Another very disturbing report on discoveries in Afghanistan about Al Qaeda�s plans for weapons of mass destruction: Scientists confirm bin Laden weapons tests.

The breadth and detail of al-Qaeda’s aspirations have taken the security services by surprise. At one point the documents discuss creating an explosion using 500kg of TNT — almost twice the amount that killed two people in the London Docklands bomb in 1996. Similarly, al-Qaeda’s plans for chemical weapons were drawn up with large-scale production in mind: each recipe contained a step-by-step guide explaining how to produce batches that would kill thousands of people.

…the documents showed that al-Qaeda had gone so far as to manufacture and test certain types of chemical weapons on rabbits, including cyanide gas, which was used by Saddam Hussein to kill hundreds of Kurds in Halabja in 1988.

As disturbing as the substance of these findings is their context. The documents did not come from a single source of expertise. They included material produced by men of several nationalities at different stages of education, varying from recruit to degree level student and professor, and were being reproduced for wide distribution. They were the work of a variety of autonomous cells, who conducted their own experiments, without collusion.

“Rather than being assured by al-Qaeda’s diversity, in fact this proves a huge problem to the Western security forces,” one intelligence expert said. “What we can see is the work of different, potentially self-replicating cells, united only by an ideal. They will be far more difficult to extinguish than a centrally organised terrorist force.”