Chemical Weapons
Sep 25th, 2005 at 10:03 am by Susie
There are probably no peaceful reasons to do this, so they’re most likely up to no good:
The US military wants to buy large quantities of anthrax, in a controversial move that is likely to raise questions over its commitment to treaties designed to limit the spread of biological weapons.
A series of contracts have been uncovered that relate to the US army’ Dugway Proving Ground in Utah. They ask companies to tender for the production of bulk quantities of a non-virulent strain of anthrax, and for equipment to produce significant volumes of other biological agents. Issued earlier this year, the contracts were discovered by Edward Hammond, director of the Sunshine Project, a US-German organisation that campaigns against the use of biological and chemical weapons.
Let’s say that the professional element of our military believes that it is almost certain that biological or chemical weapons of mass destruction will be used against one or more North American or European city within the relatively near term (maybe ten years), but can’t talk about it for all the obvious reasons. In that case, they might quietly try to get a large quantity of non-lethal anthrax to develop and test defensive measures for troops and/or civilians. It is likely that real world dispersion and survival of biological agents is different from that which might be supposed on the basis of laboratory tests. If we still had any faith left, research on tactics to limit the effectiveness of weaponized pathogens would be a good thing. Instead I think, what will the Bush clowns do with this? I sure hope that there is no room here for politically connected sole source contracts administered by partisan cronies.