U.S. kills germ warfare pact
Published 9:00 pm Wednesday, July 25, 2001
The Washington Post
WASHINGTON — The United States on Wednesday rejected a draft U.N. agreement to control germ warfare, effectively killing nearly seven years of international negotiation, saying that the risks it posed to U.S. commercial concerns and national security were too great.
Donald Mahley, the American representative to the talks in Geneva, told the working group there that while "no nation is more committed than the U.S. to combating the (biological weapons) threat" there were "serious substantive difficulties" with the text that caused Washington to reject it. And U.S. officials promised to continue working on other options to prevent the use of biological weapons.
The draft agreement is an effort to implement the 1972 Biological Weapons Convention, which more than 140 countries, including the United States, have ratified. That earlier treaty did not have provisions on how inspections would be handled for sites where biological weapons were suspected of being developed.
The nations had set a November deadline to complete enforcement provisions for the accord, although the U.S. decision now throws the timetable into disarray. It would be possible for the other countries to go ahead and ratify the protocol without the United States, although a State Department official termed that "not a good idea."
The decision comes after the Bush administration has rejected the Kyoto global warming accord and U.S. officials acknowledged that they could face further criticism from European allies.
But senior State Department officials were keen to stress Wednesday that the United States would commit itself to finding workable alternatives to the rejected protocol.
