develop best practices for
potential compliance and inspection measures.
It may seem that more bureaucracy is hardly the bold, game-changing
leadership that the situation requires. The simple reality of biological
weapons is that Obama cannot call for an end to biological threats the
same way he called for an end to nuclear weapons. No one can outlaw or
lock up pathogens; it is impossible to end their proliferation because
their proliferation is a fact of nature. Addressing the risks that they
pose is the only course. Providing clear leadership at home, harnessing
the power of the life sciences community, and reinvigorating the
international community will do just that.
Katharine Diamond is a program assistant
with the Environmental Change and Security Program at the Woodrow
Wilson International Center for Scholars.
Robert P. Kadlec is
managing director of East West Protection, LLC, a consulting firm that
advises communities and countries on issues related to the threat of
weapons of mass destruction and natural pandemics. He served as special
assistant for homeland security and senior director for biological and
chemical defense policy under President George W. Bush and as the
Office of the Secretary of Defense representative to the Biological
Weapons Convention under President Bill Clinton.
ENDNOTES
1. “Arms Control Today 2008 Presidential Q&A: President-Elect Barack Obama,” Arms Control Today, December 2008.
2. Office of the Press Secretary, The White House, “Remarks by President Barack Obama [As Delivered],” April 5, 2009.
3. Ibid.
4. Katharine Jose, “Obama Adds ‘Cyber Security’ to National Defense Plan,”
New York Observer, July 16, 2008.
5. Commission on the Prevention of WMD Proliferation and Terrorism,
World at Risk
(New York: Vintage Books, 2008), p. xv; Ellen Tauscher, Address to the
annual meeting of the states-parties to the Biological Weapons
Convention, December 9, 2009,
http://www.state.gov/t/us/133335.htm (hereinafter Tauscher BWC address); Conor Friedersdorf, “It’s Biological Weapons That Keep James Steinberg Up at Night,”
Atlantic, July 1, 2012.
6. National Security Council (NSC), “National Strategy for Countering Biological Threats,” November 2009, p. 1.
7. Ibid., p. 31.
8. Office of the Press Secretary, The White House, “President Obama
Releases National Strategy for Countering Biological Threats,” December
9, 2009.
9. NSC, “National Strategy for Countering Biological Threats,” p. 13.
10. Brendan Maher, “Bird-Flu Research: The Biosecurity Oversight,”
Nature, May 23, 2012 (quoting David Fidler of the Maurer School of Law at Indiana University-Bloomington).
11. Ibid.
12. Jonathan B. Tucker, “Is Washington Prepared to Lead at the BWC Review Conference?”
Arms Control Today, January/February 2011.
13. Bipartisan WMD Terrorism Research Center, “Bio-Response Report Card,” October 2011,
http://www.wmdcenter.org/?page_id=183.
14. At their review conference in December 2006, the parties to the
BWC established an Implementation Support Unit (ISU) to provide
organizational support to member states. The ISU is tasked with
providing administrative support, bolstering confidence-building
measures (an integral part of strengthening cooperation and compliance
with the treaty in the absence of official monitoring and verification
provisions), assisting in national implementation, and expanding treaty
membership. To carry out those sizable tasks, the ISU has a staff of
three and is dependent on funding from countries that are parties to the
treaty.
15. Tauscher BWC address.
16. Tucker, “Is Washington Prepared to Lead at the BWC Review Conference?”
17. Amanda Moodie, “Lucky Number Seven? The 2011 Biological Weapons
Convention Review Conference,” James Martin Center for Nonproliferation
Studies, December 23, 2011,
http://cns.miis.edu/stories/111223_bwc_revcon_2011.htm.
18. Hillary Rodham Clinton, Remarks at the Seventh Biological and Toxin Weapons Convention Review Conference, December 7, 2011,
http://www.state.gov/secretary/rm/2011/12/178409.htm.
19. Advances in uranium-enrichment technologies have complicated
detection of covert nuclear proliferation, but the problem still
arguably is more severe in the case of biological weapons.
20. Gregory Koblentz,
Living Weapons: Biological Warfare and International Security (Ithaca, New York: Cornell University Press, 2009), pp. 53-105.
21. Ibid.
22. Tucker, “Is Washington Prepared to Lead at the BWC Review Conference?”
23. Wil S. Hylton, “How Ready Are We for Bioterrorism?”
New York Times Magazine, October 26, 2011.
24. Ibid.
