8 December 2001
U.S. Scuttles Germ War Conference Move to Halt Talks Stuns European Allies
Mike Allen / Steven Mufson
Washington Post

Yesterday, the final day of the three-week conference, the United States stunned European allies by proposing to terminate the group's mandate. Convinced that the action would turn the conference into a failure, organizers suspended international discussions until at least November 2002. The breakup of the meeting renewed complaints from Europe that President Bush was acting unilaterally and not heeding concerns of the nation's allies. (..)

A State Department official said the Bush administration believed the enforcement protocol under discussion would not prevent rogue nations from acquiring or developing biological weapons if they were determined to do so. "If the conference had continued, there was a danger that continued negotiations would have undermined our concerted efforts to strengthen the convention," the official said. (..)

Tibor Toth, a Hungarian official who was the conference's president, said delegates decided to suspend their work for a year instead of bringing the meeting to an unsuccessful end. "The differences between positions seemed to be irreconcilable, at least in the time remaining today," he said. "The draft final declaration was 95 percent ready." (..)

Elisa D. Harris, the National Security Council's director for nonproliferation throughout the Clinton administration, said that despite fears about the use of anthrax as a weapon, "the Bush administration has blown up an international meeting aimed at making it more difficult for countries to acquire these biological capabilities."

But Larry M. Wortzel, a national security specialist at the conservative Heritage Foundation, said that refusing to be a party to doomed verification efforts is "the sanest thing this administration has done," since the United States has been deceived so often by countries that continued buildups of biological weapons. (..)

Last month, as the Geneva conference opened, Bolton presented a U.S. plan that would not make the protocol legally binding under international law, but include it in a politically binding final document. The U.S. package also left out provisions that would have established an international implementing body with the power to investigate suspicious facilities and perform routine visits to declared facilities. However, the U.S. package retained some of the protocol's measures, such as a requirement for any country that signs the treaty to pass laws criminalizing activities prohibited by the treaty. About half of the signatories do not have such laws currently, experts say. The U.S. package would also expand the mandate of the secretary general of the United Nations to investigate suspicious disease outbreaks, clarify vague provisions for resolving compliance concerns and make it easier to extradite criminals who use biological weapons. (..)

The Federation of American Scientists, which promotes disarmament, issued a statement calling the U.S. action "sabotage," and said that European diplomats "privately accused the U.S. of deceiving them."