Washington

Three prominent US arms-control experts have hit out at the Department of Homeland Security's plans to start a new programme in biodefence research.

In an article published online on 17 May, the specialists say that activities planned at a National Biodefense Analysis and Countermeasures Center, scheduled to be built at Fort Detrick in Maryland, could breach the Biological Weapons Convention. The convention, which the United States has signed, prohibits offensive bioweapons programmes.

According to a presentation made by a US Army official at a Department of Defense meeting on 9 February, the centre would carry out studies to anticipate how bioterrorists might develop and deploy new biological threats. But the authors of the article, published in Politics and the Life Sciences (http://www.politicsandthelifesciences.org), say that these studies may cross the line from defensive into offensive territory. Taken together, they write, many of the activities “may constitute development in the guise of threat assessment, and they will certainly be interpreted that way”.

The authors are Milton Leitenberg, an arms-control analyst at the University of Maryland; James Leonard, who led US negotiations to the Biological Weapons Convention; and Richard Spertzel, a scientist who worked with the United National Special Commission investigating bioweapons in Iraq.

Leitenberg says he is also troubled by the fact that no independent group is reviewing all of the US government's planned biodefence research to decide whether it complies with the convention. He adds that a new body announced on 4 March, the National Science Advisory Board for Biosecurity, will not solve the problem because it is not permanent and will not review classified projects.

Most of the terrorist groups about which the United States is concerned, including al-Qaeda, have not developed effective bioterrorism programmes, Leitenberg adds. The United States risks accelerating their progress, he argues, by investigating new horizons in bioweapons. “We will become the Johnny Appleseed, providing sophisticated technical know-how related to bioweapons to the rest of the world,” he says.

The Department of Homeland Security did not return calls seeking a response to the critique.