Washington

Bioweapons experts convene in Geneva, Switzerland, this week for fresh talks on the Biological Weapons Convention (BWC), the international treaty that seeks to counter the proliferation of such weapons.

But while the United States and some of its allies will use the occasion to exhort other nations to enact stronger biosecurity laws — as called for by the treaty — their calls are likely to fall on deaf ears.

The United States and supporters such as Britain hope to use the meeting to convince other nations to enact strict pathogen-monitoring regimes and to draw up penalties for those who defy them. “We're convinced that the best way to approach these issues of pathogen security is at the national level,” says Greg Stewart, a microbiologist seconded from the State University of West Georgia to the state department, and a US delegate to the talks.

Britain is keen that the talks are seen to produce results, meeting participants say, to demonstrate that international agreements are still relevant to global security issues. The meeting was arranged two years ago to prevent the BWC from collapsing after the United States opposed provisions to make the treaty binding on its signatory nations (see Nature 414, 675; 2001). But some observers say that the best they are hoping for from this week's meeting is that no fresh public recriminations will break out.

The talks are the first of three annual 'experts meetings', each to be followed by political summits, before the next major negotiations on the convention in 2006. Delegates from most of the 146 signatories to the convention, and observers from non-governmental organizations, are due to discuss penalties for nations that violate the treaty, as well as biosecurity regulations. But with the treaty itself in limbo, the United States wants to use the meeting to build pressure for biological-weapons-control measures that fall outside the scope of the convention.

Non-governmental organizations plan to use the forum to raise other issues related to arms control. Some are calling for tighter export controls and codes of conduct for governments. “We are entering a biological arms race, and European governments should be doing much more than spending two weeks in Geneva avoiding conflict,” says Jan van Aken of the Sunshine Project, a non-profit group based in Hamburg, Germany.

Others, such as Barbara Hatch Rosenberg of the Washington-based Federation of American Scientists, want the United Nations to reconstitute its weapons-inspections group as a permanent body that can be called on at a moment's notice. “In the past the inspections took too long to get started,” she says.

A few participants hold out hope that the meeting will lend impetus to the revival of the BWC. But most think that such progress must await a change of administration in the United States. “It's not going to happen under this administration, but these talks have been going on since the 1960s and the issue is not going to go away,” says Marie Chevrier, a political scientist at the University of Texas at Dallas who works with the Federation of American Scientists.