US Working On New
Generation Of
BioWeapons
10-28-2
- British and American academics have warned that the US
is developing a new generation of weapons that possibly violate
international treaties on biological and chemical warfare, the Guardian
reported.
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- The left-wing British daily pointed out that the
claims come at a time when the US is proposing military action against
Iraq on the grounds that President Saddam Hussein is breaking
international agreements on weapons of mass destruction.
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- The Guardian said that according to specialists in
bio-warfare and chemical weapons, the Pentagon, with the help of the
British military, is also working on "non-lethal" weapons similar to the
gas used by Russian forces to end last week's siege in Moscow.
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- The newspaper said Malcolm Dando, professor of
international security at the University of Bradford, northern England,
and Mark Wheelis, a lecturer in microbiology at the University of
California, were worried that the US is encouraging a breakdown in arms
control by its research.
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- Dando said that US work includes CIA efforts to copy a
Soviet cluster bomb designed to disperse biological weapons, and a
project by the Pentagon to build a bio-weapon plant from commercially
available materials to prove that terrorists could do the same
thing.
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- Dando told the Guardian that there was also research
underway by the Defence Intelligence Agency into the possibility of
genetically engineering a new strain of antibiotic-resistant
anthrax.
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- There was also a programme to produce dried anthrax
spores, officially for testing US bio-defences, the academic said -- but
far more spores were allegedly produced than necessary for such purposes
and it is unclear whether they have been destroyed or simply
stored.
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- "There can be disagreement over whether what the
United States is doing represents violations of treaties," Wheelis told
the Guardian. "But what is happening is at least so close to the
borderline as to be destabilising."
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- In a paper to be published soon in a scientific
journal, the two academics focus on recent US actions that have served
to undermine the 1972 Biological Weapons Convention.
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- Last July, the US blocked an attempt to give the
convention some teeth with inspections, so that member countries could
check if others were keeping the agreement, the Guardian
reported.
| The Mulindwas
communication group
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