The
U.S. and Russia have been
hypocritical about biological
weapons
By
Jonathan
Power
January 24, 2003
LONDON - On November 25th 1969 in the midst of the war in
Vietnam, President Richard Nixon, besieged by protests
that he was a war monger, threw out a sop to public
opinion. The U.S., he announced, had decided to renounce
the possession and use of lethal and incapacitating
biological weapons. He declared that the government would
destroy its stockpile of biological weapons. "These
important decisions", said Nixon, "have been taken as an
initiative towards peace. Mankind already carries in its
own hands too many of the seeds of its own
destruction."
Privately Nixon was convinced that they had little
military utility for the U.S. whilst at the same time he
feared that, if the big powers continued to depend on
biological weapons, one day a "rogue" state might one day
get its hands on the knowledge of how to make them and
use them against American cities. Sending the message
that the U.S. military considered them an ineffective
tool might discourage other nations from trying to
develop them.
This was the first time a major power had unilaterally
announced an entire category of weapons of mass
destruction and it catalysed a quick response from the
rest of the world. By 1972 the major powers had all
signed up to the Biological and Toxin Weapons Convention.
It seemed that mankind, for once, had taken a big step
forward. But the truth was different- both the United
States and the Soviet Union (and later Russia) cheated,
violating the Convention in important ways.
The rot started on the American side because Nixon's
original executive order delegated the follow up on his
new policy to the Defence department, with no effective
control or follow up by the White House's own National
Security Council. Almost immediately the CIA violated the
president's promise, deciding to retain a secret cache of
biological and toxin agents, including 100 grams of dried
anthrax spores, 5.2 grams of saxitoxin (paralytic shell
fish poison) and seed cultures of the causative agents of
smallpox, tularemia and brucellosis. Only in 1975 did
this come to light during Senate hearings. The cache was
then destroyed, three years after the Convention had come
into effect.
Also during the 1970s U.S. military intelligence used
the double agents, Sgt. Joseph Cassidy and Dmitry
Polyakov, to feed false information to the Soviet Union
saying that the U.S. was maintaining a secret program to
develop new biological weapons. The apparent point of
this extraordinarily perverse exercise was to push the
Soviets to squander their scarce resources on emulating
the Americans, especially in areas the U.S. had already
decided were unpromising for battlefield use. Of course,
Moscow then felt justified in breaking its own treaty
commitment and in doing so achieved some remarkable
breakthroughs in the use of anthrax and plague in wartime
and also developed advanced delivery systems such as
refrigerated warheads for intercontinental ballistic
missiles- information that by now may have been passed on
to "rogue" countries by unscrupulous or poverty stricken
ex-Soviet scientists. Thus instead of "smothering the
baby in the cradle", as the U.S. diplomat in charge of
negotiating the Convention put it, the U.S. inadvertently
paced the Soviet Union to make breakthroughs that then
posed a major strategic threat to the U.S..
Although this was perhaps the worst of it, later the
U.S. took advantages of ambiguity in the Convention's
language that allowed signatories to purse research on
biodefence. Until the late 1990s the U.S. was quite
transparent about its programs, keeping all the reports
unclassified. But then the Pentagon and the intelligence
community, without informing Congress or the White House,
started on some secret research including on a
vaccine-resistant strain of anthrax. Only investigative
reporting by the New York Times, published in September
2001, blew the whistle. Also later that year the
Baltimore Sun unearthed a U.S. army program to
manufacture anthrax spores that could readily become
airborne. Much informed opinion within the U.S.
considered these programs in violation of the Convention.
But even if that was unclear the programs were
large-scale and serious enough to convince many outsiders
that the U.S. was pursuing offensive programs. Certainly
if another country had carried out such research the U.S.
would have been quick to condemn them.
Jonathan Tucker who runs the Chemical and Biological
Weapons Non-proliferation program at the Monterey
Institute of International Studies, whose work has done
much to bring this troubled history to light, argues that
if the U.S. is to regain credibility it has to rapidly
change gears. It needs a "reasonable level of
transparency" with the White House being regularly
briefed. State Department lawyers need to be told to keep
an eye on the research so that it complies with the
strict terms of the Convention. "Suspicion that the U.S.
is secretly engaged in offensively orientated R & D
could have a corrosive political effect and even promote
the proliferation of biological weapons programs," he
observes.
If indeed Saddam Hussein has developed biological
weapons and he is one day arrested and arraigned before
an international criminal tribunal it would be sad day
for everyone if he could use as an argument in his
defence: the Americans and the Russians did it and so did
we.
I can be reached by phone +44
7785 351172 and e-mail: JonatPower@aol.com
Copyright © 2003 By
JONATHAN POWER
Follow this
link to read about - and order - Jonathan Power's book
written for the
40th Anniversary of
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"Like
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