GENEVA, Dec 7: The United States on Friday forced the breakup of a germ warfare conference without new measures to toughen an international ban, angering its European allies.

In a bid to save face, the review conference of the 1972 Biological and Toxic Weapons Convention opted formally to suspend work for a year until November next year after Washington put forward what one European delegate called a “conference breaker.”

In a last-minute proposal, Washington demanded the winding up of a committee that had spent years seeking to negotiate ways to give teeth to the pact outlawing biological weapons.

The move, which caught even European Union states by surprise, came just an hour before the formal end of the three-week-long meeting aimed at finding ways to strengthen the 30-year-old pact.

“They have fired a missile at the conference. We are deeply disappointed,” one senior European diplomat said.

Under pressure from the anthrax attacks in the United States, countries were agreed on a number of measures, but they remained deeply divided on some key issues.

Amongst these was the future of the so-called Ad Hoc negotiating committee — backed by all countries except the United States — which had sought ways to make the treaty verifiable.

Unlike other arms treaties, the biological weapons pact has no mechanism for checking whether members are obeying the rules.

The United States had already rejected ahead of the conference a draft protocol proposed by the committee that would have instituted a system of spot checks.

Washington said it would have exposed its industrial and military facilities to spying without giving any guarantees that it could catch cheats.

On Friday it went a step further by formally proposing that the mandate of the committee — agreed at the last convention review conference in 1994 — be withdrawn.—Reuters