WASHINGTON Ñ The United States has formally rejected a revision of the biological weapons convention.

U.S. officials said a treaty being drafted at the United Nations would hurt both national security as well as American industry. The treaty was to have been completed by November. So far, 143 nations have ratified the accord.

U.S. diplomats and officials said the administration has concluded that the proposed treaty would leave the United States vulnerable to those who want to obtain industrial and security secrets while leaving rogue states free to continue their biological weapons development. Iraq, Iran, Libya, North Korea and Syria are believed to either developing biological weapons or harboring ambitions to do so.

"The concerns that were expressed today in Geneva, substantively, are precisely the same concerns that were expressed during the Clinton administration," a senior U.S. administration official said. "There are some 37 items on which there is unanimous interagency consensus in the United States government that make this protocol unacceptable."

The decision by the Bush administration appears to end seven years of efforts to improve the enforcement provisions of the 1972 treaty to ban the use of biological weapons.

The revisions included inspections of suspected biological weapons sites. The 1972 treaty failed to include provisions for enforcement.

"In our assessment, the draft protocol would put national security and confidential business information at risk," U.S. chief negotiator Donald Mahley said in a statement from Geneva. "The draft protocol will not improve our ability to verify Biological Weapons Convention compliance. It will not enhance our confidence in compliance and will do little to deter those countries seeking to develop biological weapons."

Print this Article

Email this article

Free Headline Alerts