THE arguments over Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction have entered a new phase, after Tony Blair’s admission that none of his officials had told him whether the Government’s dossier was referring to battlefield or longer-range systems.

The apparent confusion is not just about politics. It is a question of definition, experts said yesterday: when is a weapon one of mass destruction?

Experts who have studied this subject during and after the Cold War accept that the definition has become more flexible since the days when weapons of mass destruction meant an attack by dozens of Soviet intercontinental ballistic missiles with nuclear warheads, capable of causing millions of deaths. Today the acronym WMD appears to mean different things to different people.

Experts say that battlefield artillery shells, mortars, short-range rockets or other systems fitted with nuclear, chemical, biological or radiological warheads can all be classed as weapons of mass destruction under the more liberal definition accepted today.

There are two common denominators that have survived the Cold War: by definition, today’s WMD systems in the hands of rogue or potentially hostile states have to be weapons fitted with nuclear, chemical or biological warheads, and the intention of the attacker, whether using short-range or long-range systems, would be to have a strategic impact. In other words, the launching of chemical artillery shells or the dropping of bombs containing biological agents would have consequences far outweighing the size and effectiveness of the weapons themselves.

The decision by Saddam to launch Scuds armed with chemical warheads against Iran in the 1980s killed thousands, but it also transformed that conflict between neighbours into a far more dangerous regional war and stirred the Iraqi dictator to develop even more deadly weapons.

Even conventional weapons can have a strategic impact. Saddam did not have the capability to launch medium-range missiles with chemical or biological warheads beyond his borders last year, but he did attack Kuwait with al-Samoud missiles, with conventional explosives. They caused little damage but the effect among Kuwaitis turned them into weapons of mass panic.

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