I take that point. Equally, I remind the Committee of the trend of work at Porton, much of it very valuable work. We have the situation as it is. Ideally, we might want to set up this sort of research in a different fashion, but we must make practical use of what we have already.

My hon. Friend asked about countries which might not admit to having these weapons. We do not know that there are any biological weapon systems in existence which could be effectively deployed in war. We understand that stocks of agents in the United States of America have been destroyed, but nothing has been said about the possible capabilities of the USSR.

My hon. Friend asked about progress towards chemical weapons disarmament. I have tried to cover that already. He also mentioned a conference and an escape Clause arising out of two articles in the convention, and he noted the absence of certain Middle East countries from the list of signatories so far. I cannot say much more about that, because we are circumscribed by the terms of the original treaty. We have based the Bill on the treaty, although I have heard what has been said by several hon. Members about the desirability of going further if we can. We shall return to this and other aspects of the treaty when we get into Standing Committee.

The hon. Member for Putney—I was glad to have his welcome for the Bill—referred particularly to chemical weapons. All I can tell him about Sweden at the moment is that the Swedish Government continue to require defensive research to be continued in their own defence laboratories.

I think that between us my right hon. Friend and I have cleared up what the hon. Member for Newark said about ratification.

As for encouraging other countries to ratify, the British delegation at the Conference of the Committee on Disarmament in Geneva has been doing its best to get further ratifications of the convention. We hope that when the convention is brought into force, for which our own United Kingdom ratification is a vital requirement, more countries will decide that they should act in conformity with our example. We hope that it will give the convention a fair boost forward.

We have thought a good deal about the best machinery for detection and we believe that the general powers of entry, search and seizure, particularly as set out in Clause 4, will in practice work perfectly well. But that, too, is a fair point that we might want to explore in more depth in Standing Committee.

I end by repeating our hope that the Bill will be a useful, if limited, step forward in disarmament. It gives us the opportunity to reassure the Committee, the House and the country that we are greatly in earnest in carrying forward other measures of disarmament in other respects as rapidly as possible. I hope that the Committee will be satisfied with that as a general statement of our intention,