Govt to be warned over biological terror threat

Friday, 11 July 2008 12:00 AM

The government will be warned later this year of the significant threat posed to British security by biological weapons.

A warning of the profound security implications of the worldwide biotechnology revolution is expected to be a key tenet of a major counterterrorism report out later this year.

The Institute for Public Policy Research's (IPPR) national security commission, which is co-chaired by Lord Ashdown and Lord Robertson, is not due to reveal its initial findings until its interim report in October.

But the commission's deputy chair Ian Kearns, deputy director at the IPPR, spoke to inthenews.co.uk to outline what the commission was expecting to offer advice on.

He said the potential to use disease as a weapon and advances in biotechnology were major worries.

"We need to be resilient to biological terrorism and to the potential use of biological weapons," he told inthenews.co.uk.

Mr Kearns explained the real danger was not potentially-devastating technologies being acquired by terrorist groups but by individuals.

"This is going to be a century-long thing, we're not talking about specific terrorist groups [we're talking about]... lone weirdoes with expertise - people who have very high-level knowledge skills and access to the right materials who could use it for devastating purposes," he continued.

Earlier this year the government unveiled its much-heralded national security strategy, which acknowledges the new biological weapon-based approach being employed by terrorists.

But Mr Kearns insisted a comprehensive strategy targeting terrorists would not suffice.

"We're talking about a diffusion of technology in society, which is very difficult to control, which is presenting whole new challenges and because you can't always imagine you could prevent some of these instances because of the dispersal of technology and knowledge," he explained.

"You need to think about how you can make society resilient to those kind of emergencies, how you would react to them, minimise the impact of them and get them back to normal as quickly as possible."

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