SMITHSON COURTESY OF NICOLL PHOTOGRAPHY

Negotiators who have been working on such a verification protocol since 1995 have set a deadline of November 2001 to complete the task. That is when the 5th BWC Review Conference convenes. But Amy E. Smithson, director of the Henry L. Stimson Center's Chemical & Biological Weapons Nonproliferation Project and editor of the new study, says experts drawn from U.S. industry, research institutes, and academia agree that the proposed monitoring procedures now being considered would falter.

To ward off failure, the experts "recommend that the U.S. government and industry do the research and field tests necessary to draft a meaningful and effective protocol," Smithson says.

But Gillian R. Woollett, associate vice president for biologics and biotechnology at the Pharmaceutical Research & Manufacturers of America (PhRMA), says it's not industry's place to play arms controllers. "We would contribute to a government exercise by supplying people to play the part of inspectors at a government facility, but we wouldn't host such an activity, which would compromise production."

PhRMA spokesman Jeff Trewhitt says that field testing verification techniques "is a potentially large deviation of time and resources away from what society wants us to do--research and develop more and better medicines." But Smithson counters that the drug industry "has the facilities and capabilities that in the past have been used by the U.S. and other countries for that purpose."

Smithson and two industry experts presented their study, "House of Cards: The Pivotal Importance of a Technically Sound BWC Monitoring Protocol," to the negotiating session in Geneva that ended on May 11. A compromise text for the verification/monitoring protocol was not well received. Talks on the protocol will resume in July.

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