A Modular-Incremental Approach to Improving Compliance Verification With the Biological Weapons Convention.

Abstract

The Ninth Review Conference of the Biological Weapons Convention (BWC) concluded in December 2022 with the establishment of a working group that will make recommendations on, among other issues, verification and compliance, enabling discussion on a topic that was sidelined for over 2 decades. Unlike other major disarmament treaties, the BWC does not have an effective mechanism for verifying compliance among states parties. Verification is an essential function of many international disarmament treaties; however, there is little agreement among stakeholders about what form or function verification should take for the BWC. For the Chemical Weapons Convention or the Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons, for example, verification is based on a framework driven by accounting that involves the meticulous documentation of facilities, tools, and raw materials of relevance to the fulfillment of state treaty obligations. Relying on this accounting approach alone is both technologically and practically infeasible in the context of the BWC. The dual-use nature of bioscience makes it difficult to differentiate between peaceful and offensive applications from an accounting-driven framework. Furthermore, the increased availability of and ever-widening access to biotechnology has increased the potential for misuse by a variety of nonstate actors. These new, distributed security risks present different verification challenges in the biological context, in contrast with the Chemical Weapons Convention or Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons, and have led some experts to argue that compliance verification is currently impossible, although others have pointed out the opportunities that advances in biosciences bring to technical verification. This commentary offers solutions to some of the political and technical challenges that have led to this conclusion. No single verification activity can provide unambiguous evidence for assessing treaty compliance. A pragmatic approach to BWC compliance verification should leverage