Summary: I attended the recent Biological Weapons Convention (BWC) meetings in Geneva as an observer. My overall take is that (perhaps unsurprisingly) the BWC is dysfunctional and slow and not very useful in preventing biorisk. I also hand-wave about whether paying for people to visit the BWC is cost-effective.

What Happened

You can read helpful summaries of each day’s meetings written by a civil society disarmament expert, and there are also complete recordings on UN TV. If you just want to hear my overall analysis, you can skip to the next section.

The first week comprised the Working Group on Strengthening the BWC and focused on possible verification mechanisms, and improving the structures, processes, and finances of the Convention. We heard from a series of scientific and governance experts about how other related treaties (on chemical and nuclear weapons) work and what the BWC could learn from them. We also heard about the history of negotiations in the BWC and what that means for discussions now; this is useful as many of the country delegates are themselves new-ish but the issues have been under consideration for decades.

Country delegates would ask questions of the experts, and also had the chance to make statements and give oral summaries of working papers they had submitted. Mostly the discussions were at least on-topic, except for on several days there was a ~20-minute digression arguing about the Russo-Ukrainian war.

In terms of substantive topics discussed, I think we didn’t make much progress:

• The delegates discussed the annual submission of Confidence Building Measures (CBMs) where countries list all their biolabs and describe steps taken to mitigate risks. All countries are meant to submit these reports annually, but 2021 was the first year where more than half the signatories of the BWC did so. Many delegates opined about how it is sad so many countries don’t submit and that we should make it easier to do so. The value of the CBMs themselves is dubious though given countries could easily leave off any labs they didn’t want the world to know about, and submissions are often incomplete, secret, or nonexistent.
• Everyone seemed to agree that the BWC was underfunded and that other countries should contribute more, but no breakthrough is in sight for structural reform.
• Probably most importantly, for the first time in 20 years the delegates discussed ‘verification’ measures, that is how to check whether countries are lying about having bioweapons programs. The experts and countries generally agreed this is a lot harder than for nuclear weapons, where it is more obvious that a facility is for weaponization rather than peaceful uses, and satellite imagery makes nuclear facilities easier to spot. Conversely, bioweapons labs can be small and nondescript, and easy to conceal as labs doing legitimate work. The US, I think reasonably, argued that there are so many biolabs in the world (>10,000 depending on how you count) that we could probably only inspect a small fraction of them each year, and therefore that a dodgy lab could easily get away without being inspected for decades. Even if it were inspected, it would be hard to realise, let alone prove, that it was pursuing weaponization. Russia and China complained that the US was just not committed to the BWC and verification. So some progress was made in the sense of discussing a few important issues, but we still feel very far away from an effective verification protocol, if indeed one is possible.

The second week was the annual Meeting of States Parties (MSP), which at the best of times is more political and less object-oriented towards discussing actual biorisks. This year, on the first morning of the meeting, the Russian delegate disputed the rules of procedure for the remaining three days, and this led to a long debate about whether ‘observers’ such as NATO and the EU could officially join the meeting. This impasse couldn’t be solved, and so the next 48 hours of meetings were replaced by backroom talks to try to get a resolution. These failed, and late on the last evening the delegates passed a report essentially saying that they met, didn’t decide anything, and would meet again next year. This excerpt gives a sense of the broader problems with the UN regarding underfunding:

Interactions continued in the main conference room until 18:00 when it had to be vacated as the audio system requires staffing to run it.  The MSP moved a short distance to Salle XXVI.  There was also no interpretation available at such a late hour and inevitably this put some delegates at a disadvantage.  At 21:00, a number of the other room systems, such as the projector and audio equipment, shut off on a timer as part of the UN cost saving measures.  This led to delegates having to speak loudly to be heard.

Unimportantly, but symbolically, the escalators were switched off and the heating reduced to save the UN money, as well.

What I Think

I am glad the BWC exists. Boo bioweapons! The fact that lots of countries will frown at you if you decide to be a rogue state and produce and deploy bioweapons despite the BWC is surely on the margin helpful.

However, my guess is that the BWC will have a rather small part to play in driving biorisks to very low levels this, and moreover that it is not a very promising avenue to pursue. I mainly just have intuitions and opinions to back this up. I expect if a country thought it could gain a major strategic advantage by flouting the BWC they would do so with relatively few compunctions. And to get to a position where we could effectively monitor and prevent countries from pursuing bioweapons programs, I think we would need something closer to ‘build a world government’ than ‘tweak the BWC and throw it an extra few million dollars’. (Building a world government may still be a good idea, it would just be very hard.) So personally, I am now less keen to work for the BWC directly or as a diplomat at these negotiations (though possibly for some people this would be a great choice).

A somewhat separate question is how valuable it is for junior biosecurity people to visit the BWC as observers. NTI|Bio paid for me to go as part of their Youth Delegation. I am grateful to them, and glad I went and overall had a nice time!^[1] Apart from being enjoyable for me, which isn’t a sufficient reason to spend altruistic dollars, probably the main value was meeting various other interesting people within the NTI Delegation, and from other orgs. The meetings themselves were exciting to be in at first (‘wow, I’m at the UN!’) but oftentimes fairly boring thereafter. The question is whether flying people to Geneva (which is a very expensive city to be in!) is cost-effective compared to something much less good but much much cheaper and more scalable like watching a session or two online together remotely and reading the summaries, discussing what we saw, and having some guest speaker and networking calls. As well as the nice vibes of being in person, an important thing this would miss out on is that as imperfect as it is the BWC meeting in Geneva does act as something of a Schelling point for lots of interesting biosecurity people to gather and meet each other. Additionally, the official side events are in-person only.

Overall, I am quite unsure whether this is cost-effective to run, and I am not a grant-maker so don’t have a great sense of the market of other interventions we could fund instead. I think personally I wouldn’t make an altruistic donation for someone like me to spend a week at the BWC meetings.

Feel free to message me if you want to talk about your experience at the BWC, ask more about mine, or discuss any of this more!

Disclaimer: These views are my own, my guess is NTI would disagree. Of course, there are many people who know far more about the BWC and have been to its meetings for many years, who are better qualified to write about this (and I encourage you to! Including commenting here disagreeing). I think the existence of such people isn’t sufficient reason for me not to have a go writing up some of my own thoughts though. I did so fairly quickly (2 hours) and have not run this by anyone.

1. ^{^}

   I even experience my first snowfall! :)