![]() It was unfortunate that, even with all the institutional apparatuses, “much to his revulsion”, chemical weapons were still used.Īlgeria’s representative said that the Chemical Weapons Convention had made progress, but faced challenges at all levels in today’s changing world. While biological weapons were “poorly regulated”, chemical weapons were under intense scrutiny, said Brazil’s speaker. She advocated for international cooperation in the field of biocontainment to enhance capacity to prevent and respond to those types of threats, asserting that the pandemic had highlighted the need to safeguard that material for strictly peaceful use. Confidence-building measures among States would facilitate greater information‑exchange within the research community and create trust for a verifiable common standard against biological weapons.ĭual-use material was worrying, agreed Colombia’s representative, who supported bolstering biological control mechanism to prevent access and weaponization by non-State actors. He sought a harmonized international regime that ensured biosafety and biosecurity. “We have witnessed and experienced the catastrophe of a pandemic and we cannot afford to have another,” the representative of Sri Lanka said. There were important lessons for the Biological Weapons Convention regime from the pandemic, such as the mutually reinforcing nature of its prevention and protection aspects, as well as the urgency of amplifying international assistance and cooperation in the field of life sciences. Indeed, said Pakistan’s speaker, the COVID-19 pandemic had laid bare the fragilities of the global public health architecture, including the intersecting issues of life sciences, viruses and infectious diseases. The COVID-19 pandemic had revealed global vulnerability to the potentially catastrophic consequences of pathogens and other biological threats, he said, calling for an international body mandated to investigate suspected outbreaks of biological agents. Similarly, the representative of Bangladesh expressed concern over the growing possibility of terrorists and other non-State actors using or gaining access to weapons of mass destruction. India had a robust national export‑control system and a control list of sensitive material, equipment and technologies consistent with the highest international standards. The text urged support for international efforts to combat that threat, as well as strengthen national measures. Its lack of a verification system weakened its effectiveness and relevance.ĭeeply concerned about the risk, India’s representative tabled its annual resolution on the dangers of the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction and the potential for their exploitation by non-State actors (document A/77/C.1/L.60). ![]() He urged the international community to tighten its grip on their proliferation and added a call to strengthen the Biological Weapons Convention. The “poor man’s atomic bomb” could be created using equipment and materials that had a host of civilian applications. The path to chemical and biological weapons was easier and cheaper than developing a nuclear bomb, said Myanmar’s representative. Typical contributors include political scientists and political behaviorists biosecurity and international-security experts life scientists, clinicians, health-policy scholars, and bioethicists moral and evolutionary philosophers environmental scientists and ecological economists political-behavioral and environmental historians science-policy scholars and historians of science and legal scholars.Securing High-Containment Biological Labs Can Avert Next PandemicĬhemical and biological weapons had become the best alternative to nuclear weapons for rogue States and non-State actors, the First Committee (Disarmament and International Security) heard today as it concluded its thematic debate on weapons of mass destruction and opened debate on conventional weapons. The PLS topic range is exceptionally broad: evolutionary and laboratory insights into political behavior, including political violence, from group conflict to war, terrorism, and torture political analysis of life-sciences research, health policy, environmental policy, and biosecurity policy and philosophical analysis of life-sciences problems, such as bioethical controversies. PLS is owned and published by the Association for Politics and the Life Sciences, the APLS, which is both an American Political Science Association (APSA) Related Group and an American Institute of Biological Sciences (AIBS) Member Society. Politics and the Life Sciences is an interdisciplinary peer-reviewed journal with a global audience.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |