Pentagon's weapons 'could violate treaties'

By Laura Smith, Evening Standard

The United States is developing new weapons that could violate international treaties on biological and chemical warfare, it was claimed today.

Scientists warn that the Pentagon's new generation of weapons include biological cluster bombs, anthrax and weapons similar to the narcotic gas used by Russian forces to end the Moscow siege.

In a paper to be published next month, academics from both sides of the Atlantic claim that the secrecy with which the US is carrying out this research is threatening a breakdown in international arms control.



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Malcolm Dando, professor of international security at the University of Bradford, and Mark Wheelis, a lecturer in microbiology at the University of California, accuse the US of hypocrisy in developing such weapons while proposing military action against Iraq on the grounds that it is breaking international treaties.

"There can be disagreement over whether what the US is doing represents violations of treaties," said Mr Wheelis. "But what is happening is at least so close to the borderline as to be destabilising."

In a paper to be published in the scientific journal, Bulletin of the Atomic Scientist, the two academics argue that by blurring the edges of international treaties on arms control the US risks inviting others to do the same. They focus on recent US moves they claim have undermined the 1972 Biological Weapons Convention.

Last July, for example, the US blocked an attempt to strengthen the convention with inspections, so that member countries could check that others are keeping the agreement.

The paper alleges that Washington's motive for rejecting the deal was to maintain secrecy over work on biological weapons, which includes CIA efforts to copy a Soviet cluster bomb designed to disperse biological weapons and research by the Defence Intelligence Agency into genetically-engineering a new strain of antibiotic-resistant anthrax.