The Clandestine Building of Libya's Chemical Weapons Factory: A Study in International Collusion

In a study written for specialists, the late Weigele, who was director of the Program for Biosocial Research at Northern Illinois University, offers a scholarly analysis of chemical-weapons proliferation by a Third World country. He traces the elaborate scheme by which the Libyan government funneled chemical processing equipment and raw materials from Western Europe over the past decade; firms in the Federal Republic of Germany were the major suppliers. He suggests that Iraq's success in acquiring military power during the same period encouraged Muammar Khadafy to believe, correctly, that he would encounter little international resistance in establishing his chemical-weapons factory at Al-Rabitah. Wiegele outlines the corporate and military deception practiced by Libya and West Germany as they jointly extracted the requisite materials from an international system presumably predisposed to oppose the proliferation of chemical weapons. He points out that the world community has yet to formulate a convention for controlling and/or prohibiting the use of such weapons. (Aug.)