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  About Dr Julian Perry Robinson

Julian Perry Robinson is a Professorial Fellow of Science & Technology Policy Research at the University of Sussex, England and the Co-Director of the of the Harvard Sussex Program. Since 1967 he has published some 400 papers and monographs on chemical/biological-warfare armament and arms limitation including Effects of Weapons on Ecosystems (1979), Chemical Warfare Arms Control (1984), NATO Chemical Weapons Policy and Posture (1986), and The Problem of Chemical-Weapon Proliferation in the 1990s (1991). He also authored much of the 6-volume SIPRI study The Problem of Chemical and Biological Warfare (1971-76). Along with Matthew Meselson of Harvard University, he is co-editor of the CBW Conventions Bulletin, one of the few journals in the field of chemical and biological weapons. Professor Robinson is currently coordinating two international studies: Public Health Response to Biological and Chemical Weapons: WHO Guidance (for the World Health Organization), and. a prospective study of relationships between science and bioterrorism (for an element of the European Commission. Professor Robinson has served as an advisor or consultant to a variety of governmental and nongovernmental organisations, including the World Health Organization, the International Committee of the Red Cross, and the UK National Authority for the Chemical Weapons Convention.

Statement by Dr Julian Perry Robinson

Germs, warfare and the human impulse to keep them apar
Brief broad-brush historical introduction to the more technical matters that this panel is to address.

Disease and war have always gone together. Only rather recently have wartime combat deaths tended to exceed wartime disease deaths. Better disease control. Deadlier weapons technology.

Yet the deliberate exploitation of disease as a weapon of war is exceedingly rare in the historical record. An occasional ruse de guerre (for example in siege warfare, or in attacks on draft animals), never anything approaching a conventional method of warfare. Possibly there is a technological explanation for this seeming restraint – lack of knowledge of how to do it. Yet this does not seem sufficient. Have other constraints contributed?

Consider poison. It is a potential weapon of war whose use as such has long been regarded as peculiarly reprehensible [e.g.von Senfftenberg on Hunyadi’s poison gas at Belgrade in 1456]. Poison weapons have been subject to express prohibition since ancient times. Alva Myrdal [probably drawing on Marin (1956)] describes this vividly in The Game of Disarmament (1976). She wrote of how the Manu laws of India two and a half millennia ago, and the Vedic precepts from which they stemmed, forbad the use of poison weapons. So, too, she observed, did the warfare regulations that the Saracens drew from the Koran 1400 years ago, rules that are nowadays regarded as the first systematic code of international law. In Roman and then European law, to take two further examples, analogous prohibitions are to be found. Resort to chemical warfare – no doubt also subject to technological constraint -- thus seems to have been inhibited by societal constraint.

If so for poison warfare, then surely for disease warfare too. Before germ theories of disease began to emerge in the Nineteenth Century, concepts of disease and poison overlapped, often wholly. SIPRI [TPCBW vol 3 (1973)] has recalled for us that, in the deliberations preceding the International Declaration Concerning the Laws and Customs of War (Brussels, 1874), which continued the express proscription of poison warfare, the reference to poison and poisoned weapons clearly subsumed the deliberate spreading of disease. Even today, for example in WHO publications, “infectious disease”, which is attributable to germs, is a subcategory of “disease”, which may have all manner of causes, including the toxic action of chemicals. The essential unity of chemical and biological warfare is expressed in the 1925 Geneva Protocol, which outlaws both.

It is this notion of societal constraint on germ warfare that the title of my presentation reflects. In the Geneva Protocol do we not see the transcription into formal international-treaty language of what is actually an ancient taboo? In our present age of nuclear weapons and of ever more dreadful conventional weapons, the continuing respect for the Geneva Protocol, so resoundingly reaffirmed at the 1989 Paris Conference, is striking for its seeming irrationality: why is CBW banned when so much else that is horrible remains licit? Call it irrational, but this singling out of disease weapons for special treatment is surely the product of something altogether deeper than a comparison of one form of injury with another. It goes to the roots of what humankind finds acceptable and unacceptable. Multicultural, multiethnic and longstanding: perhaps, as Michael Mandelbaum [The Nuclear Revolution (1981)] has suggested, the taboo is somehow innate in us. Maybe it is a form of adaptation at the social level that serves
to protect our species from infection and toxicity, just as, at the level of the individual, evolution has brought with it different forms of physiological protection against such imperceptible-until-too-late threats. Maybe it is actually something quite else but, whatever it is, it exists.

In this taboo – in this norm of behaviour that eschews biological warfare and even, since the 1972 Biological Weapons Convention, rejects the study as well as the acquisition of armament for it – there is a foundation for building further societal constraint. Such strengthening of the norm is becoming essential as we face a new peril of our times: the great upsurge of biotechnology that is taking place within a social environment that seems heedless of its duality – its potential application both to the common good and to immensely threatening new weapons. As science and commerce push biotechnology still more deeply into this dire ambivalence, the taboo may be our one remaining hope.

For what the new science could be doing is not only opening up new weapon concepts for the hostile use of disease. It could also be diminishing those technological constraints to which some commentators have attributed the rarity of biological warfare.

Whether that attribution is in fact correct is questionable, even though, during 1930-1990, the technology of biological armament developed rapidly under the stimulus of war. About half-way through that period, as microbial and viral aerosol weapons for long-range delivery systems began to succeed in their field trials [e.g. a single aircraft over a Pacific test site inducing disease in test animals over an area of 2300 square kilometres], it no longer seemed extravagant to compare biological warfare with nuclear warfare. Yet, even though it is true that the peculiar conditions of the Cold War engendered preparations for continent-wide lethal biological warfare, and even though certain other forms of biological warfare were actually tried out, albeit generally to little effect, it remained the case that the hostile use of disease by human beings against human beings remained a perverse enterprise of extremely rare occurrence.

Too detailed to be presented here is a compilation of data prepared by a colleague of mine that presents particulars of all known deliberate releases of harmful biological agents during the past sixty years. Even though it includes episodes to which some doubt still attaches because of the difficulty of verification, it nevertheless records only 8 episodes.

So the challenge for today is twofold. First, how to preserve the norm so as to perpetuate that rarity. Second, how to strengthen the norm so as to preclude emergence of the profoundly new types of weapon that biotechnology could be bringing closer. Weapons perhaps capable of interfering with the fundamental biology of human beings, even to the point of exposing our very humanity to manipulation and change.

The international arms-control enterprise, in its application to the strengthening of the Biological Weapons Convention, has become too vulnerable to short-term political considerations to be capable of meeting more than a part of that challenge. Given the existence of a human impulse against the hostile use of disease, the way forward must surely lie in internatio

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