DEFENSE TREATY INSPECTION READINESS PROGRAM
Providing a resource for arms control treaty implementers to assist them with keeping up-to-date on the issues and events critical to understanding and eliminating chemical and biological weapons.
On December 9, 2009, Ellen Tauscher, U.S. Under Secretary for Arms Control and International Security, unveiled the Obama administration’s new National Strategy for Countering Biological Threats during her address to the Annual Meeting of the States Parties to the Biological Weapons Convention (BWC) in Geneva, Switzerland. The policy seeks to increase health security in order to reduce the impact of infectious disease outbreaks, whether natural or man-made.
In her remarks, Secretary Tauscher defined the broad goals of the Strategy as promoting confidence in effective treaty implementation; enhancing cooperation to complement the public health work of international bodies such as the World Health Organization (WHO); and making the BWC the premier forum for discussion of the full range of biological threats, including bioterrorism.
The Strategy uses the acronym PROTECT to describe its seven specific objectives:
Promote global health security: Increase the availability of and access to knowledge and products associated with the life sciences capable of reducing the impact of outbreaks of infectious disease whether its origin is from natural, accidental, or deliberate causes.
Reinforce norms of safe and responsible conduct: Reinforcing a culture of responsibility, awareness, and vigilance among all people using and benefiting from life science, to ensure that this knowledge is not diverted to harmful purpose.
Obtain timely and accurate insight on current and emerging risks: Improve threat identification, notification, and assessment capabilities and our understanding of the global progress and distribution of the life sciences to help identify and understand new and emerging challenges and to inform appropriate actions to manage the evolving risk.
Take reasonable steps to reduce the potential for exploitation: Identify, sensitize, support, and otherwise safeguard the knowledge and capabilities of the life sciences and related information that could be vulnerable to misuse.
Expand our capability to prevent, attribute, and apprehend: Further hone our abilities to identify and stop those with ill intent to reduce the risk of single, multiple, or sequential attacks.
Communicate effectively with all stakeholders: Ensure that the U.S. government is advancing cogent, coherent, and coordinated messages.
Transform the international dialogue on biological threats: Promote a robust and sustained discussion among all nations regarding the evolving biological threat and identify mutually agreed steps to counter this threat.
This Strategy does not change U.S. policy with regard to not supporting the creation of a verification regime for the BWC. In her remarks, Secretary Tauscher stated, “We have carefully reviewed previous efforts to develop a verification protocol [to the BWC], and have determined that a legally binding protocol would not achieve meaningful verification or greater security." The Secretary cited rapid advances in biological research and the potential for dual-use as making compliance verification “extraordinarily difficult.” “We believe that a protocol would not be able to keep pace with the rapidly changing nature of the biological weapons threat," she said.
In 2001, the Bush administration withdrew from ongoing negotiations for establishing a verification protocol for the BWC. Bush administration officials stated that such a system would not increase confidence in the Convention and would create an undue burden on U.S. research efforts and the biotechnology and pharmaceutical industries due to the costs associated with hosting on-site inspection activities and complying with other bureaucratic obligations.
[For more information, link to the full text of the U.S. Strategy or Secretary Tauscher’s Remarks]
"The Obama administration will not seek to revive negotiations on a verification protocol to the convention. We have carefully reviewed previous efforts to develop a verification protocol and have determined that a legally binding protocol would not achieve meaningful verification or greater security. . . . We believe that a protocol would not be able to keep pace with the rapidly changing nature of the biological weapons threat."
-- Ellen Tauscher, U.S. Under Secretary for Arms Control and International Security, in her Address to the Annual Meeting of the States Parties to the Biological Weapons Convention, Geneva, Switzerland, December 9, 2009
The States Parties to this Convention undertake to consult one another and to cooperate in solving any problems which may arise in relation to the objective of, or in the application of the provisions of, the Convention. Consultation and Cooperation pursuant to this article may also be undertaken through appropriate international procedures within the framework of the United Nations and in accordance with its Charter.
— Convention on the Prohibition of the Development, Production, Stockpiling and Use of Chemical Weapons and on their Destruction (Chemical Weapons Convention), Article IV, paragraph 6
Under Secretary of State Ellen O. Tauscher Addressing the States Parties of the Biological Weapons Convention in December 2009 
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