The U.S. Hampers Work of the UN Biological Weapons Conference
Since the opening of the three-week long United Nations Biological Weapons Conference in Geneva on November 19th, the United States has continued to frustrate its work by refusing to ratify measures to control the threat of these types of weapons. The laying down of obligatory verification measures was part of the original 1972 Biological Weapons Convention signed by 144 countries; yet the United States has argued for years that agreeing to these measures would jeopardize the secrecy of its own biological weapons research programs.
It has been widely known for decades that the biological warfare research conducted by the U.S. is not confined to its laboratories. In the 1960s and 1970s, the U.S. military used chemical and biological weapons in its war of aggression against the people of Indochina. Over the years, the Cuban people have had ample evidence of the unleashing of various forms of biological weaponry against them by the U.S., including nerve gas, poisonous insects and infectious diseases. The list goes on and on.
The U.S. refusal at this time is even more disturbing and illogical in the face of the overwhelming sentiment of the American people, not to mention the people of the world, concerning the apparent anthrax threat. A recently-released survey found that 81 percent of Americans are in favour of the inspection of all public and private laboratories capable of producing biological weapons, while 71 percent support the creation of an international agency to supervise compliance with the Convention on Biological Weapons.
One of the American NGOs participating in the Geneva Conference has charged that many U.S. laboratories are currently working on "terminator technology"- the development of highly destructive bacteria capable of ruining oil and gas deposits and contaminating large quantities of food and water. This research is prohibited by the Convention.
At the opening of the Geneva Conference, the United States hypocritically accused six other countries of germ-warfare development: Iraq, Libya, Syria, Iran, Sudan and North Korea. By not including itself on the list, it can only be saying that, as a superpower, it alone has the right to conduct such research.