International compliance with the Biological Weapons Convention (BWC) can be routinely monitored, a group of U.S. biopharmaceutical industry experts said yesterday in a report challenging some core tenets of the Bush administration opposition to a formal inspections mechanism.
Experts say that the recent disclosure that a large explosion in North Korea was not a nuclear test shows that the world's system for detecting clandestine nuclear tests is working, but it could be improved if more countries signed a treaty that proposes outlawing all such weapons testing.
The UN Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty Organization, using a global network of seismic, infrasound, hydroacoustic and radiation monitoring stations was able to determine that a recent explosion in North Korea was not a nuclear test.
Thousands of instruments emplaced around the world to detect earthquakes and monitor once-secret Soviet nuclear tests are finding new uses for scientists in a field they call "forensic seismology." So sensitive are the devices that they can even measure the precise timing of waves pounding against a shoreline after a storm, and record the impact of plane crashes, falling buildings or explosions.
The United States, China and most other major nations with satellites in space have failed to register all of them -- a violation of a Cold War-era U.N. convention intended to keep the arms race from moving into orbit.
Astronomers charge that the U.S. is not in compliance with the 1975 U.N. Convention on Registration of Objects Launched into Outer Space because several U.S. spy satellites are not in the orbits the Pentagon says they are.
America's spy satellites are not in the orbits the Pentagon says they are, according to a respected space analyst. The errors will add to concerns over George W. Bush's plans to place weapons in space. If today's satellite orbits cannot be trusted, opponents reason, how will we verify the numbers of future space-based anti-missile lasers and anti-satellite weapons?
New research suggests that there are only a limited number of geological environments suitable for hiding a nuclear test from seismic instruments and the international community.