Skepticism Triumphant: The Bush Administration and the Waning of Arms Control

Overview

“The draft protocol that was under negotiation for the past several years is dead in our view.  Dead, and it is not going to be resurrected.  It has proven to be a blind alley.”   This was the comment of US Undersecretary of State for Arms Control, John Bolton, at his press conference in Geneva on November 19, 2001, explaining the decision of the Bush Administration to abandon the effort to negotiate a verification protocol to the Biological Weapons Convention (BWC). Earlier, at the formal session in Geneva, Bolton had shocked the assembled delegates by accusing a number of identified states of “flatly violating” the BWC.  Now, before the press of the world, he elaborated that “simply putting one convention on top of another is not going to solve the problem that the rogue states that we are talking about are prepared to violate the underlined prohibitions in the BWC….”   With these pronouncements, years of painstaking diplomacy came to naught and the Bush Administration’s view of arms control came fully into view.