Blinkers and biological weapons

Following on from previous posts on the value of low technology, it turns out that even how we think about things might be influenced by an increasing reliance on ‘high-tech’ solutions. James Evans reported in last week’s edition of Science magazine that the explosion of electronic information might not be such a good thing. He argues that while accessing things online allows a wider audience to access more information, quicker and more cheaply, it could also be undermining the principles of scholarship. Since such large amounts of information have become available online, referenced texts tended to be more recent, fewer in number and relate to a smaller set of journals and articles. Evans says that:

searching online is more efficient and following hyperlinks quickly puts researchers in touch with prevailing opinion, but this may accelerate consensus and narrow the range of findings and ideas built upon.

I wonder if this principle holds true in multilateral disarmament? If so, it might offer insights. Anything that helps build consensus has to be good, right? But what happens when a consensus is built on a partial picture – a selective, unrepresentative view? By inference, Evans’ work suggests that we be being exposed to fewer alternatives, degrading opportunities for real discourse and shutting down potentially useful options for the future. And it may become much more difficult to change prevailing opinion after it has been established as non-mainstream views become increasingly isolated.

Certainly, when an idea gets out there and spreads, it already takes a great deal to change peoples’ minds. Such concepts enter our social consciousness and belief in it is reinforced simply because so many people have heard about it. As fewer people become exposed to competing or alternative views there is a danger that the orthodoxy becomes ‘the truth’. If we’re being increasingly channelled toward a small set of ideas, and these viewpoints are self-sustaining, then how are we to set about changing things if we need to?

This has certainly been a problem for the Biological Weapons Convention (BWC). The treaty underwent a significant change in direction seven years ago, when efforts to negotiate a legally binding verification instrument were set aside. This prompted some, at the time, to suggest it was a regime on the verge of collapse - an image we are still fighting despite the BWC’s stewardship process having become a different animal.

The BWC now has an ongoing international process to strengthen how the treaty is implemented through national action; enhancements to its information exchange mechanisms (with growing support for more radical improvements over the next few years); increasing awareness of, and interest in, its activities by a rapidly expanding set of stakeholders; better integration into the broader disarmament and non-proliferation architecture; a plan of action for universalization that has already yielded good results in getting more states to join; and a small ‘secretariat’ to support the activities of states parties. And yet, there is still a perception that alternative structures and administrative arrangements must be created to achieve exactly the same ends.

This week, as diplomats, scientists, academics and civil society participate in a BWC expert meeting in Geneva, my thoughts are certainly on what sorts of messages this meeting is sending out. I hope that given the number and range of people who are participating, there will be no shortage of opinions as to what it all means and what has been achieved.

This is a guest blog by Dr. Piers Millett. Piers works for the BWC Implementation Support Unit in Geneva, Switzerland.


Photo Credit: "There is no freedom without dissent" by Furilo on Flickr.

The Anthropocene question

The International Herald Tribune ran an unusual article a couple days ago with the by-line 'Maybe science can save the planet: But should it?'.

The article took as its starting point a proposal by a private American company, Plantos, for

""fertilizing" parts of the ocean with iron, in hopes of encouraging carbon-absorbing blooms of plankton. Meanwhile, researchers elsewhere are talking about injecting chemicals into the atmosphere, launching sun-reflecting mirrors into stationary orbit above the earth or taking other steps to reset the thermostat of a warming planet."

Well, wasn't sticking chemicals in the oceans and in the atmosphere part of the problem in the first place? What really struck me, however, is that nowhere in the IHT article was there mention of the phrase 'unintended consequences' - although, at one point, the article quotes a philosopher at the American 'Center for Engineering, Ethics and Society,’ who said new technologies such as nanotechnology and robotics were so powerful that ""our saving grace, our inability to affect things at a planetary level, is being lost to us," as human-induced climate change is demonstrating."

This strikes me as a bit contradictory. It looks like we are facing human-induced climate change, but this goes back to the industrial revolution and the transfer of massive amounts of fossilized carbon locked up in the earth's crust (primarily coal, oil and gas) to the atmosphere. These sources of energy certainly aren't emerging technologies - they're well established and could even be considered 'old'. Although our ancestors didn't know it way back then, they'd stumbled on planet changing technology before we even had a global view of the planet.

Indeed, the Geological Society of America has argued that the industrial revolution, which really got underway during the 19th century, has caused a new geological epoch - the Anthropocene:

"Stresses to the planet's atmosphere, oceans, life forms, and very surface are dramatic enough to end the Holocene epoch, the geologists say. That period began about 12,000 years ago as the last Ice Age melted and the planet warmed enough to allow people to farm and thrive."

We now face the prospect of the human species "changing geologic time".

But will we be around to see it? The development of weapon systems over the last century should be a rich vein of cautionary tales about the hazards of depending on technology without considering the prospect - no, the certainty - of unintended consequences. Investment in bomber forces from the First World War for so-called precision bombing contributed to massive bombing of civilians in World War Two. Carpet bombing by the U.S. and its allies in South East Asia in 1960s and 70s caused great damage to the environment, in addition to all of the human misery it caused to civilians - many of whom lived in countries not officially at war with those bombing them.

And then there was the large-scale use of chemical defoliants such as 'Agent Orange' to strip away vegetation in the hope of spotting North Vietnamese forces, with all of its longer term environmental and human consequences. According to the Sunshine Project, this helped to build pressure for the 1977 Convention on the Prohibition of Military or Any Other Hostile Use of Environmental Modification Techniques (or ENMOD). (Curiously, ENMOD is not spoken about in disarmament and arms control circles much, although it entered into force internationally in 1978, and the U.S. and Russia are both state parties.)

The IHT article picks up on biotechnology and nanotechnology as two general areas of technological advance with big potential risks for our planet. It also notes that the ethics of emerging technologies are often not something scientists who "have their nose to the bench" necessarily think about much. This certainly matches my own experience a few years ago in working to promote the International Committee of the Red Cross's 'Biotechnology, Weapons and Humanity' appeal to practitioners in the life sciences, in order to prevent their hostile misuse. There has been some modest awareness-raising since then, and states parties to the Biological Weapons Convention have given official focus to it, in addition to the good work of many national scientific academies and medical associations. But synthetic biology, in particular, is one likely area full of difficult ethical dilemmas.

The biggie for the present though is nuclear technology. The scientists involved in the Manhattan Project believed that were developing a weapon to win the Second World War, and many hoped nuclear technology would then be turned to peaceful purposes. Few were likely aware that it would became the basis for a Cold War arms race in which the effects of nuclear war would truly have world changing consequences because each side would deploy tens of thousands of warheads each.

Richard Rhodes' book Arsenals of Folly discusses how the design of the reactors installed in Chernobyl was compromised by the demands of the Soviet Union's military programmes. The RBMK reactor was originally a production reactor developed in the 1950s to produce plutonium for nuclear weapons - a factor that meant it was chosen rather than the safer VVER light water reactor design to be adapted for civilian power operation in the 1970s. Rhodes also relates how, in 1986, the Soviet Union's new leader Mikhail Gorbachev was aghast when the scale of the human, environmental and economic consequences of the Chernobyl reactor accident finally sank in - and horrified at what would happen if these facilities became deliberate targets in war. Yet the Chernobyl explosion, fire and radiation were only fractions of the damage nuclear weapons could do.

This is all salient when we hear of new technologies being offered as panacea to contemporary problems, whether figuring out how to keep the lights on, what to run our cars on or how to build a better minefield. (A major challenge for many former Soviet countries trying to destroy Cold War stocks of anti-personnel mines under the Mine Ban Convention is that, for instance, the ubiquitous PFM-1 mine contains hydrogen chloride and so is highly toxic.)

The road to hell is paved with good intentions and perhaps more than a few handy-sounding inventions. Responsible policies are needed to tackle global challenges, and not just new technologies - and that means thinking further ahead than the next election cycle, a hard thing for politicians to do.

John Borrie


References
Richard Rhodes, Arsenals of Folly: The Making of the Nuclear Arms Race, London: Simon & Schuster: 2008.

NASA image AS8-14-2383 ("Earthrise") taken by Apollo 8 astronaut William Anders on 24 December 1968, and downloaded from Wikipedia.org. "Earthrise", although now almost visual cliché has been described as "the most influential environmental photograph ever taken." Earthrise is sometimes confused with a December 1972 photograph taken by Apollo 17 astronauts taken of the brightly lit face of the Earth from 29,000 kilometres ("The Blue Marble").

"How arms control's past shapes its future"

Some of us took a break yesterday from the grind of the second week of the NPT PrepCom to attend a Geneva Forum brown bag lunch featuring University of Michigan historian of science Dr Susan Wright.

Susan spoke about some of her recent research, around the topic "how arms control's past shapes its future: biological disarmament as a case study". Originally trained as a natural scientist, Susan has done a great deal of research in American and British archives on how the process that led to the 1972 Bacteriological and Toxin Weapons Convention emerged - the BTWC, usually known as the Biological Weapons Convention.

The escalating nuclear arms race after World War Two had led, by the late 1960s, to schools of strategic analysis in both Britain and the US concerning arms control that viewed war as a recurrent but inevitable tragedy. This epistemic community's views were well represented by both the work of economist Thomas Schelling ('Strategy and Arms Control) and Aussie-Brit political scientist Hedley Bull's 'The Control of the Arms Race', both published in 1961. Using differing frameworks, these two reached similar conclusions - in the Cold War context, strategic stability rather than disarmament was the dominant concern. Moreover, like war, arms control was about seeking strategic advantage, according to Susan.

This concept of arms control came to dominate US official thinking during the 1960s, and was a major thread in British officialdom too. Although an Australian by birth, Hedley Bull was - remarkably - invited to head its arms control office in 1965, which he did for two years and produced a number of influential internal government reports. Moreover, Wright's archival research exposed the considerable extent of the classified work Bull did for the British Foreign & Commonwealth Office, something not generally known before.

One of Bull's special reports focused on chemical and biological weapons (CBW). At that time, the US was using chemical agents on an increasing scale in South East Asia, including riot control agents like CS gas as well as BZ agent and chemical defoliants. Many countries, including the UK and US, had active germ warfare programmes, not to mention those of the Warsaw Pact.

Against the backdrop of a burgeoning domestic nuclear disarmament movement in Britain and internal government concern about the potential harm to the UK of retaliation for allied CBW use, Bull suggested to the Labour Government that biological weapons weren't really useful. This kicked off a long internal policy debate, which eventually resulted in a UK proposal to the 18-nation Committee on Disarmament in Geneva (a precursor of the Conference on Disarmament) late that decade after much departmental in-fighting, and initial reluctance by Britain's key ally, the US.

In Susan's view, the UK's initiative to ban biological weapons was the product of its national strategic goals, rather than the pursuit of a particular disarmament paradigm. The UK government figured it and others could renounce BW without changing the balance of power with the Warsaw Pact - in fact, it would place more weight on nukes. The UK proposal (and, eventually, the BTWC agreed in 1972) didn't address chemical weapons, which at the time were viewed as the greater menace - a point the Soviet Union and Non-Aligned states were quick to point out. And, neither the UK proposal nor the eventual BTWC provided for a verification regime. The public rationale was that the Warsaw Pact wouldn't buy it. But Susan's archival research indicates, she said, that both the UK and US recognized it wasn't in their strategic interests either in case there were secret activities they had that they would prefer remained that way, alongside concerns about protecting proprietary commercial information.

In other words, the eventual BTWC's flaws weren't there by accident. And, on verification, the BTWC - and the world - are still living with this decision, as the Convention still lacks such a regime a generation later. In the NPT context, it is still painfully clear that many states use the language of disarmament while still in the mindset of strategic stability or advantage in the narrow sense. On the plus side, there is now the Chemical Weapons Convention, which is non-discriminatory and has a strong and comprehensive verification system.

The disarmament community's achievements shouldn't be underrated, but sometimes there is a tendency to impute motives to those involved in past initiatives that don't necessarily reflect what was going on behind the scenes. What people say in public doesn't necessarily reflect what they're actually thinking. Susan's research demonstrates the importance of viewing the past with a critical eye.

Just as importantly for those who feel overawed or discouraged about difficulties in current disarmament efforts, it shows that we stand on the shoulders of human beings, rather than mythical giants.

John Borrie


Image by judy_breck retrieved from Flickr.

Explaining Civil Society Schizophrenia

Tuesday's post on 'civil society schizophrenia' seems to have struck a chord. Apart from some insightful comments, which you can read, I've also received a number of emails from NGOs telling me that they are as puzzled as I am at the different levels of formal integration of civil society into multilateral processes of disarmament and arms control; from the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty to the Anti-Personnel Mine Ban Convention.

Some have suggested interesting explanations for this phenomenon. For example, Piers suggests that, although the diplomats dealing with all of these issues may generally be the same people, perhaps the NGOs are not. In other words, might not different levels of acceptability (to governments) of issue-specific NGOs explain the different levels of formal civil society integration across these issue-areas? Daniel Feakes points out, however, that the same NGOs that deal with biological weapons issues also tend to deal with chemical weapons issues but that the Chemical Weapons Convention (CWC) is decidedly more restrictive than the Biological Weapons Convention when it comes to granting formal roles to civil society.

An anonymous commentator on Tuesday's post suggested that NGOs are largely excluded from the NPT process because States with nuclear weapons consider them indispensable to their national security. While I would agree with this point as it relates to the NPT, this line of reasoning does not explain why civil society is largely excluded from the CWC process. States Parties to the CWC have renounced chemical weapons and yet NGOs still find it hard to gain access. Daniel Feakes did me the great service of suggesting where the CWC should appear in my Spectrum of Civil Society Integration, on which I now bestow the official acronym 'SCSI' (pronounced 'skuzzy'). The SCSI now looks like this (you should imagine these items stretched out on a single-line scale from left to right. As one moves along the scale from left to right, the level of formal integration of civil society increases):

Conference on Disarmament (CD) -- Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) -- Chemical Weapons Convention (CWC) -- Biological Weapons Convention (BWC) -- UN Programme of Action on the Illict Trade in Small Arms and Light Weapons (PoA) -- Convention on Certain Convention Weapons (CCW) -- Oslo Process on cluster munitions -- Anti-Personnel Mine Ban Convention (Ottawa Convention)

Now that we have diagnosed civil society schizophrenia as a pandemic afflicting multilateral disarmament diplomats, how can we explain it? I do not think that one simple explanation will do justice to this phenomenon. Instead, I would propose the following set of four tentative explanations that, taken together, might give us a better understanding of what we are dealing with:

WMD vs. Conventional Weapons: A first-cut explanation derives from the blatantly obvious observation that weapons of mass destruction (WMD) are located at the left of the scale while conventional weapons are on the right. The Conference on Disarmament deals with non-WMD issues as well, of course, but three of its four current priorities are WMD-related - banning the production of fissile material for nuclear weapons, assuring non-nuclear weapon States that they will not be threatened or attacked with nuclear weapons, and nuclear disarmament. It is surely not a coincidence that the CD, NPT, CWC and BWC all appear next to one other on the left of the scale. Could it be that States 'trust' or see a role for civil society when it comes to conventional weapons issues, but not when it comes to WMD?

Potential vs. Actual Humanitarian Impact: The scale separates out, on the left, WMD with catastrophic potential humanitarian impacts from, on the right, conventional weapons with huge actual (and demonstrable) humanitarian impacts. We should of course never forget that nuclear, chemical and biological weapons have all been used in the past with devastating consequences. Chemical and biological weapons are banned, however, and nuclear weapons have not been used against humans since 1945. Guns, cluster munitions and mines, on the other hand, claim hundreds of thousands of human lives every year. They also maim, impoverish and condemn whole communities and regions to perpetual underdevelopment. Could it be that the more immediate and visible is the humanitarian impact of a weapons system, the easier it is for NGOs to integrate themselves into formal multilateral processes?

Old vs. New: It is interesting to note that, generally speaking, as one moves along the scale from left to right, the issues (or institutions) tend to become newer. The Conference on Disarmament can trace its origins back to the Ten-Nation Committee on Disarmament of the late 1950s. On the opposite end of the scale, negotiations on the Ottawa Convention were completed in 1997. The time scale does not hold for all issues - e.g. the CWC post-dates the BWC by two decades and the CCW is older than the PoA - but a general trend is recognisable. Could it be that the more recently a multilateral process on disarmament and arms control is institutionalised, the more likely it is for civil society to be well integrated?

Geneva vs. the Hague (vs. New York): In his comment on Tuesday's post, Daniel Feakes attributed the difference between civil society integration in the BWC and the CWC to "cultural" differences between Geneva and the Hague. He pointed out that, "in Geneva, despite the restrictiveness of the CD, diplomats are fairly used to interacting with NGOs and with NGOs being around in the Palais [UN building]. In The Hague, most diplomats are bilateralists rather than multilateralists and seem to be less used to having NGOs around." This, in my view, is a very important point. There are also cultural differences between Geneva and New York when it comes to the way in which multilateral disarmament processes are conducted (see our earlier posting on "Is there a Geneva / New York Divide?). Could it be that the place in which a multilateral disarmament process is created and maintained can influence the degree of integration of civil society?

This is just a first attempt to explain why we observe different levels of formal civil society integration across different issue-areas of multilateral disarmament and arms control. None of the above tentative explanations is satisfactory on its own but, taken together, they begin to make sense (at least to me).

Please do let me know, by using the comments function at the bottom of this post, if you can discern any other patterns from the SCSI tealeaves. With your help, we'll crack this one yet.

Patrick Mc Carthy


Photo Credit: 'Schizophrenia' by LILLAjija on Flickr.

Civil Society Schizophrenia

Reading John Borrie's daily postings from last week's Wellington conference on cluster munitions (see below), I was reminded of something that I have been mulling over in my mind for some time now but have not yet had the chance to examine properly. I am referring to a highly specific professional disorder that seems only to afflict disarmament diplomats. It's called 'civil society schizophrenia.'

Last week in Wellington, 122 States slogged it out with each other and with the now formidable Cluster Munitions Coalition of NGOs to agree a draft text that will serve as the basis for negotiations on a new Cluster Munitions Convention. NGOs were present in Wellington's Town Hall for the entire duration of the conference. They intervened at will in the discussions and openly criticized certain States for attempting to weaken the Wellington text. NGOs provided valuable inputs to the debates based on sound research, interpretation of evidence and testimony of victims. In short, civil society was an integral, dynamic and vital element of the Wellington conference that influenced the outcome of the meeting.

Compare this with what happens in the Conference on Disarmament, another negotiating forum that features regularly on this blog. One NGO - the Women's International League for Peace and Freedom - has one opportunity each year to address the Conference; on March 8, International Women's Day. But they may not do so themselves. They must pass their statement, drafted by a separate conference of women's NGOs from around the world, to an official of the Conference, invariably a man, to read out while they observe in frustration from the public gallery. This dismal situation has at least created some comic relief in the past, such as the occasion a few years ago when the (male) Deputy Secretary-General of the Conference began reading the statement with the ringing words, "We, the women of the world..."

The thing that really puzzles me, however, is that the diplomats who engaged, argued and strategised with NGOs at last week's Wellington Conference on cluster munitions and those who routinely acquiesce to the Conference on Disarmament's almost reflexive exclusion of civil society are, for the most part, the same people. How can this be? Is there some special module in training courses for disarmament diplomats that help them to deal with the cognitive dissonance that this must create? Or, does it actually help a disarmament diplomat's career to be a just a little bit schizophrenic?

The two examples I cite - the Oslo Process on cluster munitions and the Conference on Disarmament - lie at opposite ends of a spectrum that measures the extent of formal civil society integration into multilateral disarmament processes. In between are a number of other processes that complicate even further any desire that a disarmament diplomat might have for consistency with regard to engagement with civil society. Moving from the most restrictive to the most open to formal NGO inputs, I would suggest the following ranking:

(1) The Conference on Disarmament, (2) the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, (3) the Biological Weapons Convention, (4) the UN Programme of Action on the Illict Trade in Small Arms and Light Weapons, (5) the Convention on Certain Convention Weapons, (6), the Oslo Process on cluster munitions and (7) the gold standard of civil society integration; the Anti-Personnel Mine Ban Convention (Ottawa Convention).

I feel unqualified to place the Chemical Weapons Convention in this ranking since, as an exclusively Hague-based process, I have no direct experience of it (perhaps readers can enlighten me?). It also remains to be seen where negotiations on an Arms Trade Treaty, when they begin, might fit into this scheme (although, based purely on the impressive role civil society, in the form of the Control Arms campaign, has played to date, it should score quite high).

Any such ranking cannot be set in stone, however. As an illustration of this, recent experiments with enhanced NGO and industry integration into the Biological Weapons Convention process could, if they are continued, eventually lead the BWC to overtake the UN small arms process, which seems unable to move beyond a rudimentary openness to NGOs despite the vast amounts of research, field work and policy advice being churned out by civil society on this issue.

Also, to their credit, a number of States in the Conference on Disarmament do regularly complain about the exclusion of NGOs from their work. As a direct result of this, the CD decided recently to devote one half-day session per year to NGOs; but only after the Conference has been able to reach agreement on a programme of work, something that has eluded it now for more than ten years. This concession, hard-fought though it was, hardly moves the CD out of its pole position in my ranking.

It is a mystery to me how the Conference on Disarmament and the Oslo Process on cluster munitions can exist in the same universe. It baffles me even more that they can be populated by the same diplomats. Remaining unfazed in the face of such inconsistency regarding civil society integration takes special skill. Or a split personality.

Patrick Mc Carthy


Photo Credit: 'Schizophrenia_01' by dogsivu on Flickr.

Synthetic biology & weapons: How soon is now?

There have been some interesting disarmament-related developments in the last week:

- In a think tank report, a group of former senior Western military commanders has called for a major change to NATO's approach to defending its members, insisting that the first-strike use of nuclear weapons is an "indispensable instrument", and claiming that there is "simply no realistic prospect of a nuclear-free world". (Paul Rogers and Jeffrey Lewis have posted useful critiques of this report.)

- Meanwhile, opinion editorials continue to appear that reflect the call reiterated by George Shultz, Henry Kissinger and others for renewed efforts on nuclear disarmament.

- As Patrick Mc Carthy reported, the UN's Secretary-General, Ban Ki-moon gingered up the Conference on Disarmament here in Geneva with his appraisal of its inability to get back to work after a decade of inactivity.

- Paul Wolfowitz, former American deputy secretary of defence and an architect of the 2003 Iraq war - and of course former World Bank boss forced to resign over an ethics scandal - has been appointed to chair a U.S. advisory board on arms control.

All of these are newsworthy developments, although right now media attention seems increasingly turned toward jitters in world financial markets, especially in the wake of a breaking trading scandal at a prominent French financial institution.

But an item of great significance was confined largely to the weekend edition newspaper features and the science pages. That is, last week a team funded by biotech entrepreneur Craig Venter announced the penultimate step toward the creation of artificial life: the world's first artificial organism.

What's the big deal?

Back in 2002, scientists reported in the journal Science that they had 'made' a virus, which they assembled from separate components, all of which they made synthetically. This was big news, but the process took two years and a large scientific team.

About 18 months later, Craig Venter and his team carried out a similar task with a different virus, but they did it in two weeks. It was much quicker this time around because commercial production of some of the virus components were now available, enabling technicians in the lab to make quicker progress, without the need to know how to recreate the initial steps - a more 'engineering-like' approach.

Venter announced he would try to do the same thing with bacteria. Bacteria - unlike viruses - are definitely 'alive'. Now, the team from the J. Craig Venter Institute has built the first bacterial genome from the raw components of DNA. It's not yet 'alive', but it's very close.

The magazine Wired was quick to point out that the news is hardly earth-shattering in its own right. But as developments occurring so closely together in time, it indicates that Venter's colleagues are close to being able to assemble a synthetic organism in a process in which it's not essential to understand all of the individual scientific steps. To paraphrase Drew Endy's useful (but very budget) short introduction to synthetic biology available on YouTube:

Synthetic biology isn't making a specific thing. It's how you make something.

What we're seeing here is another inexorable step toward moving from "the science of biology" to more of a "black-box" engineering approach in which, like the graphical front-end of computer operating systems like Windows, Linux or Mac OS X, we can perform functions without the need to understand or programme the underlying binary computer code from scratch. In other words, soon it won't be necessary to go through a decade of training to create an artificial organism, you just need sufficient knowledge and equipment to assemble it.

This has big implications for efforts to prevent the hostile use of the life sciences - biological weapons. For ten years now, I've been a participant or observer - and always a supporter - of international efforts to prevent poisoning and deliberate spreading of disease by means of the 1972 Biological Weapons Convention (BWC). What has always struck me is that in such an environment it's easy to get stuck in the long now: policy makers and diplomats know that big technological changes in the life sciences are on the way, and will have major ramifications for the effectiveness of the BWC regime. A cursory glance at the documents of the BWC's review conferences of the 1990s shows that many of the life science advances spoken of almost as science-fiction then, such as synthetic biology, are here and now for us today. But these advances don't come with blinking arrows or a clear guide to their implications.

How will humanity make use of synthetic biology for its benefit, while preventing harm to ourselves, each other, or to our environment? I really don't have any concerns about what Venter and his colleagues are doing, per se. They're legitimate innovators, and there's absolutely no question of any hostile intent behind what they're doing. But it's nevertheless a wake-up call.

Among others, I've argued in the past that the increasing intangibility and diffusion throughout society of biotechnological and other related developments this century will mean that orthodox disarmament and arms control processes aren't sufficient on their own to stem their risks. Increasingly, understanding and addressing intent is going to be crucial to managing the risks of misuse of the life sciences for hostile purposes as "dual-use" technology that will inevitably flow from advances like the Mycoplasma genitalium team's work becomes cheaper, easier to use, and spreads. Otherwise, regulatory frameworks for preventing hostile misuse of advances in the life science won't be able to keep up. The question is, can the BWC and related regimes like the Chemical Weapons Convention adapt to these challenges?


John Borrie

This blog post was assembled synthetically with the invaluable help of Dr. Piers Millett of the BWC Implementation Support Unit. Responsibility for any errors is entirely the author's.

Picture of MIT biologist Drew Endy's comic book, Adventures in Synthetic Biology, retrieved from the U.S. National Institutes of Health website. More info here.

Disarmament Grumblefest 2008

As we foreshadowed in December, 2008 is gearing up to be a busy year for disarmament in Geneva. From 21 January, the Conference on Disarmament (CD) will resume talks to try to get back to work after a decade of blockage and inertia, for instance. The Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty will meet for the second preparatory meeting to its upcoming five-yearly review conference 2010 in Geneva from late April, after a tough start in Vienna last year . And, next week, representatives of member governments of the 1980 UN Convention on Certain Conventional Weapons (CCW) will begin work to "negotiate a proposal to address urgently the humanitarian impact of cluster munitions, while striking a balance between military and humanitarian considerations".

So, 2008 will be busy for disarmament. The real question is - will it be productive? Though Geneva-based disarmament processes like the Biological Weapons Convention are quietly boxing on, there are some wider doubts. Officials doggedly try to be positive about the CD, and the tenor of talks there do seem to be gradually improving. But it's unclear whether anything has changed sufficiently to enable a breakthrough that would allow vital work like fissile material cut-off negotiations to get properly underway.

Dynamics also remain difficult in the NPT. Iran made it clear in last summer's PrepCom in Vienna that it would hang tough against perceived attempts to isolate or coerce it, and its position only seems to have hardened - Tehran's alleged non-compliance will continue to be a flash-point this May.

And then there is the CCW, which has become rather a grumblefest. Representatives from certain CCW states grumble about the Oslo Process, which they regard as a loopy attempt to re-create the Ottawa Process of more than a decade ago, resulting in the 1997 Mine Ban Convention. There is no need for it now that the CCW has achieved its work mandate, so the argument goes. There are jitters about what exactly banning cluster munitions that "cause unacceptable harm to civilians" will mean in the Oslo Process. And in pro-ban circles it may be possible to detect some sniffiness about the CCW, which ever so coincidentally only seemed to get its act into gear after the Oslo Process emerged in 2007.

It all reminds me a bit of being stuck at an outdoor rock festival in the rain. The clouds come over and the rain starts, and despite there being a choice of two main stages, and you're all in it together, some misery-guts starts a contagion of hand-wringing, paranoia (okay, maybe that due to something else) and tent-lurking negativity. People complain about how far they have to slog to commune with their chosen music act. People offer dire portents about the weather worsening. People, whether Deadheads or metallers, hippies or punks, even begin engaging in dumb arguments about whose artist of choice is better.

Oh puh-lease, give us all a break. The CCW and the Oslo Process shouldn't descend into a "my band is better than your band" contest. There's a place for both.

Yet both face big challenges. The CCW is Duran Duran at the moment: it was a big act in the 1980s, but has only been able to create a couple of decent albums in the 90s and the 00s. It's had ... creative difficulties. (A recent album produced by Justin Timberlake also probably didn't help its street cred.) But people who say it's a spent force are probably wrong. The difficulty to be faced though, is that some of its song-writers have had irreconcilable difficulties over a recent important creative project - "mines other than anti-personnel mines" - and producing an outcome on addressing the humanitarian impact of cluster munitions is going to have to transcend these types of dynamic if it's going to make something better than bland, over-produced mush only hard-core fans will buy. But it can do it.

The Oslo Process is the Arcade Fire. Never heard of the Arcade Fire? You will, don't worry. A big, messy, international ensemble who seemingly emerged from nowhere not long ago, and on paper at least, should never have worked. At times they resemble a misfit church orchestra crossed variously with U2, Bjork, The Beatles and Radiohead. Cripes! Yet, they've produced two amazing albums so far, and live were the best act I saw in 2007. They're young and keen and seem to lack the jaded cynicism of true rock survivors. Oh oh.

The Arcade Fire/Oslo Process juggernaut is the buzz right now. But two albums and one tour do not the pantheon make. In Wellington in February and Dublin in May, the Oslo Process must produce the goods on the big issues that will determine whether it will produce a "Sgt Peppers" or "Dark Side of the Moon" - something that's great music to many ears in addressing the humanitarian effects of cluster munitions. Exceptions to a prohibition on cluster munitions and issues surrounding military inter-operability are immediate challenges, and elegant arrangements to weave solutions regarding these need to be part of its coda.

Even if I'm a bigger fan of the The Arcade Fire right now (I think they're more likely to do exciting things) don't write off Duran Duran. Let's hope they both do good work, and as I already said you can like'em both at the same time. Just like the CCW and the Oslo Process, which are - in the words of the UN Secretary-General - "complementary and mutually reinforcing".

Music to our ears. We'll review (I mean report on) both in the course of this year. In the meantime, enough grumbling already, there's work to be done.

John Borrie


John Borrie likes to his listen to his music collection and invent new ways to mix metaphors badly, preferably with a Stratocaster or Les Paul in hand. He is easing very gently into another serious year of Disarmament Insight blogging.

Photo of anonymous classical rock chick courtesy of author.

Signing Off for 2007

The (thankfully quite uncontroversial) Meeting of States Parties to the Biological Weapons Convention has just ended, bringing to a close a typically busy year of disarmament and arms control work in Geneva. In the previous posting, John Borrie reviewed 2007 as perceived and analysed through the lens of the Disarmament Insight blog. Before signing off for the year and wishing all of our dedicated readers a pleasant holiday, I would like (at the risk of ruining your festive repose) to cast an eye forward to what awaits us next year.

Of course, we'll have all of the usual fare:

• -- The Conference on Disarmament will continue its struggle to break its now more than decade-long deadlock so that it can finally start negotiating a treaty banning the production of fissile materials for nuclear weapons.

• -- States Parties to the Biological & Toxin Weapons Convention will continue their intersessional work programme (this time by holding expert meetings on biosafety and biosecurity, as well as on codes of conduct for life scientists) and will also hold their usual annual Meeting of States Parties.

• -- States Parties to the Convention on Certain Conventional Weapons (CCW) will also hold their usual annual meetings on Amended Protocol II (on mines, booby traps and other devices), on Protocol V (on explosive remnants of war), and on the convention as a whole.

In addition, however, we will have some new and interesting elements thrown into the 2008 mix:

• -- There will be a bevy of new so-called "Groups of Governmental Experts" discussing such issues as missiles, conventional ammunition stockpiles, an Arms Trade Treaty, as well as, in the context of the Convention on Certain Conventional Weapons, discussing Protocol V on explosive remnants of war and "negotiating a proposal" to deal with the humanitarian impact of cluster munitions.

• -- The Oslo Process on cluster munitions will hold conferences on opposite sides of the world, in Wellington (February) and Dublin (May), the latter to finish negotiating a treaty banning cluster munitions that cause unacceptable harm to civilians. A signing ceremony is foreseen for Oslo in the autumn.

• -- The second Preparatory Committee for the 2010 Review Conference of the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty will take place in Geneva in April/May.

• -- The third Biennial Meeting of States on the UN Programme of Action on the illicit trade in small arms and light weapons will be held in New York in July.

So, whether you work in the area of disarmament and arms control as an analyst, activist, diplomat or observer, have a nice break over the holidays. You're going to need it!

This is Disarmament Insight signing off for 2007. We will be back online early next year to bring you more alternative, out of the box (and off-the-wall) analysis of the latest developments in disarmament and arms control from a humanitarian perspective.

Until then, peace.

Patrick Mc Carthy


Photo credit: "The War on Christmas" by Cuttlefish. Retrieved from Flickr.

The Power of the President

What makes for a successful multilateral arms control negotiation? Sufficient political will? Maturity of the issue being negotiated? Pressure from civil society? A critical mass of seasoned diplomats? The list is long and there is no single silver bullet that will ensure success every time.

But what about the role played by the President of such negotiations; the Ambassador chosen by the negotiating parties (usually on the basis of regional rotation) and entrusted with the delicate task of guiding negotiations to a successful conclusion? All other things being equal, does the President have the power to tip the balance and conjure success where none seemed possible?

Observing Pakistan's Ambassador Masood Khan (picture) in action at the 6th Review Conference of the Biological and Toxin Weapons Convention (BTWC) at the end of 2006 would lead one to answer this question in the affirmative. The 6th Review Conference was up against formidable challenges. Years-long efforts to negotiate a verification protocol to the Convention had collapsed in 2001 after the United States withdrew its support. As a result, the 5th Review Conference had to be suspended for a whole year to allow tempers to cool. States were heading into the 6th Review Conference having completed some constructive intersessional work but resentments were still raw. Hopes were not high that the meeting could put the BTWC process back on track.

Against the odds, Ambassador Khan guided the conference to a successful conclusion; i.e. a strong final document and a demanding intersessional work programme in the run-up to the 7th Review Conference in 2011. He has gone a long way towards explaining how he did so in an article he published in Disarmament Diplomacy earlier this year, although I have the impression that we may have to wait for his memoirs to get the full story. The article offers a fascinating and rare insight into the internal workings of a multilateral disarmament machine; worn cogs, snapped springs and all. My favourite characterisation, however, of how Ambassador Khan pulled it off was provided by my Disarmament Insight colleague, John Borrie, who described as "diplomatic jujitsu" the way Ambassador Khan kept delegations off balance by shuffling the agenda and tabling proposals.

Masood Khan is not one to rest on his laurels and is already looking for new challenges. He plans to introduce an innovative new way of interacting with NGOs and the biotech industry at next month's BTWC Meeting of States Parties. After that, he will turn his attention to the Convention on Certain Conventional Weapons (CCW) - also known as the 'Inhumane Weapons Convention' - where he will preside over the Meeting of States Parties in November 2008.*

That meeting is due to hear a progress report on negotiations by a CCW Group of Governmental Experts on a proposal to address the humanitarian impact of cluster munitions. Given the inability of the CCW over last number of years to address adequately the harm caused to civilians by cluster munitions, and the emergence outside of the CCW of the ambitious Oslo Process on cluster munitions, the challenge facing the CCW on this issue is significant.

Ambassador Khan is undoubtedly a skillful diplomat who domonstrates that diplomacy is an art; abstract and sometimes even martial. The 6th Review Conference of the BTWC was his masterpiece. Helping to get the CCW to agree on an adequate response to the humanitarian impact of cluster munitions would be no less of an achievement.


Patrick Mc Carthy


* An earlier version of this entry stated in error that that Ambassador Khan had been nominated to preside over seven weeks of CCW negotiations in 2008 on the issue of cluster munitions.

References

Masood Khan, "The 2006 BWC Review Conference: The President's Reflections." Disarmament Diplomacy, issue no. 84, spring 2007.

John Borrie, "The Limits of Modest Progress: The Rise, Fall, and Return of Efforts to Strengthen the Biological Weapons Convention." Arms Control Today, October 2006.

Photo Credit: Photo of H.E. Mr. Masood Khan - Ambassador Extraordinary and Plenipotentiary, Permanent Representative of Pakistan to the United Nations and other Specialised Agencies in Geneva - retrieved from the website of the Pakistan Mission to the United Nations Geneva.

Do "non-lethal" weapons really exist?

Last week, I spent a day with a very interesting mixture of people talking about so-called “non-lethal” weapons. It was quite the multi-stakeholder encounter.

There was the demand side of the non-lethal equation; the police officers and soldiers who were interested in finding out what new technologies could provide in the way of enhanced capabilities to control riots, disperse crowds or otherwise apply force to sticky situations all the while minimising deaths and permanent injuries.

The supply side of the non-lethal equation was also well represented – the arms manufacturers, ever eager to apply new technologies in ingenious ways to respond to the demands of their customers. At one point during the proceedings, we were even given demonstrations of some of the newest non-lethal innovations; e.g. a handgun that fires jets of chemical irritant at 430km/h, a trailer-mounted gas dispenser, and the mother of all paint-ball guns (complete with colour-coded slugs filled with a choice of indelible or washable paint or chemical pepper agent).

Mixed in among the demand and the supply elements were what you might call the multipliers – research and technology professionals offering their services to help bring the two sides together.

There were, however, no lawyers present.

I’m not a lawyer myself, but I found myself stepping into that role on numerous occasions throughout the day, inadequately of course. After all, the debate on so-called non-lethal technologies throws up a lot of thorny questions, legal and otherwise.

First and foremost, what is a non-lethal weapon? Most definitions focus on the purpose for which the weapon was designed, i.e., to incapacitate people while minimising fatalities. But the lethality of a weapon is determined less by the purpose of its design and more by the context of its use. It depends on how, where and when the weapon is employed, the motivation of the user of the weapon and, crucially, the vulnerability of the victim of the weapon (for more on this approach, see Aurélia Merçay's posting of September 5).

Looked at in this way, an AK47 assault rifle is 100% lethal when used to execute a person tied to a post (the intent of the user is to kill and the vulnerability of the victim is very high). When used in combat conditions, however, an AK47 is much less lethal, killing on average less than 20% of those it hits.

Similarly, a Taser electroshock device, now used by numerous police forces, was designed as a non-lethal weapon and is normally employed as such. However, if the user has malicious intent or is badly trained and/or if the victim is particularly vulnerable (e.g. suffering from an epileptic fit) it too can be lethal.

As a final example, the incapacitating agent pumped by Russian forces into the Moscow theatre on 26 October 2002 ended the siege but killed at least 129 of the 850 theatregoers. That’s upwards of a 15% lethality rate; comparable with that of an AK47 under combat conditions.

The point that I am trying to make here is that there is no such thing, per se, as a “non-lethal” weapon. All weapons can be lethal under certain conditions.

Another point that worried me was that participants in the meeting did not seem to draw a distinction between the domestic application of non-lethal force by police and its international application by soldiers. This is a crucial distinction. The Biological Weapons Convention prohibits biological and toxin weapons, even in incapacitating doses, being used anywhere, either in a domestic or international context.

The Chemical Weapons Convention, however, contains an exception that allows chemical agents such a tear gas to be used in domestic riot-control situations. It is therefore legal, under domestic law, for most police forces to fire tear gas to disperse angry crowds. It would be illegal, under international law, for a soldier to do so in war.

The reason for this counterintuitive distinction? In a word, escalation. Allowing chemical weapons, even tear gas, to be used in war could lead to an escalation in chemical warfare retaliation that would be as bad, or even worse, than that experienced during World War I.

With such things at stake, we really do need to have lawyers in the room as well.


Patrick Mc Carthy


Reference

Photo Credit: Timophoto on flickr.

Arms and Non-State Groups

The biggest threat facing the world today, according to some, is weapons of mass destruction (WMD) in the hands of terrorists. A chilling enough scenario, granted, but how likely is it actually to transpire? And what about weapons other than WMD in the hands of non-State groups broadly defined? Shouldn't we be worried about that as well?

Indeed, there is plenty to be worried about, as was highlighted this week by a UNIDIR seminar on "Preventing the Spread of Weapons to Non-State Armed Groups." Interestingly, participants seemed to be less worried about the prospect of terrorists building or otherwise acquiring a nuclear device than they were about them getting their hands on such relatively low-tech devices as shoulder-fired guided missiles capable of downing commercial airliners.

It all seemed to boil down to a (albeit inexact) calculation of risk; understood as probability multiplied by consequences. One speaker rated the probability of terrorists acquiring nuclear weapons as being so low as to drastically reduce the overall risk, despite the dire consequences of it actually happening. Another pointed out that - in the age of the biotech revolution, suicide bombings and global travel - a more effective way for terrorists to use weapons of mass destruction might be to infect themselves with a new strain of a deadly virus and travel on international flights, potentially unleashing a global pandemic.

For me, however, the most interesting part of the whole debate centered on the acquisition by non-State groups of conventional weaponry; something that happens all the time. Most States represented in the UNIDIR seminar came into being as a result of armed struggle - i.e. as non-state armed groups rising up against colonial powers or pre-existing States. Obviously, States existing today have a strong interest in maintaining the status-quo by crushing all non-State groups that undermine their sovereignty or threaten their very existence . However, some States still seem to reserve the right to arm non-State groups in other countries, using them as tool of foreign policy to promote regime change.

The debate on preventing the spread of weapons to non-State armed groups tends to become immediately polarized along the lines of "terrorist" vs. "freedom fighter." Although the UNIDIR seminar did not manage to avoid this completely, it did suggest some interesting nuances. For example, participants suggested that it is more useful to speak about terrorist "acts" than about terrorist "groups" and that, since there are many different kinds of non-State armed groups - e.g. aspiring or not to statehood; engaging or not in attacks on civilians - it is not useful to paint them all with the same brush.

The thorny issue of arming non-State groups did not feature very prominently in last week's international conference in Geneva on small arms transfer controls (see my posting of August 23), which is perhaps one of the reasons that the conference was so successful. The issue will have to be dealt with head on, however, by the nascent UN process leading towards the negotiation of a legally-binding Arms Trade Treaty regulating the transfer of all conventional weapons. I have a feeling it will be a difficult nut to crack.


Patrick Mc Carthy

Reference

Photo credit: Monohex on flickr

BWC: 2007 Meeting of Experts

If you were in the Palais des Nations last Friday morning, you might have heard applause emanating from one of the conference chambers. That was the end of the 2007 Meeting of Experts of the Biological Weapons Convention (BWC). In comparison to other events in the Palais like the Human Rights Council, it was a low-key gathering. It is, however, the latest chapter in the reinvigoration of multilateral efforts to strengthen the norms against poisoning and deliberate spreading of disease.

One of the highlights of the meeting was the official launch of the new Implementation Support Unit (ISU) for the BWC. The ISU has three staff. As the ISU’s size suggests, it isn’t designed to solve the problem of biological weapons by itself. Rather, it was created to help states help themselves. They decided not to contain resources dedicated to addressing these weapons in a single monolithic institution but to keep them in the hands of governments and other international organizations, where most of the time they are dedicated to other issues, such as tackling naturally occurring infectious disease.

The ISU, however, will be key in bringing these resources together when necessary, and ensuring that they are interwoven to form a new type of fabric - one that will offer the flexibility of lycra, the strength of silk but be as soft on political sensitivities as cashmere is on skin. (Ed – Piers, I think we need to get you to the pub for a pint and a game of darts.)

Last week’s BWC meeting was an important opportunity for experts from governments, international and non-governmental organizations to meet and discuss national and regional measures and approaches to implement the provisions of the Convention. This year’s discussions had a special focus on law enforcement. While clearly not the stuff of newspaper headlines, this kind of collective work is absolutely crucial to building a norm that’s effective in preventing biological weapons, and identifying emerging risks to the regime.

By all accounts the BWC meeting was considered a success, with many substantive proposals. As importantly, there’s a renewed sense of confidence present despite past difficulties stewardship of the Convention has faced. This will help move the BWC higher up national agendas and strengthen impetus for implementing its obligations.

Although it’s clear that there’s no ‘one size fits all’ solution to implementing the BWC, a number of common understandings, themes and elements emerged during the course of the meeting. There was also a shared sense that better use could be made of the new ISU as a catalyst in better coordinating and managing implementation activities. Another important sense was that there’s a need to build national capacities – in addition to guidance and advice on enacting legislation and regulations, some states need practical assistance to be able to enforce and manage such measures.

The ideas and proposals tabled at this meeting come on top of more general discussions on national implementation held in BWC meetings in 2003 and the review of the BWC’s operation late last year. The next annual Meeting of BWC States Parties, due to be held this December, will be tasked with ‘cooking up’ these raw ingredients into something more accessible and polished that can then be ‘served’ to those states looking to improve or enhance their national arrangements or who have just joined the treaty (4 countries already have this year.)

There is an old maxim that a chef is only as good as his last meal. So if the BWC is to continue to be at the forefront, it will be critical that each and every one of its meetings add something new to the ‘stockpot’. This one certainly did, and it bodes well for December’s menu.


This is a guest blog by Dr. Piers Millett, a member of the BWC Implementation Support Unit team.


References

The BWC Implementation Support Unit’s website can be viewed here.

Video entitled "What You Should Know About Biological Warfare (1952)", available on Youtube at www.youtube.com/watch?v=a6NdxEmqvtk.

Last Chance for the Conference on Disarmament?

The Conference on Disarmament -- "the world's sole multilateral disarmament negotiating forum" as its 65 member States frequently remind us -- has featured either directly or tangentially in a number of postings on this blog (see in particular August 8 and March 28).

And with good reason. In existence since 1983, the CD has negotiated such landmark agreements as the Chemical Weapons Convention and the Comprehensive Nuclear Test Ban Treaty (CTBT). Its antecedents, which date back to the Ten-Nation Committee on Disarmament of 1959-60, gave us the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, the Biological Weapons Convention and the Environmental Modification Convention.

Despite its impressive track record, however, the CD has not been able to produce a multilateral disarmament treaty since finishing its work on the CTBT in 1996. This more than decade-long deadlock has its roots in disagreements on which issues to deal with next.

There is broad agreement among CD member States that a treaty banning the production of fissile material for nuclear explosive devices is ripe for negotiation. A number of thorny issues would have to be worked out -- would existing stocks of fissile materials be covered and how, if at all, would such a treaty be verified? -- but the will is there to negotiate. The United States even put a draft treaty on the table in May 2006!

However, some States, most notably China and the Russian Federation, would like to make such negotiations conditional upon making progress on preventing an arms race in outer space (PAROS). Both countries have fast-growing civilian space industries and are concerned about the lead that the United States has built up in space technology, with potential applications in both the civilian and military fields.

Until quite recently, linking negotiations on fissile material with progress on PAROS was considered unacceptable by the United States. But this all changed earlier this year during a period of quite intensive discussions in the CD when the United States signaled its willingness to discuss ways to prevent an arms race in outer space in order to get negotiations on fissile materials off the ground. The scene was set for a historic breakthrough. It seemed for a time as if the CD might actually spring back into life.

But the breakthrough has not materialised. China has been playing for time, arguing that it needs to study intensively the work plan that is now on the table. In the meantime, other countries have raised their voices with objections. Pakistan, for example, has argued that negotiating only on fissile material would be too narrow a focus for the CD and that negotiations should commence simultaneously on five issues!

Having built itself up with initiative, hard work and a healthy dose of realism during the first half of 2007, the CD is again rapidly deflating. Whether it can recover from this latest disappointment and go on to live up to its past glory remains to be seen.

What is clear, however, is that more and more governments are questioning the justification of maintaining disarmament Ambassadors in Geneva while the CD languishes. The more governments withdraw their most experienced disarmament negotiators to Capitals, the less likely it becomes that the "world's sole multilateral disarmament negotiating forum" will be able again to live up to that lofty description.


Patrick Mc Carthy


Reference

Picture: The Council Chamber, meeting place of the Conference of Disarmament in the Palais des Nations, Geneva (Photo credit: sara.wagle on flickr.com)

On the Ropes

BBC Radio Four (Intelligent Speech is how the Beeb modestly describes it) has some of the best radio programmes in the English-speaking world.

Many will be familiar with the BBC World Service. But unless you’ve lived in the numerous isles off just of the west European coast, chances are that you will not quite understand how addictive the station is. From aficionados of Women’s Hour to eccentric fans of Mornington Crescent and Just a Minute, Radio Four listeners are a peculiarly well-read, well informed group of obsessives. (I should here, I suppose - if I have to - give the The Archers addicts a mention. But they’re a very strange lot and are probably right now listening to one of the twice-repeated daily episodes dedicated to the sleepy, fictitious farming town of Ambridge and its drama-queen inhabitants).

(Disarmament Insight team note – for our part, we’re addicted to Melvyn Bragg’s weekly BBC Radio Four show and pod cast on the history of ideas, In Our Time.)

It was to just such an erudite public audience that Dr Hans Blix, former Director-General of the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) and former Chairman of the UN Monitoring, Verification and Inspection Commission in Iraq bared his soul.

On the Ropes is a half-hour interview slot in which journalist John Humphreys interviews famous people about a difficult time in their lives, in which they have had to endure stormy weather.

Dr Blix was asked tough questions about the time leading up to the 2003 invasion of Iraq. No doubt all reading this will remember how Dr Blix, along with Dr ElBaradei of the IAEA, regularly faced the Security Council to give accounts of the progress that UN inspectors were making in the search for weapons of mass destruction (WMD) in Iraq.

In the On the Ropes interview we learned of Dr Blix’s dawning realization that there were no major stocks of biological weapons in Iraq, or any other type of WMD for that matter. He was also increasingly uncomfortably aware that this understanding was not going to be able to stop the war. He talked also in the interview about Dr David Kelly, the British bioweapons inspector who died soon after the invasion.

The interview is thought-provoking, honest and, at times, moving. It’s a fascinating account of how one man – Blix – with the knowledge was also powerless to stop the war, despite being able to tell the facts openly and honestly. Something this Swedish lawyer is still determined to do.

I recommend you take the time to listen to On the Ropes and – who knows? – you may become as addicted to Radio Four as the rest of us.


Guest blog from Patricia Lewis

Patricia is Director of UNIDIR.


References

Dr. Blix’s radio interview is online at: http://www.bbc.co.uk/radio4/ontheropes/pip/sy4r8/

BBC Radio 4’s show entitled “In Our Time” can be downloaded at: http://www.bbc.co.uk/radio4/history/inourtime/

Photo of Hans Blix retrieved from Flickr, see http://www.flickr.com/photos/epsen/447192121/