TUESDAY 11 APRIL 2000

PROFESSOR MALCOLM DANDO, PROFESSOR GRAHAM S. PEARSON AND DR TOM INCH

  120. Yes.
  (Professor Pearson) Of course, that is the responsibility of the Home Office as you will appreciate. I believe that the UK has been aware of this problem for a number of years and has taken that into account in the planning for emergencies. The point that I would make about both chemical and biological terrorism is that in the society in which we live, increasingly we have to prepare for possible accidents in the chemical industry or in outbreaks of disease because someone has flown in from a foreign country and suddenly we have an outbreak. I believe that the fact that you have those capabilities to cope with, say, an explosion at a chemical factory and chemicals being spread, enables a viable basis that can be built upon to counter both the chemical and biological terrorism threat. A point that comes to mind on Mr Rowlands' question and which relates to your question concerns technologies. One reason why chemical and biological weapons have not been used much—the same is true in the case of terrorism—is that when the terrorist pushes the button on a high explosive device, he can predict, in advance, how far the effects will spread because of the quantity of explosive used. However, if it is a chemical or biological device, there will be a time lapse. Chemicals make take minutes or hours to take effect and with a biological device it may be days or weeks. When the button is pushed it will depend on whether the chemical or biological material goes in the required direction, and particularly in the case of biological material whether the terrorist had been clever enough to get precisely the right particle size. The range of one to ten microns is the size needed to enter your lungs. Ordinary explosions produce lots of big drops that would splash out and may not be effective. So it comes back to how effective would the terrorist weapon or the state weapon be? That is one of the factors, fortunately, why in this country we have not seen chemical and biological terrorism attacks.

  121. We have talked about ways of control. Leaving the CWC and the BWC to one side, do you consider that there are any financial or political influences that could be used that would deter states from manufacturing chemical or biological weapons? Has that area been investigated at all, or has it been left to one side?
  (Professor Pearson) I believe that the financial and political actions are very much seen as what to do after you have evidence that someone is going down the road of trying to develop chemical or biological weapons. In both cases, the Treaty regimes provided the process for looking at how you can provide evidence as to whether or not someone is in breach of a convention. What happened then is always up to the political world and up to the Security Council. Looking at the Iraqi situation, I am not at all optimistic about the effectiveness of sanctions and the political will over a number of years. Looking at it from where I now sit, the political attention is usually for about two years at most and then something else is on the agenda. The question is, can you do something politically or financially within two years to force a nation to comply and not to go down the route of chemical and biological weapons? I am not terribly optimistic because of the difficulties of getting multilateral agreement. One of the crucial issues in the biological weapons protocol negotiations will be the transfer regimes: how do you get some of the materials and the export controls? At the moment that is a hot issue in Geneva.

  122. I see that Professor Dando is bouncing but is there not some evidence that the political pressure on South Africa very considerably altered the situation of the South African government? Professor Dando, please go on.
  (Professor Dando) I wanted to come back again to the general purpose criterion and the point that the prohibition is implemented, in part, through the international agreement but, in large part, through the operations of national legislation and the national authorities in individual states. When the Chemical Weapons Convention was coming towards the conclusion of the negotiations, considerable efforts were made to try to show people how to put into effect strong national legislation. Handbooks were produced by Professor Barry Koleman about how you do it. Many people feel that that did not quite succeed. The quality of the national legislation in many states is not as good as it should be. With the Biological Weapons Convention, we should have much greater effort to make sure that the national implementation legislation for the verification protocol is much better in many more states. That would also do a great deal to deal with the problem of terrorism because the better the quality of the legislation in individual states the less likely it is that substate actors will be able to get their hands on this.

  123. Would you not agree that that has been reinforced by IAEA in Vienna who, in considering their own regime and the possibilities of acquiring chemical and biological weapons, say the two are not comparable and it becomes very much more difficult to look at the biological and chemical inspection factors than it does with the nuclear?
  (Professor Pearson) I would like to go back to your point about South Africa which I think is absolutely correct. I think it comes down to the state and whether there is the political will to rejoin the international community of nations. Iraq shows no sign of trying to do that. South Africa wanted to and North Korea is another rogue state. Unfortunately, I believe the Iraq experience sends a message: if you are determined you want to be a rogue state and you want to acquire these weapons, hang on in there and you will still have them in seven years.

  124. I was wondering whether the comparison of the ability to monitor by the IAEA, as has been able to be proved in nuclear, for chemical weapons concern would not be as easy.
  (Dr Inch) It is certainly not going to be as easy but I think we can go further than we have done without being too intrusive on our industries in this respect. The message we get at the moment is that, as we learn from experience in chemicals, most of our industries are not finding it too intrusive and as they now learn what to expect it goes much more smoothly than hitherto. That is an encouraging sign. It is a strength of the Convention. There are many good things within it which we can build on.
  (Professor Dando) The real question is in regard to each of these different technologies have we a sufficiently strong mechanism to dissuade the proliferator. I think it is the wrong question to ask, how do these different verification systems compare. That is an interesting question but the real question is do we have a mechanism sufficiently strong to ensure that a potential proliferator decides not to go down that road.

  Sir Peter Emery: Those were my first questions to you.

  125. You pointed out at least two series worries which you have expressed to us about the Chemical Weapons Convention. You pointed out the problem of the increasing availability of what I would describe as non-conventional, toxic chemicals which are not normally associated with chemical weapons, conventional ones such as mustard gas. You have also highlighted the problem of what I would call innocent chemicals which, in the hands of someone like Saddam Hussein, can be mixed on demand at very, very short notice and used to produce a binary chemical weapon. Are you saying to us that the wording of the existing Chemical Weapons Convention is okay and the problem is one of getting enforcement and getting adequate political will to enforce it, or are you saying that in addition to the enforcement weaknesses that you highlight in your evidence the actual wording of the Convention needs to be altered to accommodate the two particular weaknesses I have referred to?
  (Dr Inch) In principle, it is fine. There is a little bit of fine tuning necessary but in principle it covers virtually everything.

  126. The wording is okay?
  (Dr Inch) Yes. There is a little problem in the Chemical Convention on the overlap of what is going to be in the Biological Convention and whether that is absolutely clear enough, but these are minor problems and I would not think that there was any drastic change necessary.
  (Professor Pearson) I would endorse that the wording is comprehensive because that general purpose criterion covers any chemicals not for permitted purposes. It is the parallel to the Biological Weapons Convention. In 2002, the Chemical Weapons Convention will have its first review conference. The Biological Weapons Convention has review conferences every five years. The next one is in 2001. At those review conferences, the final declaration adopted by consensus actually extends the understanding of what the prohibition covers. If you look at the biological one, it does, for example, pick up the genomic analyses and studies that Professor Dando was talking about. The understanding is the prohibition is broadened. As far as the point about toxins being covered by both Conventions, I have always argued that they must overlap. Otherwise, we will have the potential of a gap down which somebody might try to go, but I think this is another reason why it is so important that the Biological Weapons Protocol has a strong, comparable regime. It does not have to be identical but it should not be that chemical weapons regime is strong and the biological one is weak, or the other way round. That is something the British Government could push.

  Chairman: Gentlemen, this has been a fascinating session. I thank the three of you on behalf of the Committee for your most valuable evidence.