In August 2009, a leading expert on chemical and biological arms control 
called for urgent efforts to stop new mind-altering drugs developed for medical purposes from being adopted by the military for use in warfare.
In an article in the U.S. journal Nature, British academic Malcolm Dando said civilian researchers in many countries seemed largely unaware of the danger and urged quick action to adapt a key arms pact to head it off.
“In the past 20 years, modern warfare has changed from predominantly large-scale clashes of armies to messy civil strife,” wrote Dando, citing the Bosnian conflict of the mid-1990s and current fighting in Iraq and Afghanistan.
Chemical agents and even gene therapy being developed in civilian life science laboratories “are particularly suited to this style of warfare; it is not hard to find people in the military world who think they would be useful,” he declared.
Dando, Professor of International Security at Britain’s Bradford University, is a regular participant in U.N.-sponsored arms conferences and in Nature, he said attention should be focused on changing the 1993 global Chemical Weapons Convention (CWC).
Currently the CWC, which went into effect in 1997 and to which 188 countries are signatories, bans all chemical weapons but excludes those used for law enforcement and riot control.
“‘Law enforcement’ could be taken by some to cover more than domestic riot control, which in certain circumstances would make it legal for the military to use agents such as fentanyl,” said Dando, referring to a powerful painkilling drug.
Fentanyl, a strong painkiller, Dando said, was deployed in a still unrevealed mixture by Russian special forces in 2002 to subdue Chechen militants who had seized a Moscow theater.
But its use led to the deaths of over 120 hostages among the theater-goers and Russian commandos who went into the theater with protective gear shot dead the incapacitated hostage-takers.
The Russian government will not reveal the type of gas because it may face similar attacks in the future, “
A former Russian defence ministry official, Viktor Baranets said: “Most likely the agent they chose was the gas known as Kolokol-1, the most promising of all psycho-chemical agents developed by the Soviet special services.”
He said the gas, known within Russia’s security community for some time, “spreads rapidly across broad areas, and can render a healthy person completely unconscious in 1 to 3 seconds”, but people with weak hearts or prone to vomiting could die from inhaling it.
Other agents being developed, said Dando, include oxytocin, dubbed the “love and cuddle” chemical which induces trust and whose emergence “opens up the possibility of a drug that could be used to manipulate people’s emotions in a military context.”
In a paper to be published soon in the scientific journal Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, the professor focuses on recent US actions that have served to undermine the 1972 Biological Weapons Convention. In a move that stunned the international community last July, the US blocked an attempt to give the convention some teeth with inspections, so that member countries could check if others were keeping the agreement.
Mr Dando believes Washington’s motive for torpedoing the deal, which had the support of its allies, was to maintain secrecy over US research work on biological weapons. He said that work includes:
- CIA efforts to copy a Soviet cluster bomb designed to disperse biological weapons
- A project by the Pentagon to build a bio-weapon plant from commercially available materials to prove that terrorists could do the same thing
- Research by the Defense Intelligence Agency into the possibility of genetically engineering a new strain of antibiotic-resistant anthrax.
Jonathan Tucker, a chemical weapons expert at the US Institute for Peace in Washington, said much of the work on non-lethal weapons was being carried out by an institute under the US justice department but was funded by the Pentagon.
For the full story see Reuters coverage
We’ve discussed in the past how there’s an arms race so to speak to see which of the uber rich has the biggest, bestest most totally tricked out super yacht. Roman Abramovich has been ahead of the game for a while but he’s still hard at work building perhaps the largest, coolest Bond villian yacht – heck it even out does those grand visions. The 557-foot boat Eclipse, the price tag of which has almost doubled to almost $1.2 billion since original plans were drawn three years ago set sail this week with a slew of show-off features, from two helipads, two swimming pools and six-foot movie screens in all guest cabins, to a mini-submarine and missile-proof windows and hull to combat piracy.
