The Politics of Biological Disarmament - Deadly Cultures: Biological Weapons Since 1945 - page 314

total prohibition” of BW if they tried to tackle the more difficult CW is-
sues. Finally, getting agreement on the prohibition of BW would “create a
favorable climate” for negotiations on a CW ban. Optimistically, the pa-
per argued that “much of the preparatory work...forinstance, work on
methods of investigating complaints of infringements of any Conven-
tion—will be of great use when the problem of chemical weapons is tack-
led.” 42 With hindsight the arguments for separating CW from BW were
politically expedient while not necessarily substantively compelling. Nev-
ertheless, the political difficulty of tackling CW, given the differences be-
tween East and West during the Cold War concerning verification, and
given the US use of anticrop and antipersonnel chemicals in Vietnam, en-
sured that the political arguments won the day.
The dilemma posed by the Geneva Protocol—that drawing attention to
its weaknesses could serve to exacerbate them—remained an important
issue. The UK argued that the ban could be drafted so as to strengthen the
Protocol through both preambular and operative clauses, which the sub-
sequent UK draft did emphasize. The reason for what came to be known
as the general-purpose criterion was succinct: “the trouble with listing
exactly what is prohibited is that any agents of biological warfare subse-
quently developed remain outside the prohibition.” 43
The response to the issue of the difficulties of verification is worth
quoting at length. It demonstrates the great differences between what the
UK envisioned and what was actually achieved. The UK stated at the out-
set that “we do not think that verification, in the sense in which the term
is normally used in disarmament negotiations, is feasible in the field of bi-
ological warfare.” Yet Whitehall rejected this as a reason to eschew a ban
on BW and explained:
we think that the right solution is to ban the development and produc-
tion of biological weapons, and to create the strongest possible deterrents
against infringements of the ban. The objective should be to set up an ef-
fective procedure for investigating complaints that the Convention had
been infringed, rather than to establish safeguards of the kind provided
for in the Non-Proliferation Treaty. The procedure for investigating com-
plaints would have two distinct aspects:
(i) machinery for receiving complaints and initiating an investigation;
(ii) machinery for carrying out the actual work of investigation;