Dear President Bush,
So those of us in other nations who have followed this issue are puzzled.
Why should you, who claim to want to build "a
peaceful world beyond the war on terror" have done all you can to undermine
efforts to control these deadly weapons? Why should the congressmen in
your party have repeatedly sabotaged attempts to ensure that biological
and chemical agents are eliminated?
In December, your negotiators tore the biological weapons convention
to shreds. The 1972 convention, as you know, was
impossible to implement. While the treaty banned the development and
production of bioweapons, it contained no mechanism for ensuring that its
rules were enforced. So for six years, the 144 signatories had been developing
a "verification protocol", which would permit the United Nations to examine
suspected bioweapons facilities. In July, your government refused to sign
the protocol. In December, you deliberately scuttled the negotiations by
insisting, at the last minute, that the resolution be rewritten. One European
delegate, referring to the commitments your delegation had made before
the meeting, observed, "they are liars. In decades of multilateral negotiations,
we've never experienced this kind of insulting behaviour." Your actions
have rendered the convention useless, leaving the world unprotected from
the very weapons you say you want to eliminate.
Four years ago, Republican members of Congress, working alongside the
Clinton government, voted to inflict similar damage
to the chemical weapons convention. This treaty already possessed the
means to force nations to open their laboratories to inspection, which
is the key determinant of effective weapons control. But in 1998, your
party decided that the United States should not be subject to these provisions.
By passing legislation banning the removal of chemical samples from the
US by
international weapons inspectors; limiting the number of laboratories
which the US needs to declare and permitting the United
States president to refuse "challenge inspections" of its chemical
plants, Republican congressmen effectively hobbled the convention worldwide.
Under your presidency, even routine verification has been vitiated, as
government officials have told the inspectors which parts of a site they
can and cannot visit, just as Saddam Hussein has done in Iraq. Other countries
have used your intransigence as an excuse for undermining the convention
themselves.
The United States has also withheld both the money required by the chemicals
weapons inspectorate, and the funds needed to
remove and disable the vast arsenal of warheads loaded with nerve agents
in western Siberia, some of which are lying in warehouses secured only
by bicycle padlocks on the doors. It was your own senator, Pat Roberts,
who argued that the promised funding should not be issued, on the grounds
that these weapons "pose more of an environmental threat to Russia than
a security threat to the United States". Yet security at the dumps is so
lax that no one even knows how many warheads they contain.
You should not be surprised to learn that many of us have been wondering
why your professed intentions and your policies
diverge so widely. Nor should you be surprised to discover that some
of us suspect that the US might have some deadly secrets of its own, which
your government hopes to shield from public view.
In September last year, the New York Times reported that "the Pentagon
has built a germ factory that could make enough
lethal microbes to wipe out entire cities". The factory's purpose was
defensive: your employees wanted to see how easy it would be for terrorists
to do the same thing. But it was constructed without either congressional
oversight or a declaration to the biological weapons convention, in direct
contravention of international law. We could, perhaps, agree that if the
US had
discovered a similar undisclosed plant in a poor nation, then that
country's government, if it survived your initial response,
would have a good deal of explaining to do.
But of still more concern is the recent discovery that your government
has been planning to test warheads containing live
microbes in large aerosol chambers at the US Army's Edgewood Chemical
Biological Centre in Maryland. Experts in this field say that the scale
of the experiments suggests that they are not defensive, but designed to
help develop new biological weapons.
It is also clear that some elements of your existing defence programme
contravene both of the treaties your government and
your party have sabotaged. The genetically engineered fungus you have
developed for aerial spraying in Colombia plainly qualifies as a non-lethal
biological weapon. And, because your strategic aims in that country extend
beyond the simple eradication of drugs to the elimination of the leftwing
rebel forces, the chemical sprays you have been using in the regions they
control have also clearly been deployed as weapons, much as Agent Orange
was in Vietnam. Your military laboratories have been developing a new range
of genetically engineered "materials-eating bacteria", designed to destroy
runways, engines and the radar-blocking coatings of warplanes. Though they
do not directly affect humans, you would be hard-put to deny that these
are biological weapons.
Your government has also refused to destroy its stocks of smallpox,
and has insisted on developing new and more lethal
arieties of anthrax. You say that this is purely for defensive
purposes: to study how they might be used by enemy forces, or to develop
new kinds of vaccine. But the Federation of American Scientists warns that
some of the new research you are funding could be categorised as "dual
use": it could lead just as easily to attack as to defence. Even if we
were to accept your government's assurances that these programmes are solely
defensive in nature, it is surely plain that they are generating the very
hazards they claim to be confronting. The anthrax attacks in October appear
to have been launched by a scientist from within your own biological warfare
laboratories, making use of a strain developed by the US Army's medical
research institute.
Mr President, you say you want to save the world from biological and
chemical weapons. With or without the help of our own
leaders, you seem prepared to go to war in pursuit of that aim. But
surely the first step towards dealing with weapons of mass destruction
is the mass destruction of weapons? And surely your campaign for world
peace would be more convincing if you respected the conventions designed
to destroy them?
Yours sincerely, George Monbiot
www.monbiot.com
Guardian Unlimited © Guardian Newspapers Limited 2002