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The term "weapons of mass destruction", as collective shorthand for nuclear, biological and chemical (and sometimes radiological) weapons, is a poor guide to thinking about security -- it lumps together widely different categories and exaggerates the damage some of them would be truly likely to inflict. But they all pose dangers and it is worth doing whatever we reasonably can to reduce these.
Impediments to the spread of nuclear weapons, although imperfect, are fairly well developed after long international attention and there are useful international instruments for tackling chemical weapons. Barriers to biological weapons, however, are much weaker. The great majority of states have signed up to the 1972 convention banning them but the convention has no provision for verification. The Soviet Union cheated massively and even today monitoring is far harder than it is for nuclear weapons. Biological knowledge, advancing at an extraordinary rate, pervades many aspects of daily life; materials open to malign use are more diverse, less distinguishable from those for innocent use and easier to produce or adapt at short notice than are those in the nuclear field. In addition, facilities to make them are less specialised and costly.
In 2001, the Bush administration punctured a long-running international attempt to devise verification arrangements, arguing they did not offer enough assurance to justify the costs and snags. That, however, left a treaty of merely exhortatory force as the only international obstacle to biological weapons and no substantial new agenda or process has emerged. The best remedy would be to move beyond the usual approach to arms control, which thinks mainly of constraining weapon possession. We should not give up on that but a new drive should focus on weapon use.
Preventing use of such weapons is the classical role of deterrence, That means more than mere capability for military retaliation. It is strengthened by clarity about what will not be tolerated and by certainty of internationally legitimate responses. The world could reinforce it through international commitment, perhaps in a Security Council resolution, to act collectively against any state using weapons banned by the 1972 convention or helping others do so. Their use might not be easily or immediately detected and provably distinguished from a natural outbreak of disease. But although an offending state might not be sure of being found out, it could not be sure of not being found out, so deterrence would still have purchase.
Given worldwide abhorrence of biological weapons and near-universal acceptance of the convention, no one could readily oppose such a commitment directly. The main obstacle might be claims that it would be unbalanced to adopt this while doing nothing new about nuclear weapons, The latter, for good or ill, are too deeply embedded in the structures of international security to be dealt with in the same sweeping way. There is nevertheless scope for advance.
The five-yearly review conference on the nuclear non-proliferation treaty, to be held in May, is going to be difficult. The nuclear powers are keen to universalise the additional protocol developed by the International Atomic Energy Agency to strengthen oversight and constraints on nuclear energy facilities exploitable for weapons. The non-nuclear weapon states will be demanding more action from nuclear powers to fulfil their disarmament obligations under article VI of the treaty, and will complain in particular about the Bush administration's virtual repudiation of steps accepted by its predecessor at the 2000 conference. A bridge might be built through recommendations in the recent report by the United Nations secretary-general's high-level panel that nuclear-weapon states should reaffirm their commitments -- known as negative security assurances, requiring states never to threaten or use nuclear weapons against non-nuclear states -- and that the Security Council should pledge collective action against on any such threat or use.
Although the NSAs, first given in 1978, have never been withdrawn, the US has given a strong impression of diluting them through its reluctance to rule out nuclear response to biological or chemical attack. Non-nuclear states see this as a retreat from the NSAs, widening the role of nuclear weapons when, in the spirit of article VI, nuclear powers ought to be reducing their significance. America's massive non-nuclear military power could amply punish the perpetrators of a biological or chemical attack without resorting to nuclear weapons. Enhancing deterrence in the way suggested -- perhaps against both biological and chemical weapons -- would reduce risk even further. The UK could usefully propose, within the European Union's strategy against WMD proliferation, an international bargain on these lines across all three categories. (Sir Michael Quinlan was permanent undersecretary of state at the UK's Ministry of Defence 1988-92)
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