There will inevitably be a temptation to relax a little after what appears to have been the successful resolution of the latest confrontation with President Saddam Hussein of Iraq. If the agreement brokered by the UN Secretary-General, Kofi Annan, holds, the West can increase its confidence in the eventual destruction of Saddam's arsenal of chemical and biological weapons, while Saddam can offer his people the hope that such a move will lead to the lifting of economic sanctions. But relaxation would be a mistake. The Iraq crisis has been a stark reminder that, even though the use of such weapons is outlawed by two international treaties, the threat they represent remains very real.

It is therefore pleasing that President Bill Clinton has recently released a new statement of US policy that addresses one aspect of this threat, namely support for the speedy completion of a protocol to the Biological Weapons Convention of 1972, outlining how compliance with this convention might be monitored and verified (see page 831). Pressure for such a protocol has not come from the recent behaviour of Iraq alone; other countries have been arguing the case for several years, and have set in motion diplomatic negotiations which the United States has now agreed to join. But Saddam Hussein's actions have certainly focused minds in a way that few other events could have done.

The situation in Iraq has helped to clear the air in other ways too. Some of the traditional US scepticism about the value of verification procedures should have been tempered by the ingenuity and effectiveness displayed by United Nations weapons inspectors since the ending of the Gulf War in 1991. Those who had argued that such inspectors would be easily hoodwinked have had to eat their words. And the argument that a verification regime would make little impact has, in the process, lost much of its weight. The task facing those negotiating a draft protocol, with Clinton's support now ringing in their ears, is to design a regime that is rigorous, effective and trustworthy.

Formidable obstacles remain. The pharmaceutical and biotechnology industries, for example, both in the United States and elsewhere, have raised concerns — some legitimate, some possibly less so — about the potential threat to commercial confidentiality inevitably created by a visit by foreign inspectors. Other major powers, in particular Russia and China, as well as Japan, have to be persuaded to share the political enthusiasm of the West for strict controls. And countries from the poorer ‘South’ will expect some form of compensation for their support.

But none of these problems is insurmountable. Experience with the Chemical Weapons Convention of 1993 has shown that it is possible to design inspection procedures that the industry does not find excessively burdensome or intrusive. All major governments must be sufficiently worried about the threat of terrorists releasing biological weapons onto their soil to wish to reduce the likelihood of that happening. And possible compensation schemes for the South — such as an international network to monitor emerging diseases — would not necessarily involve a massive transfer of either proprietary technology or intellectual property, two of industry's greatest fears.

The most difficult task will be to persuade Western nations to accept the costs involved, whether the relative loss of sovereignty implied by an international monitoring regime, the extra paperwork and regulations that would entail, or just the expense of an institutional apparatus designed to make it work effectively. But given terrifying scenarios that are now all too possible, those costs will be a small price to pay for the extra security they will buy.