Compared to nuclear weapons, biological warfare "technology is less challenging, more accessible, and no really high-tech equipment is needed," says Gary Milhollin, director of the Wisconsin Project on Nuclear Arms Control in Washington, a long-time critic of lax restrictions on military technologies. (Although Milhollin is a law professor on leave from the University of Wisconsin-Madison, the project is not affiliated with the university.)

In fact, you don't even have to be a government to play this game: The Japanese cult Aum Shinrikyo, which used nerve gas in a deadly March, 1995, subway attack in Tokyo, also experimented with biological weapons, and reportedly tried to collect Ebola virus from Zaire in 1992.

Better control?
If seven years of inspections couldn't eliminate Iraq's biological weapon program, can these horrific weapons ever be controlled? While not optimistic, experts do say it's worth the effort. "It's almost impossible," says Jordan Richie, an analyst with the Wisconsin project. "Scientists pride themselves on being able to share information and resources, share samples." He notes that Iraq bought its anthrax cultures from a U.S. scientific supplier, and suggests that better policing will take a "lot of help from the scientific community."

The basic control framework is the 1972 Biological Weapons Convention, which has been signed by 157 states, including the United States, the Soviet Union, and Iraq, and went into effect in 1975. The treaty bans stockpiling and using biological weapons. It also prohibits offensive research but permits defensive research. (You can skip to some intriguing defensive developments.) After concluding that the weapons were so dangerous as to be useless, the United States decided to destroy all its biological weapons in 1969, even before the treaty was signed.

An un-rare weapon
Richie says the United States, Russia, Iraq, China, and North Korea probably have a "significant biological capability," and that Iran, Syria and Israel may also have capabilities.

The key problem with the biological weapons convention is the lack of teeth. "They need to set up a verification regime, like arms control agreements for chemical and nuclear weapons have now," says Raymond Zilinskas, an associate professor at the University of Maryland Biotechnology Institute. He suggests that biological weapons inspectors need to make the kind of unannounced inspections that are a mainstay of nuclear and chemical weapons inspectors.

Still, the basics of producing pathogens is not exactly rocket science. If Iraq could conceal a large biological weapons program while under international inspection, smaller efforts should be easier to conceal. "Intelligence will tell you if somebody's building a lab with a clean room and heavy security," says Richie. "But if there's a guy who wants to build them in a small lab in an outpost, that's very difficult to detect."