Report Will Warn – Biological Weapons Greatest Terrorist Threat to Britain
July 11, 2008 by national
Filed under World Report
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.
