BUSH ADMIN EXPLORING BIO-​​OFFENSE

“The Bush admin­is­tra­tion is ramp­ing up bioter­ror­ism research that will press beyond tra­di­tional defenses against nat­ural biowar­fare germs to explore genet­i­cally engi­neered super­bugs, as well as the means to mass-​​produce and dis­sem­i­nate them,” the Oakland Tribune reports.

The Homeland Security Department’s new National Biodefense Analysis and Countermeasures Center… tasked sci­en­tists to study how to “acquire, grow, mod­ify, store, sta­bi­lize, pack­age (and) dis­perse” bioweapons and to run com­puter sim­u­la­tions of large-​​scale pro­duc­tion.
It called for “red team­ing” oper­a­tions, in which sci­en­tists would fig­ure out how to exe­cute ter­ror­ist attacks…
“If any other coun­try set forth a pro­gram like this, U.S. intel­li­gence undoubt­edly would call it an offen­sive pro­gram,” said Edward Hammond, head of the Sunshine Project, a group in Austin, Texas, that tracks bioweapons and biode­fense issues. 

THERE’S MORE: “There is a dan­ger that these activ­i­ties would pro­voke an inter­na­tional arms race in bioweapons,” says chem­bio author­ity Barbara Hatch Rosenberg.

The pro­posed func­tions, com­bined with the secrecy under which they may be con­ducted; the prece­dent set when secret US projects of dubi­ous legal­ity under the Biological Weapons Convention (BWC) became known sev­eral years ago; the omis­sion of those projects from the annual BWC confidence-​​building infor­ma­tion exchange; the pro­lif­er­a­tion of high-​​containment lab­o­ra­to­ries and fund­ing for research on bioweapons agents now under­way in the US; and the recent US rejec­tion of a BWC Protocol con­tain­ing on-​​site inspec­tion mea­sures — all these are cer­tain to gen­er­ate sus­pi­cions abroad about US capa­bil­i­ties and inten­tions…
Compared to nuclear weapons, bioweapons are far more read­ily acces­si­ble to a large num­ber of nations. If the US under­takes the planned activ­i­ties, other coun­tries, uncer­tain of what is going on and want­ing to keep up, are likely to pur­sue sim­i­lar biode­fense and threat assess­ment activ­i­ties, pos­si­bly using them as cov­ers for bioweapons pro­grams. Even if the ini­tial inten­tions are defen­sive, poten­tially offen­sive capa­bil­i­ties would thereby pro­lif­er­ate, with the risk that they might even­tu­ally fall into the hands of terrorists. 

A sec­ond group of chem­bio big­wigs have teamed up to blast the new Center. Read their remarks here.

June 9th, 2004 | Chem-Bio | Comments Off Both comments and pings are currently closed.