If some good has come from the crisis over Iraq, which is dominating global headlines at the moment, it is renewed interest in verification. There will be few who have not heard of the United Nations Monitoring, Verification and Inspection Commission (UNMOVIC) inspections in Iraq. Archival footage of white-suited inspectors of its benighted predecessor, the United Nations Special Commission (UNSCOM) on Iraq, has been constantly shown on television around the world.
Few will have failed to notice the protracted negotiations in the Security Council on a tougher regime in Iraq. There will perhaps be fewer still who missed attempts by senior US officials, notably Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, to belittle the capabilities of UNMOVIC even before it had set foot in the country, or the quiet reassurances of UNMOVIC Executive Secretary Hans Blix and Mohamed El Baradei, Director-General of the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), that they can successfully verify Iraqi non-compliance with its obligation not to acquire weapons of mass destruction. All of this has raised the general publics awareness of monitoring and verification to unprecedented levels.
The verification of compliance by states with their obligations under international arms control and disarmament agreements is inevitably a mixture of science and politics. While science can provide the technologies and techniques for monitoring measurable compliance outcomes and thus the hard facts for determining whether a state is in compliance or non-compliance with its obligations, the ultimate judgement reached on such issues is not scientific. Since there is no universally accepted supranational legal authority to judge such cases, such judgements are also not judicial (although they may be judicious). Instead, while verification judgements employ scientific evidence and are taken within an international legal framework, they are taken by representatives of states. This cannot but be a political process.
Hence, the Comprehensive Nuclear Test Ban Treaty Organisation (CTBTO) will use a global monitoring system of scientific instruments to collect seismic, hydroacoustic, infrasound and radionuclide data to determine whether illicit nuclear tests have been conducted. The data will be processed at an International Data Centre by experts using agreed criteria to filter out obvious non-nuclear events. However, any determination that there has been a violation of the treaty will not be taken by scientists, or by a court of law, but by a representative group of the treaty parties or by the states parties as a whole.
This is not to say that the scientific data are usually disputed or ignored in verification judgements. Indeed, they must form the bedrock of any non-compliance decision. None the less, the critical question that must be answered is how the scientific data should be interpreted. Even though the data may indicate a violation, the parties may conclude, on the basis of other information available, that the violation is likely to have been inadvertent, too minor to be worth worrying about or technical in nature. An important consideration in judging whether a violation has occurred will be the presumed intent of the violator. Verification falls into disrepute when a judgement is tainted by extraneous political considerations such as the desire to preserve good relations with the non-compliant state for other purposes or the attempt to protect an ally from embarrassment or worse.
Civilian and military use: how to differentiate?
The case of biological weapons is probably the most difficult arms control verification challenge of all. This is one reason why the ban on biological weapons contained in the 1972 Biological Weapons Convention (BWC) does not have a verification system. Normally a total ban on a weapon is cast in terms of the spectrum of banned activities, ranging from research and development through to deployment and use. In the case of biological weapons, several of the stages in the life cycle of the banned weapon are difficult to discern and therefore verify. The scientific data are often ambiguous. Attempts to verify the illicit research, development, production and stockpiling of biological weapon in the past have failed, in part because of these considerations.
The difficulty lies in the fact that the biological agents and the accompanying research and development infrastructure that would be of use for a weapons programme are quite difficult to distinguish from those that would be used for peaceful purposes. The 1972 treaty naturally permits the peaceful uses of biological agents. The vast and growing global biotechnology industry employs high-containment facilities and has access to biological agents to produce vaccines and for other research and development purposes.
These are among the same requirements that a country would have for the development and production of biological weapons. The scientific facts that an on-site inspection team might find by visiting a biotechnology facility may thus be inconclusive for the purposes of verification. Moreover, since research into defensive measures against biological weapons is permitted under the BWC, no conclusions can be drawn from the fact alone that military establishments operated in secret by governments might be researching biological warfare agents.
These difficulties were among those that led the United States to conclude that it could not support any form of verification system for the BWC and that it should therefore block agreement on the draft protocol to the treaty that was due to be agreed in 2001. The US claimed that it feared that intrusive verification would lead to a loss of commercial propriety information by its highly competitive and lucrative biotechnology industry, and that its biodefence programme would be exposed to foreign espionage via international on-site inspections and other monitoring and verification activities.
But perhaps even more significant in US thinking was the possibility that the scientific facts produced by such inspections might be misinterpreted, either genuinely or maliciously, resulting in accusations that the US itself was violating the BWC treaty. Hence, while the normal US goal in international negotiations is to establish systems where the facts will speak for themselves, in the biological weapons case it decided that the contestability of such facts would endanger US standing. In a sense the US was arguing that the absence of universally accepted indicators that would prove a BWC verification case worked against US interests and prevented it agreeing to any verification scheme.
The fears of the US administration seemed to be realised when the New York Times in September 2001 revealed the existence of several secret programmes run for the Department of Defense which appeared to straddle the fine line between offensive and defensive biological weapons research. The failure of the US to declare these programmes under the voluntary confidence-building measures agreed by the BWC parties in 1986 did little to allay suspicions that the US might indeed be skirting close to violating the convention.
Collecting circumstantial evidence of a likely breach
If verification of offensive biological weapons research and development in the laboratory is difficult, efforts to verify attempted weaponisation of biological agents outside the laboratory are also problematic. This is partly because, unlike nuclear or chemical weapons, no country is known to have successfully developed and stockpiled a reliable biological weapons arsenal, so there are no agreed indicators as to what a biological weapons programme is.
Biological agents can, in theory, be delivered by a variety of means, including missile warheads, artillery shells, gravity bombs or by spraying them directly into the air from light aircraft. While such delivery systems may be tested more or less openly, most are indistinguishable from other military experiments. Indeed it has only recently been revealed that the US and UK over many years conducted biological weapons tests in urban and rural areas using simulants without anyone being the wiser.
Moreover, the fact that biological agents themselves do not need to be stored in vast quantities ready for military use renders stockpiling activities much less significant in the biological weapons case. Biological agents can be rapidly grown from small amounts for use whenever required. And relatively small amounts can have enormously destructive effects. The huge storage areas required for housing a chemical weapons arsenal and the complex storage, handling and delivery systems for nuclear weapons are simply not necessary for biological weapons.
The BWC treaty violation for which scientific facts are most likely to prove decisive is the use or alleged use of such weapons. Scientific research has produced a series of advances that today permit rapid detection and analysis of the use of biological weapons in the field. Hence the battlefield or terrorist use of biological weapons is easier to detect than it ever has been. Handheld devices can now provide instant readings. However, attribution away from the classic battlefield remains a problem.
It took months for the likely source of the anthrax incidents that occurred in the US just after the 11 September terrorist attacks on New York and Washington DC to be identified. The perpetrators have still not been revealed, at least not publicly, and may never be. It was easy in the absence of scientific proof for accusations to be levelled at Iraq as the source, when in fact the source turned out to be domestic. And of course if the use of biological weapons is detected then arms control and disarmament has essentially failed.
All of this leaves the role of science and scientific fact in verifying biological weapons disarmament in an unusually precarious situation compared with other arms control and disarmament regimes. This is not to say, however, the verification on the basis of facts is impossible. The facts to be sought in verifying biological weapons violations tend to be less scientific than deductive; the most apposite image of the verifier here is that of the detective rather than the white-coated laboratory assistant. The evidence is often bureaucratic rather than scientific; it includes military doctrine and training manuals that envisage the use of banned weapons, records of imports of components and materials, the level and type of security surrounding particular facilities and the career trajectories of key scientific personnel.
Concentrating on the traces of the smoking gun
The Iraq case has demonstrated that one of the great boons to verification is the tendency of governments, managers and scientists to leave an extensive paper trail. The more authoritarian the regime, the more paper there will be. A purchase order for quantities of growth media for cultivating biological agents that exceeded by many magnitudes any possible peaceful uses created instant suspicion that a biological weapons programme was under way in Iraq. The discrepancy has never been convincingly explained by Iraq to this day.
Apart from the Iraq case, the only verification exercise that has been conducted in relation to biological weapons proved frustratingly inconclusive. None the less, during the so-called trilateral inspections carried out by US and British scientists in 1990 at former Soviet biological research facilities, several incidents, while not conclusive, gave invaluable clues that biological weapons research was being conducted. According to David Kelly, one of the inspectors, senior officials on one occasion contradicted an admission by technical staff that research on smallpox was being conducted at the Institute of Microbiology in Oblensk.
The officials were unable to properly account for the presence of smallpox or for the research being undertaken in a dynamic aerosol test chamber on orthopoxvirus, which was capable of explosive dispersal. At the Institute of Ultrapure Preparations in Leningrad (now St Petersburg), dynamic and explosive test chambers were passed off as being for agricultural projects, while contained milling machines were described as being for the grinding of salt. Studies being conducted on plague, especially production of the agent, were also clearly misrepresented. Hence, it is clear that evidence that may be used for verification purposes is obtainable through biological weapons on-site inspections. The difficulty is that in the court of international law and public opinion, such evidence is viewed as being insufficient. At the most it would provide grounds for suspicion and further investigation.
The case of Iraqs alleged biological weapons programme is illustrative of the difficulties. Iraq has never accounted properly for its programme, which it admitted to having only after the revelations by Saddam Husseins son-in-law, Hussein Kamel, in 1995. It has never explained the fate of the hundreds of tons of growth medium that it imported, nor substantiated its claim to have destroyed its stocks and accompanying capabilities and materials. Its purported full, final and complete declarations relating to biological weapons were judged to be internally inconsistent by an international panel of scientists (an idea agreed to by Iraq), even without the benefit of external evidence.
But the scientific facts deduced in this way were insufficient since the Iraqis simply refused to accept the panels conclusions. A classic dilemma for verification, and one that science is only too familiar with, is the inability to prove a negative. Hence while UNMOVIC may eventually prove that Iraq does have leftover and new weapons of mass destruction capabilities, it will never be able to satisfy those who wish it to prove definitively that Iraq does not have those capabilities. Paradoxically, UNMOVICs inability to find a smoking gun to date, is simply evidence to suspicious minds that there is something to be found.
The finding of a smoking gun in the biological weapons case is unlikely except perhaps if one of the alleged mobile biological weapon laboratories is found (since such capabilities would appear to have no rationale in terms of peaceful purposes). Scientific facts, such as the positive identification of a phial of anthrax at a research facility, are also not likely to be decisive in proving an offensive intent. What is much more likely, and as the trilateral inspections have shown, is that a combination of scientific fact, snippets of information that begin to form a pattern of suspicion, a trail of incriminating paperwork and plain old intuition and luck, will build the case that Iraq has committed a material breach of its obligations in the biological weapons field. Fortunately for scientists, it is the Security Council that will have to decide the case and, as we have seen to date, this will be as much political as evidentiary.
