Germ warfare pact nearer

Press, Volume CXI, Issue 32678, 6 August 1971, Page 9

Germ warfare pact nearer

(N.Z.P.A.-Reuter—Copyright] GENEVA, August 5. The United States and the Soviet Union will present the Geneva Disarmament Conference today with a jointly-prepared draft treaty outlawing germ warfare.

The conference of 25 nations is expected to reach swift agreement on the measures proposed by its two joint chairmen, whose work is considered by some delegates to be the conference’s first “true” disarmament measure, involving the physical destruction of arms. Previous measures on which the conference has agreed, such as last year’s treaty banning the placing of weapons on the seabed, have been described as “non-arma-ment measures,” because they banned what no nation had yet done. The draft treaty lays down that signatory-States must destrov existing stocks of germ weapons within three months of the date the treaty comes into force. It also bans the development, production, stockpiling and acquisition of biological means of- warfare and toxins, as well as the

means of delivery of such agents. The United States, whose version of today’s draft differs from that of the Soviet Union only in that it is written in English and not Russian, unilaterally renounced germ weapons nearly two years ago, and has already begun-eliminating its stocks. The presentation of the draft reflects a sudden change in policy by the Soviet Union in March, when she ended two years of criticism of an American-supported British draft, and presented a similar document in which she dropped previous insistence that germs and gases should be outlawed in one composite agreement The British proposal had suggested a separate ban on germ weapons first, with a pledge to continue negotiations on ..the- more complex problems of gases.