The unfortunate, unforeseen and unexpected demise of David Kelly has deprived the UK (and its allies) of an experienced scientist and a much respected and valued member of the team of international inspectors of the so-called weapons of mass destruction.
The history of the international efforts to control these inhumane agents goes back to the years after World War One when noxious gases, aerosols and vapours were released in the atmosphere in the static trench warfare of that war. Agents like chlorine (released by the Germans on April 22, 1915, at Ypres against the French army front, followed soon after by British retaliatory action on September 22), phosgene and mustard gas were also used in that world war of 1914-1918.
These toxic warfare agents aroused such horror, revulsion and abhorrence world-wide that mankind probably first coined the phrase "Never again".
This was a pipe dream.
Despite the good intentions expressed in The Geneva Protocol of June 12, 1925, banning the use of chemical and biological weapons in war and, 50 years later, The Biological and Toxin Weapons Convention of April 10,1972, banning the development, production and stock-piling of such weapons, signed in London, Moscow and Washington, and many subsequent updating of international conventions on these terrifying agents, these are still hanging over our heads like the sword of Damocles.
A heinous crime against all humanity.
It is of interest to mention, en passant, that even our tiny island is signatory to these well-intentioned international pious agreements.
However, one fears that many governments are not always honest and honourable despite the signing of firm declarations and impressive protocols. It is obvious that the spirit and the letter of these international statements by various nations denying they have prepared, produced, or stock-piled these weapons of mass destruction is not worth the papers on which these are documented.
We have seen or heard of chemical agents used in the Iraq-Iran war and their use against the unprotected and unprepared Kurds; the accidental deaths of about 66 innocent civilians living near the biowarfare agent producing facility at Sverdlovsk, Siberia, in the USSR, in 1979, when a technician forgot to change the laboratory filters and spores of anthrax were disseminated in the outflowing air; and the recent anthrax outbreak in the US of October 2001, the perpetrators of which have not as yet been identified. There are also the stories of fleas infected with the plague bacillus dropped by Japan on the Chinese population and the possible use of botulinum toxin in beer in South Africa.
I may add the use of the "Orange" defoliant sprayed over the vegetation by the US in Vietnam.
The reader has to be reminded that biowarfare agents are designed for use against all living beings and things, that is to say not only against the human populations but also against their food chains, cattle and crops.
The intelligence services of the various nations must have had suspicions, if not firm knowledge, of what has been going on but they kept things under cover until one fine day a Soviet scientist, Vladimir Pasechnik, defected to the West in 1989 and on debriefing spilled the beans about the USSR's well kept secret on the large-scale production of biological weapons, such as smallpox and plague.
The Western powers protested strongly to the Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev and insisted that he allowed an international inspecting team to visit the soviet laboratories, although all the time the USSR continued to deny it had any biowarfare agent production programme.
Dr Kelly was included in the inspecting team which, in 1991, travelled throughout the USSR. In one virus laboratory (Vector, a virus laboratory in far off Siberia), his suspicion, experience and intuition made him corner a junior soviet technician and he enquired of him what viruses were being handled in that particular facility. "Smallpox," replied the technician.
This was explosive and damning information. The smallpox virus (Variola), the No. 1 candidate biological warfare agent, was not supposed to be held in any laboratory in the world, except in the refrigerators of the WHO repository in Moscow and in the CDC Atalanta, USA.
On further demanding and searching questions to the directors of the Vector laboratory by the members of the now greatly alarmed inspecting team, the visiting scientists were asked abruptly to leave the laboratory premises.
As stated in the opening paragraph, it is reiterated that the loss to the UK (and its allies) of Dr Kelly's professional scientific experience will be greatly felt. What has happened, has happened. And now the whole world awaits the outcome of the Hutton public inquiry to get to the bottom of Dr Kelly's dramatic and tragical demise.