What lies ahead for Russia, now that Vladimir Putin has decided to return as president? For answers, go no further than Dmitri Trenin and his new book, Post-Imperium, published by the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace.

Trenin looks over the cliff 20 years ago -- at the precarious, unknown abyss after the Soviet collapse -- and discovers why Russia did not become the nightmare scenario that many predicted. He helps explain the mindset, circumstances, and outlook of Russia over the last two decades, providing an excellent vantage point to see where Russia is going.

Trenin is director of the Carnegie Moscow Center. He is clear-eyed and non-ideological. Almost every page carries an insight or fascinating revelation about these troubled years.

Trenin finds Russia has gone through a four-dimensional crisis since the 1980s:

• Letting go of communism.
• Abandoning central planning.
• Walking away from the Cold War confrontation.
• Giving up the imperial state.

What is remarkable about this period is what didn’t happen:

• There was not a nuclear conflagration.
• Russia did not attempt to restore the empire.
• There is not a failed state among the former Soviet republics.
• Russia itself is a unitary state and a country if not yet a nation, in Trenin's analysis.

Trenin forces us to think about a central tension in Russia today and in the years to come. Russia is shrunken from the Soviet empire, but it still has big ambitions. How does a weakened state go about realizing such ambitions, or accepting that it cannot? What are the dangers and internal tensions? What does it mean for the rest of the world?

Trenin connects these questions about Russia's external ambitions with the reality of its internal situation. In two brilliant paragraphs, he sums things up:

Significantly, there is no imagined community of fate in today's Russia. The end of the Soviet Union was the end of the big macro-community. People used to be bound, almost physically, hand and foot, by tradition in tsarist times; by the official ideology, the police state, and impregnable borders in Soviet times. In present-day Russia, atomized society is not really bound by any barriers, official or conventional. The more successful the people are, the wider the distance between them and the rest of the population. The elite rise, but they do not lead, and do not care to. The private definitely trumps the public. Seen from virtually any level of society, the state is too corrupt to inspire national consciousness.

Having gone through the trauma of the sudden collapse of the state with all its systems--political, economic, societal, and ideological--Russian people have learned to prioritize their private lives and not to worry too much about such things as the color of the national flag, the delineation of the borders, or the composition of the government. What have survived are family ties, local and personal connections. Once communal in spirit and fiercely patriotic, Russia has definitely gone private. On the contrary, the public space, once all-embracing, is being decidedly neglected. Like in a typical big-city apartment block, the apartments are usually refurbished and generally well-kept; by contrast, the staircase is dirty and the elevator creaky, and no one seems to care.

An important new book on biological weapons and nonproliferation is being published this week. Amy E. Smithson’s Germ Gambits: The Bioweapons Dilemma, Iraq and Beyond (Stanford University Press) is a carefully researched and fascinating study of the long struggle by United Nations weapons inspectors to uncover Saddam Hussein’s germ warfare program in the 1990s. Smithson has meticulously reconstructed the UNSCOM missions, using interviews and documents. Her narrative reveals how a group of smart, determined gumshoes eventually were able to piece together the truth about Iraq’s program, and dismantle it, long before the United States went to war. Today’s posting is a short excerpt from the book, by permission. Smithson is a senior fellow at the James Martin Center for Nonproliferation Studies of the Monterey Institute of International Studies.

From GERM GAMBITS: THE BIOWEAPONS DILEMMA, IRAQ AND BEYOND, by Amy E. Smithson. (c) 2011 Stanford University. Reproduced by permission of Stanford University Press, www.sup.org.

After Coalition forces ousted the Iraqi army from Kuwait in a four-day ground offensive in late February 1991, the ceasefire conditions included Iraq’s unconditional agreement that the United Nations would remove, render harmless, or destroy its weapons of mass destruction and ballistic missiles. This disarmament mandate was directly linked with the lifting of trade sanctions. The UN established the UN Special Commission (UNSCOM) to implement the disarmament mandate. Swedish diplomat Rolf Ekeus took the helm of UNSCOM, dispatching his seventh team of inspectors into Iraq in August 1991.

David C. Kelly, a former chief of microbiology in the United Kingdom’s chemical and biological weapons defense facility, led UNSCOM’s first biological inspection. To the task he brought field experience from inspections of dual-use facilities in the Soviet bioweapons program.  Kelly became a mainstay of the inner circle that busted Iraq’s bioweapons program, the chief of thirty-seven UNSCOM missions to Iraq. A Welsh biologist who sported wire-rimmed spectacles, Kelly was known for his quiet methods and encyclopedia knowledge of biological weapons. On UNSCOM’s first biological inspection, this unassuming scientist began to demonstrate his knack for getting interviewees to divulge more than they intended.

Together with Nikita Smidovich, one of Ekeus’s top lieutenants, Kelly fashioned a questionnaire to extract more detail from the Iraqis about the ten facilities they identified as having dual-purpose equipment, which can be used for offensive weapons programs as well as for civilian commercial and research purposes.  Kelly intended to quietly slip his twenty-eight specialists in microbiology, medicine, biotechnology, safety, and communications into Iraq, but the Iraqis knew they were coming because UNSCOM followed its previous practice of announcing inbound inspections.

Amy E. Smithson

At Habbaniyah Military Airfield on August 2, 1991 an Iraqi delegation greeted the team, including Rihab Taha, who held a PhD in biology from a British university and was later identified as a leader of the Iraqi military bioweapons program. Getting right down to business, Kelly asked for an 8:00 p.m. meeting. After the exchange of courtesies at the Palestine Hotel, Brig. Gen. Hossam Amin, who headed the nascent National Monitoring Directorate, dropped the first bombshell.

Amin said that Iraq was prepared to cooperate with UNSCOM, and then, as David Huxsoll put it, Amin began to “lay it on the table.” Huxsoll, a veterinarian who directed the U.S. Army Medical Research Institute for Infectious Diseases and later the Plum Island Animal Research Disease Center, was intimately familiar with the fine line between defensive and offensive research. He listened to Amin closely, measuring every word.

Admitting that Iraq’s earlier declaration was incorrect, Amin identified the Salman Pak facility, 15 miles south of Baghdad, as a center for military biological research and stated Iraq had engaged in a research program for “military purposes” under the auspices of the Technical Research Center, where Dr. Ahmed Murtada directed electronic, forensic, and biological research. Taha, he said, led a small military biological research group of ten people and reported to Murtada. Amin said that research was limited to work on three agents, volunteering a list of publications from Salman Pak and of the agents studied, including Iraq’s sources for those pathogens. Amin concluded that Iraq had never produced agents or had biological weapons.

Taha followed, explaining briefly why they chose to work with anthrax, botulinum toxin, and Clostridium perfringens. Their research, she claimed, consisted of academic studies about the properties of the agents, their sensitivity to antibiotics, their resistance to the environment, and issues related to immunization. Concerned that Salman Pak would be bombed, they halted the work in August 1990, autoclaved the agents, and evacuated the facility. Taha’s very nervous demeanor belied the pressure of the moment.

Kelly instantly began trying to determine what the Iraqis meant by a program of military research. “The Biological and Toxin Weapons Convention does not ban research, and defensive work with known biowarfare agents is permissible, but at a certain point, a country that wants these weapons is going to do things to make decisions about the suitability of agents for offensive purposes, and that is when the thin line is crossed,” explained Huxsoll.

Kelly inquired “about various defensive research activities with several questions and various angles, and the answer always came back that they did not do that.” For example, Kelly asked whether Iraq vaccinated its soldiers against the agents they were working with and was told that the Ministry of Health vaccinated Iraqi citizens, including soldiers, against typhoid and cholera. He asked for more detail about the tests conducted with the three agents, and Taha said they had tested these three agents to determine their LD50, a technical abbreviation for a standard toxicity test to identify how much of a substance is needed to kill 50 percent of the test animals. In other words, what the Iraqis described in various ways was not a defensive program. “For me,” said Huxsoll, “that left only one option as to what they were doing. They never labeled their work as defensive and they certainly weren’t describing defensive work, so at the very least it raised the questions of what they were doing and why.”

So Kelly finally asked point blank if their work was defensive, and Amin’s reply was, “Oh no, not defensive.” Amin then blurted that the research was offensive. Kelly asked again whether Amin was talking about a defensive program, and Amin tried to recover by saying that it could be for offensive purposes, defensive purposes, or both. After this eyebrow-raising exchange, Kelly inquired why Iraq had started an offensive bioweapons program. Amin replied that Iraq began the program in the 1980s when it was worried that Iran and Israel might have such weapons. Amin repeatedly stressed that the program was limited to research and strenuously denied that Iraq had manufactured biowarfare agents or weapons. Kelly also asked why they were revealing this program at this point, and Amin said they were concerned that this work would be misinterpreted and used for propaganda purposes. Kelly requested a statement about their work at Salman Pak, and the Iraqis later produced a handwritten version for him bearing Amin’s signature. That night, the Iraqis gave Kelly a list of ten facilities in response to UNSCOM’s questionnaire.

After this encounter, some inspectors thought the Iraqis had just confessed to an offensive research program, others that the Iraqis said or meant to say that their work was confined to permitted defensive activities. “So,” recalled Huxsoll, “there was varying interpretation of this statement amongst the team, but all of the inspectors had sufficient information that there was undoubtedly some kind of a program there. What it was had to be settled.”

Kelly, who had intended to inspect the Foot and Mouth Disease Vaccine plant at Al Daura first, said Iraq’s acknowledgment of Salman Pak “actually threw me” and that he knew he had to head there the next day. Shortly after 10:00 p.m., Kelly notified the Iraqis that Salman Pak would be inspected. Later that night, some inspectors reviewing Iraq’s facilities list saw it included the “Al Hukm plant” (or Al Hakam) and the notation that some fermenters were stored there.

At this stage, in August 1991, the inspectors were trying to gauge what the Iraqis were saying and had done, and the Iraqis were trying to determine what the inspectors already knew. With Amin’s slip of the tongue and their pre-emptive declaration of Al Hakam, the inspectors appeared to have the upper hand. Retired British Army Col. Hamish Killip, a member of UNSCOM’s first inspection team at the Al Muthanna chemical weapons compound and of Kelly’s maiden biological team, mused that “they must have been kicking themselves” because Iraq revealed at the outset more than the inspectors could independently confirm. That night, the inspectors pondered how, if at all, Al Hakam might be linked to Iraq’s bioweapons program.

In September 1991, Huxsoll led UNSCOM’s second biological team to Al Hakam, which the Iraqis said was not a warehouse after all but a chicken feed plant.  Practically everywhere the inspectors looked, they saw things that were strikingly inconsistent with a commercial operation, immediately raising suspicions that Al Hakam was indeed involved in Iraq’s bioweapons program.  After a lengthy hiatus in dedicated biological inspection missions, in the spring of 1994 UNSCOM augmented its biological staff and within months the inspectors collected sufficient incriminating evidence to paint Iraq into a corner.  On July 1, 1995, Iraq admitted that it had made biowarfare agents.

The current conventional wisdom about the failed coup in the Soviet Union twenty years ago -- great expectations, followed by disappointment -- neglects the more subtle and important aspects. The anniversary this week is a good opportunity to savor some insightful and complex assessments. Among the best, in my view:

Jonathan Steele's interview with the last Soviet president, Mikhail Gorbachev. Gorbachev is unusually introspective, and laments his failure to separate himself from the Communist party. Many people have long thought it was his greatest error, and it is refreshing to see him acknowledge it now.

A series by Der Spiegel including an interview with Gorbachev. In discussing the coup, Gorbachev admits he should not have left Moscow for vacation in the days before the hardliners moved against him. "I had become exhausted after all those years," he said. "I was tired and at my limits. But I shouldn't have gone away. It was a mistake."

Masha Lipman's terrific essay in The Washington Post. Lipman points to the bargain that Russians have made with the Kremlin, what she has called a non-participation pact. Russians have won personal freedom, and enjoy it, while apathetic and passive about public politics, in which competition has ceased to exist. This nuanced description of today's Russia points out that not all was lost. The public space may be closed, but the private space is free. That's not the Soviet Union any longer.

Leon Aron's piece in The Post is based on extensive discussions with people involved in building civil society, and he concludes there's still hope, that there's a solid foundation being built in social movements that will prove a counter-point to the efforts from above to suck all the air out of civil society.

Neil Buckley has an enlightening survey in The Financial Times [behind paywall] that looks at what happened to all the former Soviet republics, chiefly focusing on economics and political freedom. This wider lens is very useful. Estonia and Uzbekistan were once in the same country, and although differences existed then, too, look at the distance between them now.

I've already had my say on this topic, in FP, here.

In 2008, a congressional commission warned of the threat that terrorists could acquire biological weapons. The technical obstacles would be large, probably beyond the capability of any existing terrorist group, the commission said in its report, "A World At Risk." But terrorists could recruit biologists. "In other words, given the high level of know-how needed to use disease as a weapon to cause mass casualties, the United States should be less concerned that terrorists will become biologists and far more concerned that biologists will become terrorists."

A fresh examination of the Aum Shinrikyo cult in Japan offers some insights into just how difficult it might be to use pathogens for terrorism. The Center for a New American Security has published a case study on the 1990s quest for biological and chemical weapons by the group. The report shows how cult leaders struggled to create a biological weapon and failed, and only then turned to a chemical weapon, which they managed to create, launching a sarin attack on the Tokyo subway in March 1995 which killed 13 people and injured many scores. The sarin attack--and reports that Aum experimented with biological substances--shocked the world, and is one of the events, along with the 2001 anthrax letters, which ramped up attention and public spending to combat biological terrorism. Billions of dollars have been spent in the last decade to defend and protect against a possible attack.

The new study, led by former Navy Secretary Richard Danzig, chairman of the board of the think tank, is based on prison interviews with some but not all of the Aum members. While the Japanese police investigations focused on developing court evidence about the sarin attacks, Danzig and his team sought to understand Aum as a terrorist organization and the choices they made about biological and chemical attacks. One thing they discovered was that Aum turned to chemicals because they were more accessible and easier than biological methods for mass killing.

The report shows how the cult slid into violence under the leadership of founder Shoko Asahara. After losing a parliamentary election bid in February, 1990, Asahara ordered his deputies to obtain some Clostridium botulinum, the bacterium that produces the dangerous botulinum toxin. In keeping with the cult's belief in self-reliance, rather than purchase it under the guise of research, which was possible, the cult member overseeing the effort, Seiicho Endo, attempted to harvest the bacterium from soil. He tried two propagate it in cube-shaped fermenters. While it is not known exactly how much was made, apparently there was a large supply of the yellow liquid, comprised mostly of growth media. No attempt was made to separate the toxin from the media. (Endo refused to be interviewed by the authors of the study.)

All signs are that the "weapon" didn't work. The cult used three trucks and tried to spray the stuff at two U.S. Naval bases, Narita airport, the Japanese Diet, the Imperial Palace and the headquarters of a rival group. No one died in their attacks. The attacks went entirely unnoticed. One member of the cult slipped and fell into a fermenting tank, and nearly drowned--but did not die of the disease.

Why did Aum fail? According to the report, there are many possible factors. Among them: they may not have acquired the right strain of the bacteria; they may have screwed up the culture conditions; they may not have fermented it properly to produce the toxin. All of this means that, thankfully, the Aum Shinrikyo biological "weapon" was no weapon at all.

After a pause, the cult resumed seeking a bioweapon in 1992. This time, Endo turned to Bacillus anthracis, the bacterium that causes anthrax. It is not known exactly how Endo acquired it, but he wound up with an extremely common and benign vaccine strain, perhaps from a university. The Danzig team speculates that he may have been attempting to add a plasmid necessary to make it an effectively virulent anthrax bacterium. This also failed. Some cult members inadvertently inhaled some of the product and did not fall ill. The cult attempted to disseminate what they had created using a homemade sprayer. At one point, mechanical difficulties made it "spout like a whale," one cult member recalled. The mixture was a foul-smelling brown liquid slurry. The cult members tried to add perfume to kill the putrid odor. No one died from it.

The report concludes that "this unbroken string of failures with botulinum and anthrax eventually convinced the group that making biological weapons was more difficult than Endo was acknowledging." That's when they turned to chemicals and the sarin, which was placed in small bags which the cult members punctured on the Toko subway in March, 1995, leading to deaths and panic.

It seems clear from the Danzig study that the cult was limited by the capabilities of its members. They were a gang that couldn't shoot straight when it came to biology. Their intentions were evil but in the end, despite funds and determination, they could not make a biological weapon. Instead, they killed with chemicals. Al Qaeda also looked into anthrax, but was never able to create a weapon. The Danzig study is about events of the past, but raises anew a question for today: whether terrorists can or will eventually succeed where the Aum Shinrikyo could not. It is a sobering thought.

The study does not deal with today's biological threats. But it ends on a note of warning:

Groups such as Aum expose us to risks uncomfortably analogous to playing Russian roulette. Many chambers in the gun prove to be harmless, but some chambers are loaded. The blank chambers belie the destructive power that the gun can produce when held to the head of a society.

Only two countries on Earth possess thousands of nuclear warheads: the United States and Russia. Together, they account for 95 percent of the existing 20,500 weapons; no other nation has more than a few hundred. Despite the new U.S.-Russia strategic arms limitation treaty, there is plenty of room for deeper reductions in these two arsenals, including tactical nuclear weapons, which have never been covered by a treaty, and strategic nuclear weapons held in reserve.

This December will mark the 20th anniversary of the Soviet collapse and end of the Cold War, a largely peaceful finale to an enormous, costly competition between two blocs and two colossal military machines. Today’s threats are different: terrorism, cyber attacks, pandemics, proliferation and conventional wars. As Leon Panetta told the Senate Armed Services Committee at his confirmation hearing to be Secretary of Defense: “We are no longer in the Cold War. This is more like the blizzard war, a blizzard of challenges that draw speed and intensity from terrorism, from rapidly developing technologies and the rising number of powers on the world stage.”

Yet the United States and Russia, no longer adversaries, seem to be sleepwalking toward the future. Perhaps the drift is the result of the approaching election season in both countries. Unfortunately, politics makes it harder to embrace new thinking. But honestly, haven’t we learned anything in two decades?

Instead of moving to the next stage in reducing nuclear arsenals, the two countries are debating stale arguments of yesteryear.

Take missile defense. A generation ago, President Reagan proposed research into a global shield to defend against ballistic missiles. At the Reykjavik summit in 1986, Reagan and Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev came close to a deal that would have dramatically slashed offensive strategic nuclear arms. But it fell apart because Reagan insisted on his dream of a global missile defense shield. Even today, many Americans remember this dramatic moment as a triumph by Reagan. The globe-straddling shield was never built, although one legacy of that era is that missile defense still enjoys enormous political support in Congress. Many of the vexing technical hurdles to building an effective sheild remain unresolved.

Today, a fresh divide over missile defense separates East and West. It should not be as momentous as the last one. NATO and Russia are discussing a U.S. plan to build a limited European ballistic missile defense system, known as the Phased Adaptive Approach, largely aimed at defending against medium-range missiles from Iran. The scope would be more modest than Reagan’s 1983 idea. Nonetheless, Russian officials have expressed fear that improvements in the NATO system by the end of this decade could threaten Moscow’s nuclear deterrent. Russia has asked NATO for legal guarantees that the system would not be used to neutralize its strategic missiles. In response, NATO has been trying to hammer out a method of cooperation—two hands on the joystick?—to meet the Russian concerns, so far without success.

The Russians have been warning that should this effort stall, it may not be possible to negotiate deeper cuts in existing nuclear arsenals. Also, partly in response to uncertainty over missile defense, Russia has taken the first steps to design a new liquid-fueled, multiple-warhead intercontinental ballistic missile. Such a project would take years, huge investments, and might never materialize, but it has appeared on the drawing boards.

These may be just negotiating feints. But it will be a real shame if an impasse over missile defense prevents progress on negotiations for deeper cuts in existing nuclear arsenals, or if it begets a new weapons system.

Last week, one of Russia’s leading defense industry chiefs, Yuri Solomonov, who heads the Moscow Heat Technology Institute, which built the Topol-M and Bulava missiles, presented some hard truths in an interview published by the newspaper Kommersant. He called plans to build a new heavy liquid-fueled missile “outright stupidity.” On missile defense, he said there has been talk about a shield for half a century; nothing has come of it, and nothing will come of it. He said ballistic missile defense would always be easier to defeat with countermeasures, which Russia has developed.

So, let’s hope NATO and Russia can find a way to agree on limited missile defense, if only to pave the way for genuine cooperation on what’s really important: reducing the existing outsized nuclear arsenals. Should arms control negotiations stall, and Russia builds the new heavy missile, it will stimulate a response in the United States, where the military services are already preparing modernization plans for the next generation of subs, missiles and aircraft to carry nuclear weapons. A new Russian heavy missile would be just the threat they need to justify massive new spending.

A revived nuclear arms race is the last thing the world needs to mark the 20th anniversary of the end of the Cold War.

In 1989, Mikhail Gorbachev permitted elections for the first popularly elected legislature in Soviet history. The Communist Party still dominated, but about a third of the seats in the 2,250-member chamber were open, and in many of them, establishment party members were booted out. When the first session of the new Congress of People's Deputies opened on May 25, the nation was mesmerized by the televised proceedings. Work stopped on factory floors as millions of people witnessed an astonishing new phase in Gorbachev's revolution from above -- open criticism of the powers that be.

Read the rest of the article here.

It’s no secret: the international treaty that outlaws germ warfare is not much of a pact. The Biological and Toxin Weapons Convention, which entered into force in 1975, had good intentions but no teeth. There was no effective  enforcement mechanism to keep countries from cheating, and there still isn’t.

From December 5-22 in Geneva, the signatories will meet for the seventh review conference, held every five years. The treaty is pretty tattered, and the review conference won’t change that. The diplomats may attempt some procedural tweaks, but there is very little in this treaty that would stop a determined effort by a country — let alone a terrorist -  to build an illicit biological weapons program. The Soviet Union, Saddam Hussein’s Iraq and apartheid-era South Africa all defied the treaty in years past.

Although countries are supposed to file annual declarations, last year only 73 of the 163 nations that are parties to the agreement actually sent in their forms.

Two U.S. presidents, George W. Bush and Barack Obama, have concluded that any kind of binding, legal provision for verification would be unworkable. Their argument has been that rapid advances in biology have simply outpaced traditional measures to check against cheating. Almost all biological research is dual use; that which can be directed at improving human health can also be used to create harmful agents. Unlike nuclear weapons, biological research can be easily hidden. That’s one of the reasons to worry about illicit germ warfare, but also a factor in why the treaty has not been strengthened; verification tools like satellites and inspections can miss a well-concealed biological weapons laboratory.

Laura Kennedy, the U.S. Ambassador to the Conference on Disarmament in Geneva, and special representative on the Biological Weapons Convention, is interviewed in the current issue of by Arms Control Today on the upcoming review conference.

She said one idea percolating for the conference is to devote more attention to “health security,” such as improved surveillance, detection of disease outbreaks, and organizing rapid response. I’ve heard from other sources as well that this may be part of a U.S. initiative at the review conference. A similar discussion has already been underway in meetings in between the five year conferences. Kirk C. Bansak provides an overview of these talks in the same issue of the magazine.

No doubt, health security is important; disease knows no political boundaries and is just as threatening whether at the hands of man or Mother Nature. Rapid response and good surveillance are laudable goals, but there are already large agencies, like the World Health Organization and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, which worry about them.

But back to the basic problem: the treaty’s goal was to outlaw germ warfare, and it is weak. In the interview, Kennedy says “the threat of bioterrorism—we think it’s real. We think it’s important to deal with this problem in order to achieve the aim of the BWC: a world free from the threat of biological weapons.”

But how? Kennedy refers to “enhanced transparency and compliance diplomacy,” and getting more countries to submit their annual declarations, known as confidence-building measures, and revising questions on the form to be more relevant and precise. At a recent workshop in Switzerland, it was pointed out by one participant that there is no penalty for countries that failed to submit their declarations, and that many of them are never made public.

Some “confidence building” measures.

By contrast, the Chemical Weapons Convention, which came into force in 1997, has often been cited as a model disarmament treaty with effective monitoring, verification and a structure to carry it out. The treaty calls for routine inspections, but it also has a provision for a short-notice “challenge” inspections if a facility suspected of a violation. (The biological weapons treaty has no such mechanism.)

As I reported in The Dead Hand, when these challenge inspections were first negotiated in Geneva, they were very worrisome to officials at the top of the Soviet Union’s bioweapons program. In closed Kremlin meetings, they expressed fear that a challenge inspector looking for chemical weapons might point at the door of a hidden germ warfare laboratory and insist: Open! Then what could they do? The Soviet foreign minister at the time, Eduard Shevardnadze, had already agreed to the challenge inspections in the chemical weapons treaty, as a gesture of glasnost. So what happened? The bioweapons chiefs busily went about trying to conceal their work still more.

Jonathan B. Tucker points out in a new paper for the Harvard-Sussex Program that since the chemical weapons treaty came into force, no state has actually requested a challenge inspection. The reason, he says, is that it would be too confrontational and entail political risks for the accusing state. Instead, when problems arise under the treaty, they are handled by consultations; one country asks another. Tucker, who is now managing the Biosecurity Education Project at the Federation of American Scientists, said either bilateral or multilateral consultations — a process in which countries ask for clarification, instead of force their way through a door — might be useful for the biological weapons treaty, and he offers some suggestions for how it could be done. His paper will soon be posted at the project’s site, here. Update, June 27 2011: the Tucker paper is posted here.

No doubt, a regime that’s trying to hide something nasty like a biological weapons research program may not be influenced by a nice diplomatic inquiry. That’s always the problem with voluntary verification. It is not likely to catch the worst offenders, but may be better than nothing.

The concerns that were originally behind the Biological and Toxin Weapons Convention—the horrors of germ warfare— have not disappeared. It would be nice to see more than just a talking shop at the review conference in Geneva.

When the Soviet Union collapsed two decades ago, it left behind hundreds of tons of highly-enriched uranium and plutonium spread across 11 time zones. Some was protected by no more than a wax seal and string, and the system for keeping track of it was a pile of paper receipts. Today, much of this material has been locked down. But things were not so certain back then.

In late 1991, Senator Sam Nunn (D-Ga.), chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee, gave a speech saying that after spending trillions of dollars on the Cold War, the United States should spend a little more to help make Soviet weapons and materials secure. Congress was indifferent, worried more about the recession at home. One Pentagon official said he wanted the Soviets to go into “free fall.” With the critical help of Senator Richard Lugar (R-Ind.), Nunn managed to win approval of the legislation, and President George H. W. Bush signed it into law, without much enthusiasm, just weeks before the Soviet flag came down from the Kremlin.

For a few years after that, progress was achingly slow. The powerful Russian atomic energy ministry denied there was  a problem. Cold War mistrust was still evident on both sides.

In The Dead Hand, I described the ground-breaking work of Kenneth J. Fairfax, who was an officer in the environment, science and technology section of the U.S. Embassy in Moscow. Fairfax was an intrepid observer, visiting many nuclear facilities, and reporting first-hand what he saw. In 1994, he sent cables to Washington which documented some of the very serious gaps in nuclear security in Russia.

These messages alarmed officials in the Clinton White House. They confirmed what some other experts feared, that Russia’s nuclear materials were widely spread and poorly secured. I had been told of these cables, but never seen them. Last month, in response to my Freedom of Information Act request, the State Department declassified and released two of the cables.

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