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Bush Team Recommends Rejection of Germ Warfare Guidelines
The US administration of President George W. Bush may deal another blow to global arms control efforts with an interagency confidential review recommending it to reject an international protocol on enforcing a treaty banning germ weapons, The New York Times reported Sunday.
A 1972 treaty, which 143 nations have ratified, prohibits the development, production and possession of biological weapons. But the treaty has always lacked means of verifying compliance.
After six years of negotiations, diplomats in Geneva have produced a draft agreement, known as a protocol, which would establish measures to monitor the ban on biological weapons.
The Clinton administration cast the new protocol as an important tool to stem the spread of biological weapons.
But the new Bush administration has taken a far more skeptical approach. In a unanimous review, its interagency team concluded that the current version of the protocol would be inefficient in stopping cheating, and that all its deficiencies could not be remedied by the negotiating deadline, namely by November this year.
The Bush administration has already came under fire from across the world for its challenge to the existing global arms disarmament regime by planning to scrap the 19872 Antiballistic Missile Treaty (ABM).
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