Viruses could be future weapons, warn experts

Academics and security experts were today warning how foot-and-mouth disease and even more devastating viruses could be used as weapons in future wars.

Chemical warfare, cybercrime and environmental threats were all on the agenda at the Global Forum for Law Enforcement and National Security’s inaugural conference at Edinburgh.

Director Robert Hall said: ‘‘The thrust of the conference is looking at new security issues over the next 20 years.

‘‘We will look at how the technological revolution, including the revolution in biotechnology and genetics, is going to give new opportunities but also throw us new threats in the changing of security issues.

‘‘Foot-and-mouth has caused an economic disaster for many people in this country.

‘‘It would not take a great deal of imagination to see what organised crime or a hostile country could do with such a biological agent if it wanted to ruin the economic security of a country - and the economy is one of the main ways we measure a country’s stability these days.’’

Professor Malcolm Dando of the Department of Peace Studies at England's Bradford University will discuss the threat of a new breed of genetically-engineered weapons.

He said: ‘‘A whole range of new possibilities will arise from tailoring biological agents to be more difficult to detect, more resistant to antibiotics, and so on.

‘‘Today’s literature talks about a ‘designer weapon’ - a completely new organism which attacks humans, animals or crops in an entirely new way.

‘‘The medics who try to treat it wouldn’t have any idea what’s going on because it is so different.’’

Prof Dando said that given the history of biological weapons, from the First World War to the Cold War, Vietnam and the Gulf, it was almost inevitable that genomics, the application of genetics in technology and manufacturing, will be adopted by the arms industry.