A Bioweapons Inspection Regime

In the age of biowar, it will be necessary for the nations of power to agree among themselves to institute an exceptionless inspection regime worldwide. The U.S., the EU, Russia, India, China, Japan, and possibly a few other nations (eg, Brazil, Mexico, Iran, South Africa, Indonesia, Pakistan, Egypt, Israel) will control large, comprehensive inspection agencies with unhindered access to every square foot of the earth. Each national inspectorate will operate autonomously, cross-checking each other and overseeing developments in the rest of the world. Perhaps the greatest practical difficulty in this schema is the espionage threat to nuclear programs and defenses. Another problem is that access to biodefense research would necessarily have to be rendered up to the multinational inspectors (since there is virtually no practical difference between research on bioweapons defense and research on bioweapons)--this would increase vulnerability to attacks with weapons that slip through the inspection regime, since the attackers would know the nature of the available defenses. The nations must also come up with a set of rules to define permissible biological research and development activities, and all parties must be held to these rules without exception. Effective punishment must be predetermined and enforced for violators. It may be needful to recognize spheres of influence in underdeveloped parts of the world, where the dominant power in the region will be held to account for any untoward developments in the backward regions. Otherwise, major powers might feel incentivized to transfer their R & D and production facilities to Congo or Bolivia under the aegis of the local government or some ostensibly non-affiliated organization.
But, even if all this comes to pass--unprecedented international cooperation, responsibility, interdependence, interpenetration--the world will certainly remain highly vulnerable to attacks. Some of these weapons are simply too easy to produce and many are almost indistinguishable from legitimate drugs, medicines, and antidotes to bioweapons. Bioresearch is the Tree of Knowledge. I think the alternative to some such inspection regime is a rapid descent into a violent anarchic condition between states (and probably nonstate organizations) when once the cycle of attacks and counterattacks and preemptive attacks begins. Within states the land will be cleared for totalitarian lockdowns as defensive measures. Part of the momentum of war will derive from the virtual impossibility of tracing the ultimate source of bioattacks. Being untraceable, such attacks are essentially undeterrable (this lack of deterrence is the greatest distinction between nuclear and bioweapons, along with the greater ease of producing the latter). Bioweapons are undeterrable, relatively easy to produce (and becoming easier at the rapid pace of the biotechnology revolution), probably impossible to defend against, potentially hypervirulent, and capable of infecting selected populations with almost any known disease as well as carefully created and tested new diseases. This is why I consider bioweapons the greatest threat faced by the human species at the present time. Nanoweapons or nano-bioweapons may pose a still greater threat in the future, but for now bioweapons constitute the most powerful culling tool yet invented. Of course, if nuclear proliferation is permitted to run its natural course we may face an approximately equal danger from that direction. The difference is that we are positioned to stop nuclear proliferation. It is doable. Climate change poses a huge threat as well, but, again, we can control it with an application of will. Bioweapons can be invented to control the will, to alter our personalities, to play dice with our genetic expression--if a bioscientist so pleases.
If we can invent an actionable plan to evade the fate I have just sketched out, one which does not enslave or dehumanize us, I may be able to return to a point of tentative optimism about the future of the species.