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Relevant to AI safety as biosecurity governance intersects with AI-enabled bioweapon risks; illustrates challenges of verifying compliance in dual-use technology domains, a problem analogous to AI treaty verification.
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Importance: 52/100opinion pieceanalysis
Summary
This Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists analysis examines the longstanding absence of verification mechanisms in the 1972 Biological Weapons Convention (BWC), explores why past efforts failed, and considers how advances in AI, genome editing, and biosurveillance technologies could enable new compliance verification approaches following the 2022 Ninth BWC Review Conference's renewed commitment to address these gaps.
Key Points
- •Unlike chemical and nuclear weapons treaties, the BWC has no verification provisions, and formal discussion of the topic stalled after a 2001 collapse of negotiations.
- •Advances in AI, genome editing, and converging biotechnologies have increased the urgency of establishing workable BWC verification mechanisms.
- •The 2022 Ninth BWC Review Conference saw 185 countries agree to form a working group to revisit compliance and verification issues.
- •The article argues that technological progress since 2001 may now enable verification approaches that were previously infeasible.
- •The deteriorating international security environment makes effective biological weapons governance more critical and also more politically challenging.
Cited by 1 page
| Page | Type | Quality |
|---|---|---|
| Bioweapons Risk | Risk | 91.0 |
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How the Biological Weapons Convention could verify treaty compliance - Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists
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How the Biological Weapons Convention could verify treaty compliance
By James Revill | Analysis | March 5, 2024
The former Stepnogorsk biological weapons complex in Kazakhstan. (US Department of Defense)
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While significant chemical and nuclear weapons agreements contain verification provisions, the 1972 Biological Weapons Convention (BWC) does not. World governments have not discussed this topic within the treaty framework for two decades, after several years of work to develop a verification system failed in 2001.
Much has changed in science and security since then: Artificial intelligence (AI), genome editing, and other capabilities continue to accelerate and converge, resulting in ever more powerful technologies in the hands of a growing number of actors. In parallel, the international security environment has become more complex and competitive. Under these circumstances, it was remarkable that at the Ninth BWC Review Conference in late 2022, 185 countries agreed on a report with a forward-looking strategy to form a working group to discuss the long-standing issues of compliance and verification of the BWC, among several other matters.
Despite the challenging geostrategic context, the group engaged in a constructive dialogue over three days in December 2023, managing to move beyond the impasse around the failed verification protocol negotiations decades ago that stymied discussion on verification and compliance ever since. Moreover, the group recognized significant scientific and technological developments, including new open source verification opportunities and microbial forensic techniques that weren’t available in the late 1990s and early 2000s, but may be now. But there remains a gap between what is technically possible in terms of verifying that countries are in compliance with the treaty, and what BWC member states view as politically feasible and financially acceptable.
A path to verification? Before any new methods of treaty verification, whatever their merit, can be deployed, BWC members must overcome several hurdles to develop a verification system.
Conceptual clarity . During the December
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