===TOOELE - A relic Cold War building, where Army scientists once secretly studied the effects of biochemical weapons, would be renovated and reopened under a proposal by officials from Dugway Proving Ground.
===Under the proposal, the controversial Baker Lab would be rebuilt with as many as 25 new biological testing areas, including one that would be the largest of its kind for testing the effects of so-called Level-3 biological agents, such as an aerosol form of anthrax, on detection systems.
===Dugway officials say post-Sept. 11, 2001, demands for testing of protective equipment and warning systems simply can't be met in their current lab space.
==="We really don't have enough adequate lab space to do what we're doing," said Doug Anderson, chief of the aerosol technology branch at Dugway's West Desert Test Center.
===But critics say they've heard this story before. "They're certainly continuing a pattern that causes arched eyebrows," said Steve Erickson, whose Citizen's Education Project has been a longtime watchdog over Dugway's activities.
===Erickson noted that public outcry over a proposal to open a Level-4 lab, designed to test the effects of even more dangerous pathogens than those currently acknowledged as being tested at Dugway, was thwarted in the late 1980s when the plan came to public light.
===But just a few years later - "under the cover of the first Gulf War," Erickson said - the Army succeeded in constructing a new Level-3 lab, the Life Sciences Test Facility. Finished in 1997, the lab was intended to replace Baker.
==="Now they're saying they need even more space? That they need to reopen a lab they just closed? I'm not necessarily impugning their motives here, but when this is all so cloaked in secrecy, historically and actually quite recently, that's what causes fear, uncertainty and doubt," Erickson said.
===Test center Commander Douglas Tamilio stressed that the new Baker Lab would, from the inside, bear little resemblance to the lab that was shut down in 1998.
==="The only thing left would be the concrete walls and the roof," Tamilio said.
===He said the rebuilt facility would be devoted only to the testing of protective equipment and detection systems that are too large to be tested in any of the Army's current labs spaces.
===Still, Tamilio said, he understands the critics' concerns. And at two recent public meetings he pledged "to answer all of the questions we are asked."
===One question he might have difficulty answering, however, is what message an expanded testing facility might send to U.S. adversaries.
===International law has prohibited "offensive" testing of biological weapons for three decades. But Edward Hammond, director of the biodefense watchdog Sunshine Project, said that the potential to derive "dual use" data from tests, such as those proposed at the expanded Baker Lab, endangers the precarious balance of international trust.
==="Any major expansion of a laboratory that is so secretive is one that will raise concerns, by definition," Hammond said. "Other countries that might feel the U.S. is a potential adversary - Iran or China, for instance - might look at this work and say, 'We've got to do it, too.' "

                 mlaplante@sltrib.com