the arms control area. But it, too, faces a number of challenges in these first years of its implementation.

Clearly steps can and should be taken to enhance the effectiveness of and reinforce the prohibitions in each of these treaties. In the time that I have left, I would like to just mention a few of those steps.

First, with respect to the Biological Weapons Convention, we should resume multilateral discussions on measures to strengthen the BWC. Specifically, the United States should abandon its opposition to multilateral discussions and agree at the November 2002 continuation of the BWC review conference on a process that will allow both U.S. proposals and other proposals for strengthening the Convention to be explored.

Second, pending international agreement on legally binding measures to strengthen the Convention, the United States should support efforts to expand the U.N. Secretary General's authority to investigate allegations of the development, production or possession of biological weapons. Today the Secretary General can only investigate the use of these weapons. We should give him the power to investigate activities prior to use.

Third, we should strengthen controls over dangerous pathogens. The United States should take the lead in securing tighter international controls on culture collections and other repositories of biological materials. We should also work with other countries to strengthen oversight of laboratories to prevent either deliberate or inadvertent misapplications of biotechnology research for destructive purposes.

And fourth, we should enhance oversight of the U.S. biological defense program. Revelations that the United States has produced weapons-grade anthrax and replicated a Soviet era biological bomblet as part of its biological defense program have raised questions both here and abroad about the nature and scope of U.S. activities in this area. Today, there are no comprehensive review mechanisms in place for these secret biological defense activities. The U.S. Congress should hold oversight hearings on the biological defense program to ensure that its scientific, legal, and foreign policy impact is consistent with U.S. non-proliferation interests.

With respect to the Chemical Weapons Convention, we should, first, make adherence to the CWC an explicit foreign policy goal. Libya's recent decision to join the Chemical Weapons Convention demonstrates that even in complicated regions like the Middle East there are opportunities for expanding membership in this treaty. It is not unimaginable that North Korea might agree to abandon its chemical weapons program and join the convention as part of a broader security arrangement on the Korean Peninsula. The United States should ensure that CWC adherence is a prominent issue in its foreign policy toward the key hold-out countries, including North Korea.

Second, we should be prepared to use challenge inspections to address serious compliance concerns, especially in countries where bilateral consultations have been either unsuccessful or are not appropriate.

Third, we should devote the resources necessary to meet the

have indicated to the treaty organization that they will be unable to meet the April 2007 deadline for destroying their chemical weapon stocks. We should work with Russia and ensure in our own case that adequate resources are devoted to meeting this important obligation.

Fourth, we should rectify the budget problems in the treaty organization for the Chemical Weapons Convention. Because of a zero growth budget imposed on the OPCW over the past 5 years, we are beginning another year millions of dollars short for implementation. This has serious implications for the verification activities of the OPCW. The United States should work with the OPCW and other parties to ensure that there are sufficient funds to carry out all planned verification activities.

And finally, we can strengthen both conventions, both the BWC and the CWC, by making it an international crime for individuals to develop, possess or use chemical and biological weapons. Both the BWC and the CWC impose legally binding obligations on governments but not on individuals. The United States should support the negotiation of a treaty that would make it a crime under international law for individuals to acquire or use chemical or biological weapons or to knowingly assist others in doing so. Thank you, Mr. Chairman.

Senator AKAKA. Thank you very much.

At this time I would like to call on Senator Cochran for his statement.

OPENING STATEMENT OF SENATOR COCHRAN

Senator COCHRAN. Mr. Chairman, thank you very much. I am pleased to join you in this hearing this morning and I thank you for convening the hearing and assembling the witnesses that we will hear from today.

This is a very interesting and troubling issue. I have been frustrated over a period of time that our efforts to control the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction and other items that threaten the security of the world have not been more successful. We have these international agreements, these so-called non-proliferation regimes, and it seems to me that in most of the serious cases of proliferation these agreements are ineffective to stop or even slow down the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction or the missile systems that could be used to deliver them over long ranges. So I am concerned if we continue to put our trust and faith in that process, in those regimes, whether we are really contributing to a false sense of security. I am curious to know what the witnesses might say about alternatives to the regimes and I just heard Ms. Harris, of course, point out a couple of things that she thinks could be considered to improve the effectiveness of the regimes.

It is this kind of suggestion I think we are looking for this morning, not only observations and discussions of the regimes themselves and what our practices have been in the past. And if there have been successes, we need to think about those. We do tend to focus probably on the ineffectiveness rather than the good that the regimes may have done and that would be useful for us, in order

So it is important and I do not know of any other issue more serious to us as a country at this time, certainly coming on the heels of the attacks that we have seen last year and the concerns we have for future terrorism attacks against the United States and our citizens.

So it is very timely and we appreciate very much the cooperation of all of you to help make this hearing a success.

[The prepared statement of Senator Cochran follows:]

PREPARED OPENING STATEMENT OF SENATOR COCHRAN

The proliferation of weapons of mass destruction is one of the greatest threats our nation faces today, and will continue to face in coming years. Countering that threat in order to ensure the security of our citizens and deployed forces requires a variety of means, ranging from diplomacy to intelligence to active and passive defenses, and even to military action when necessary.

Nonproliferation regimes are important tools in this fight against the spread of chemical, biological and nuclear weapons and their delivery means. Unfortunately, despite the existence of regimes covering all types of weapons of mass destruction, the spread of these weapons to nations and even terrorist groups continues, as the CIA has documented in its recent Unclassified Report to Congress on the Acquisition of Technology Relating to Weapons of Mass Destruction. Consider Iran, for example. According to the CIA's report, despite being a signatory to the Chemical Weapons Convention, Iran has manufactured and stockpiled several thousand tons of chemical weapons, comparable in size to Iraq's stockpile before the Gulf War. And the Director of Central Intelligence told the Senate just last week that Iran, despite being a signatory to the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, is at work now on a nuclear weapons and may succeed in developing one in just a few years.

The extent to which these nonproliferation regimes can stop or slow the proliferation of WMD remains to be seen. I look forward to hearing our witnesses' views on how the effectiveness of these regimes can be improved, and I commend the Chairman for calling this hearing to examine this important issue.

Senator AKAKA. Thank you very much, Senator Cochran.

I would like to then call on a statement from Dr. Smithson.

TESTIMONY OF AMY E. SMITHSON, Ph.D.,1 DIRECTOR, CHEMICAL AND BIOLOGICAL WEAPONS NONPROLIFERATION PROJECT, HENRY L. STIMSON CENTER

Ms. SMITHSON. Thank you. Adjusting policies and programs to address the threat of terrorism is not easy. I would like to thank this Subcommittee for looking beyond the obvious, for holding a hearing that examines the utility of international treaties in helping to assure this Nation's well-being.

Arms control critics often deride treaties as weak mechanisms that can be broken with impunity, yet these same critics would hardly advocate scrapping U.S. laws against murder even if those laws are broken with disturbing frequency. Rather, they would call for better enforcement of the laws. Even a good law is only as effective as its enforcement. Member governments are the custodians of these treaties. As the world's most powerful nation, the United States has a special responsibility to lead efforts to enforce them. Despite what you might have heard, terrorists are likely to have difficulty overcoming the technical hurdles associated with acquiring a capability to inflict mass casualties with chemical and biological weapons. Therefore one key to keeping such weapons out of their hands is to tackle the proliferation problem at the national level. Treaties such as the Biological and Toxin Weapons Conven

tion and the Chemical Weapons Convention are intended to compel governments to abandon their weapons programs.

Moreover, full and effective implementation of these treaties applies to the subnational actor security threat in three important ways. First, the fewer governments that maintain chemical or biological weapons programs, the fewer places terrorists can turn to for help with weapons materials and expertise.

Second, the CWC, but not at present the BWC, requires states to outlaw offensive weapons activities domestically. The CWC approaches its fifth anniversary with 145 members, all now obligated to have enacted penal laws that hold individuals accountable.

Third, treaties can block weapons proliferation via the incorporation of export controls. Three years after the CWC was activated, treaty members were barred from trading so-called Schedule II chemicals with countries that had not joined. Should the CWC's members decide this fall to apply export controls to the more widely traded Schedule III chemicals, states that remain outside of this treaty would incur tremendous economic hardship. Moreover, the CWC would have significantly amplified the practice of multilateral export controls by having almost five times the number of countries in the Australia Group enforce export controls on hundreds of chemicals.

As you know, midway through 2001 the Bush Administration rejected the draft BWC monitoring protocol, a decision with which I agree. My agreement is based on the advice of 35 technical experts, top-notch experts from the U.S. pharmaceutical and biotechnology industries, research institutes, universities, defense contractors, and veterans of the two U.S. trial inspections to see how the BWC could be monitored. There are a number of reasons why this protocol should have been rejected, which I will be delighted to elaborate on in Q and A.

In November of this past year the Bush Administration proposed several alternatives to monitor the BWC, some of which are downright puzzling. For example, putting investigations of suspicious disease outbreaks and alleged biowarfare incidents in the hands of the U.N. Secretary General suffers the same handicap as the current structure; namely, the possible politicization and delay of challenge inspections.

Another baffling proposal involves voluntary nonchallenge visits. Not to mince words, but why would a BWC violator invite inspectors into its midst unless it had taken extreme care to clean up all evidence of cheating prior to issuing the invitation?

The Bush Administration also advanced proposals with significant merit, as Mrs. Harris has described, to strengthen the security of access to pathogenic microorganisms, to have governments oversee high-risk experiments with pathogens, to establish professional scientific codes of conduct, to improve disease surveillance, and to require BWC members to pass legislation criminalizing offensive bioweapons activities. The common downfall of these proposals is that the Bush Administration would leave it to each of the BWC's 141 members to set their own domestic standard; to wit, country A could enact a criminalization law with slap-on-the-wrist penalties

As for the CWC, which has enjoyed a relatively strong launch in its first 5 years, this treaty clearly could be working better. One need only ask a U.S. official or discretely circulate among the treaty's cognoscenti to hear whispers of compliance problems, yet no challenge inspections have been requested to address these concerns. The reasons for these circumstances lie largely in how the United States has implemented this treaty.

When the Senate gave its advice and consent to the CWC's ratification and Congress passed the treaty's implementing legislation, the bills were spiked with exemptions that deprived the inspectors of their two strongest tools; namely, challenge inspections and laboratory analysis of samples. Officials from other nations, including Russia and China, have privately told me that their countries would not hesitate to cite the U.S. exemptions to hold inspectors at bay.

In this day and age it would be foolhardy to neglect any viable mechanism that can reduce the threat of weapons of mass destruction. I will conclude with a few recommendations to improve the performance of these treaties.

I would ask that Congress and the Bush Administration waste no time in taking the appropriate steps to see that the CWC is fully implemented and that all reasonable efforts are made to strengthen the BWC with a panoply of monitoring tools. U.S. policymakers must push this year to add Schedule III chemicals to the export control list and also overturn the aforementioned exemptions, restoring full power to the CWC's inspectors. Please give these inspectors a fighting chance to catch treaty violators. Otherwise the United States will have no one to blame but itself for this treaty's weakened condition.

Second, Congress should insist that the Bush Administration fulfil Public Law 106-113 and conduct BWC monitoring trials at various sites. Should such trials show that meaningful monitoring results can be achieved at a tolerable cost, then regular or random nonchallenge inspections would be far preferable to the proposed voluntary visits. Moreover, to have a chance of being effective, challenge inspections must be as automatic and as distanced as possible from politics.

Finally, to make the other BWC monitoring proposals more effective, the United States should add tough standards that make the desired changes reasonably uniform, not hit or miss. Thank you. Senator AKAKA. Thank you very much, Dr. Smithson. Dr. Walsh, your statement, please.

TESTIMONY OF JIM WALSH, Ph.D.,1 RESEARCH FELLOW, BELFER CENTER FOR SCIENCE AND INTERNATIONAL AFFAIRS, JOHN F. KENNEDY SCHOOL OF GOVERNMENT, HARVARD UNIVERSITY

Dr. WALSH. Mr. Chairman and Members of the Subcommittee, thank you so much for giving me the opportunity to speak to you today about an issue that I think is of singular importance to U.S. national security, and that is nuclear terrorism. What I would like to do in my brief remarks is focus on three of the questions that