Global Security Newswire

(Sep. 16) -Libyan Transitional National Council fighters guard a rally in Tripoli last week. The United States is pursuing renewed communication with Libyan WMD specialists in an effort to prevent the scientists from being recruited to produce additional unconventional armaments (Patrick Baz/Getty Images).

The United States is attempting to renew contacts with Libyan WMD experts in order to continue steering them toward civilian jobs as a means of ensuring their unique expertise is not used by hostile nations or terrorists to create new unconventional weapons, the Associated Press reported on Thursday (see GSN, March 10).

The former regime of Muammar Qadhafi at one point employed hundreds of scientists in the research and development of weapons of mass destruction. Qadhafi in 2003 struck an agreement with Western governments to shutter his WMD programs; the following year the Bush administration moved to create a jobs program that would place the Libyan weapons scientists in such nonmilitary fields as gas and oil manufacturing, atomic medicine and water desalination. That program came to a halt when fighting erupted in the North African country in February.

Before it was thrown into disarray, the program involved some 700 Libyan scientists and received roughly $2 million in annual funding from Washington, according to previous reports. While the Qadhafi government allowed fairly unrestrained U.S. contact with its nuclear researchers and biological experts, the regime limited U.S. dealings with its chemical scientists, going so far as to suppress statements and assign government watchers for meetings, an unidentified State Department official said.

The official said the Obama administration has requested permission from the Libyan Transitioned National Council to renew its dealings with the WMD experts. Tripoli's new leaders have shown a desire to collaborate with Washington on reviving the jobs program and other antiproliferation initiatives but as yet have not offered an official response, the official said.

Monterey Institute of International Studies Middle East expert Bilal Saab said gaining control over the vestiges of Qadhafi's WMD program -- which include 9.5 metric tons of deteriorating mustard blister agent, 1,300 tons of chemical weapons precursor materials, 2,000 tons of yellowcake uranium and a small arsenal of short-range ballistic missiles -- and ensuring that the knowledge needed to develop them is not proliferated are of high importance to the Obama administration. Tripoli's new civilian officials, though, have other priorities, such as suppressing the last Qadhafi holdouts and ensuring civil war does not break out in the nation, Saab said.

The United States attempted to monitor the Libyan weapons researchers during the six-month uprising and has not discovered any hard signs that any were enlisted in an effort to produce unconventional weapons, the State Department official said.

In recent days, biological warfare researchers and a handful of other scientists have renewed contacts with U.S. officials. At the same time, Washington is partnering with U.S. scientists at government laboratories and issue organizations to develop a roster of the most important Libyan scientists who need to be found (Douglas Birch, Associated Press/Google News, Sept. 15).