US expands search for WMDs to East Africa: Report

April 15, 2011 defpro.com

The US is expanding its 20-year-old search programme for weapons of mass destruction to East Africa in a bid to thwart the threat of bioterrorism emancipating from the region, a media report said, according to DD India.

The Cooperative Threat Reduction (CTR) programme began two decades ago to help secure and destroy Cold War-era nuclear and other weapons of mass destruction in the republics of the erstwhile Soviet Union.

Now, the programme is being expanded to East African countries like Kenya, Uganda and Tanzania after the roots of some of the world's deadliest diseases like the Ebola and Rift Valley Fever viruses were traced to the region, the American Chemical Society magazine 'Chemical & Engineering News' said.

In fact, East Africa is a volatile region and terrorist organisations like the al-Qaeda may use these deadly microbes to make biological weapons, the report said.

"Those weapons are being destroyed. Now we have to secure their sources," US Senator Richard G Lugar of Indiana, and former chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, was quoted as saying.

He added: "Al-Qaeda and other terrorist groups are active in Africa, and it is imperative that deadly pathogens stored in labs there are secure. This is a threat we cannot ignore... these pathogens can be made into weapons more simply than any dealing with chemical or nuclear devices."

Under the 1991 US initiative, all nuclear weapons in the former Soviet Union republics such as Ukraine, Belarus, and Kazakhstan were shipped to Russia for dismantlement. Some 8000 nuclear warheads, 3000 missiles, and millions of tons of chemical and biological weapons were destroyed. (DD India)