The U.S. government is building a highly classified facility to research biological weapons, a massive biodefense laboratory unlike any seen since biological weapons were banned 34 years ago, The Washington Post reported Sunday.

The National Biodefense Analysis and Countermeasures Center (NBACC) building is to be constructed at Fort Detrick, Maryland, on the grounds of a military base an hour's drive from the nation's capital.

When it opens in two years, the NBACC lab will house an impressive collection of deadly germs and teams of scientists in full-body "spacesuits" to work with them. It will also have large aerosol-test chambers where animals will be exposed to deadly microbes. But the lab's most controversial feature may be its secrecy, the report said.

A computer slide show prepared by the center's directors in 2004 offers a to-do list that suggests the lab will be making and testing small amounts of weaponized microbes and, perhaps, genetically engineered viruses and bacteria, the report said.

The heart of the lab is a cluster of sealed chambers built to contain the world's deadliest bacteria and viruses, and the work at the new lab could someday save thousands of lives or create new risks and place the United States in violation of international treaties, according to the report.

Since the founding of the Department of Homeland Security, the center's creator, in the aftermath of the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, department officials have dramatically expanded the government's ability to conduct realistic tests of the pathogens and tactics that might be used in a bioterrorism attack, the report said.

Some of the research falls within what many arms-control experts say is a legal gray zone, skirting the edges of an international treaty outlawing the production of even small amounts of biological weapons, the newspaper reported.

Critics of the NBACC, the report said, fear that excessive secrecy could actually increase the risk of bioterrorism. That would happen, they said, if the lab fosters ill-designed experiments conducted without proper scrutiny or if its work fuels suspicions that could lead other countries to pursue secret biological research.

"If we saw others doing this kind of research, we would view it as an infringement of the bioweapons treaty," said Milton Leitenberg, a senior research scholar and weapons expert at the University of Maryland's School of Public Policy.

"You can't go around the world yelling about Iranian and North Korean programs -- about which we know very little -- when we've got all this going on," he was quoted as saying.

Source: Xinhua