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Porton Down to check on illicit weapons trade

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TOM WILKIE SCIENCE EDITOR  TUESDAY 03 OCTOBER 1995

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Porton Down, the Ministry of Defence's

chemical and biological research centre,

is to play a leading role in verifying that

British companies are not illegally 

making or exporting chemical weapons.

But the Government plans to exempt the

 Wiltshire centre from legislation making

chemical weapons illegal. The only 

public scrutiny of government

departments will be through ministerial

accountability to Parliament.

The Government has taken the unusual step of publishing

draft legislation before introducing the Bill to Parliament. The

deadline for comments on the draft expires this weekend.

However experts say the legislation is not tough enough to

measure up to the international Convention on Chemical

 Weapons and may lead to difficulties. Nicholas Sims, of the

London School of Economics, said "most of the elements of 

national implementation of the CWC are ... absent from the

draft Bill."

Just 10 civil servants within the Department of Trade and

Industry are to be responsible for monitoring more than 500

companies and 2,000 sites which employ lethally toxic

chemicals that have a dual military-civilian use. The civil

servants will constitute the "national authority" required by 

the CWC, which is supposed to keep track of the movements

of all these chemicals and to investigate any discrepancies.

Porton Down's military experts will advise and assist the

"national authority" in monitoring scientific developments

that might lead to new types of chemical weapons.

 According to Professor Julian Perry Robinson of the

University of Sussex, this raises two problems. "The first is

ensuring that CBDE [Porton Down] is not unduly selective in

 what it chooses to tell the national aut hority - that it does not

hold back information about, for example, some attractive

new chemical-weapons possibility." In 1975, he said, the US

Senate discovered that the CIA's Technical Services Division

had retained stocks of a toxic weapon in breach of the

Biological Weapons Convention.

The second problem was "whether Porton actually has the

requisite reach into the industrial, academic and other

 worlds where there is leading- edge research".

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