Tokyo - Japan said yesterday it planned to step up its self-defence measures on biological and chemical warfare. The US Defence Secretary, Mr William Cohen, alerted Japan last month to North Korea's biological and chemical weapons programmes, Japanese Defence Agency officials said.
Special units in Japan's army will develop equipment to deal with biological or chemical weapons attacks, they added, as Japan was not fully prepared to respond to attacks by weapons of mass destruction. Japan has shied away from developing anti-biological warfare capabilities as it fears a backlash from its Asian neighbours who still remember Japan's top-secret Unit 731, which conducted biological experiments on Chinese, Korean and Russian prisoners of war during the second World War.