William Epstein           
                     400 East 58th street
                     New York, NY l0022
                     212-758-3320

                                           23 April, 2000
Dear Professor Lederberg:

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     It was a great pleasure to see and hear you again at the UN
Seminar in March on Biological Weapons and the need and efforts for
adding a Protocol or other amendments to the Biological Weapons
Convention.  Your talk about improving the effectiveness of the BWC
recalled to my mind your statement in August 1970 to the Conference
of the Committee on Disarmament (the successor body of the Eighteen
Nation Committee on Disarmament and predecessor of the current
Conference on Disarmament).  At that time the Committee was discussing
the provisions of a draft treaty on BW.

     The Committee wanted to abolish BW as a weapon of warfare, but
it was moving forward slowly, mainly because of the problem of the
difficulty of ensuring any effective or adequate means of verifying
compliance with any treaty banning all BW.  The Committee was faced
with a real problem that appeared to be impossible of solution.

     After hearing your learned and eloquent statement of the
potential dangers of BW and your hint that any important program
to develop any large scale stocks of such weapons would inevitably
become known, the Committee was encouraged to proceed with the
drafting of a BW treaty.  It went ahead with only an appeal to the
UN Security Council to deal with any violations of the Treaty and
finally produced the BW Convention which was opened for signature
in April 1972.

     As we discussed after your talk last month, it seems clear that
both of us believe that it will require what is sometimes called
"societal verification" -- by authorizing "whistle-blowers" to report
any breaches or violations as a means of effective verification 
(I think we also agree that only the creation of a system of societal
verification (or verification by the people) could ensure that nuclear
weapons can be banned and eliminated.

     I wish you could develop and publicize your views both for a
Protocol to the BWC and for a treaty to ban and eliminate all nuclear
weapons.

     All best wishes,

                                      Bill Epstein