- 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.
-
- 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.
-
- 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.
-
- 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.
-
- 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.
-
- 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.
-
- 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.
-
- "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."
-
- 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.
-
- 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.
-
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