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- SYDNEY (AFP) -
Effective germ-laden weapons have been developed and have the
potential to cause far greater devastation than nuclear arms, an
international bio-terrorism symposium was told Sunday.
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- Ken Alibek, a former Soviet bio-weapons
scientist who defected to the West seven years ago, told the
symposium at the world congresses on virology and bacteriology
that the Soviet Union had successfully developed warheads filled
with anthrax, smallpox, plague and the Ebola virus.
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- The experiments went on into the early 1990s
despite the Soviet Union signing the international treaty
banning toxin weapons in 1972, along with 140 other nations.
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- Alibek said that unlike the United States,
whose biological weapons program ended in 1969, the Soviets had
no compunction about developing weapons using bacteria or
viruses for which there was no treatment or preventive vaccines.
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- In fact, the weapons considered to have the
most potential were those using biological agents for which
there was no treatment -- such as Ebola, the related Marburg
virus, and smallpox.
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- In addition, they developed weapons based on
germs which had been genetically engineered to be resistant to
antibiotics and vaccines, he said.
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- "I'm 100 percent sure that some
biological weapons have greater killing capability than nuclear
weapons," he told the symposium.
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- Alibek, who is now chief scientist at a US
company researching biological weapons protection, said he had
worked out how much biological material was required to
devastate a population.
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- He estimated three kilograms (6.6 pounds) of
anthrax sprayed over one square kilometre would be enough to
kill 50 percent of people in its path.
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- For Marburg, the formula was just one kilogram
per square kilometre.
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- Former US presidential adviser Donald
Henderson said the biological weapons threats in order of
concern were smallpox, anthrax, plague, botulin toxin,
haemorrhagic fever viruses and tularaemia.
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- Chris Davis, a former British defence
intelligence and disarmament adviser, pointed out thousands of
scientists dispersed with the break-up of the Soviet Union,
taking their skills and possibly biological material with them.
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- The Soviet enterprise employed more than
60,000 people in 200 laboratories, producing multi-tonne volumes
of deadly germs, he said.
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- In 1995, the Japanese cult Aum Shinrikyo
created chaos on the Tokyo subway when it released the nerve gas
sarin, killing 12 and injuring at least 3,000 people.
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- Western governments are devoting billions of
dollars to bio-terrorism preparedness, the symposium heard.
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