FREDERICK -- With the development of a new biodefense campus on Fort Detrick just around the corner, local anti-expansion activists rallied Sunday afternoon to bring awareness to what they see as a crisis for Frederick.

"This is a slippery, dangerous slope," said Kevin Zeese, who spoke at the event and is a Green Party candidate for Senate. "To create bioweapons and new ways of deploying them is creating a big risk."

The 200-acre National Interagency Biodefense Campus in development at Fort Detrick will be the country's largest center dedicated to predicting and fighting biothreats. Its cost is estimated at $1.2 billion.

Mr. Zeese said the area of Baker Park where the rally was held is about 20 acres, a tenth of the size of the planned biodefense campus.

"We want to get the people of Frederick thinking really carefully about this decision (to build the NIBC), not just to let it happen without questioning it," he said.

Opponents to Fort Detrick's growth have argued the new laboratories will facilitate a biological weapons race, and that real medical threats are underfunded while the federal government spends millions on preventing bioterrorism.

"It (the threat of bioterrorism) has been domestically produced, manufactured for the production of the complex," said FredPAC member Malgorzata Schmidt of Frederick. "We don't want terror for profit."

Supporters of Fort Detrick's expansion have praised the expected boost to Frederick's economy, but FredPAC members say any benefit from the growth will be outweighed by its tax on the local infrastructure.

The group predicts the expansion will worsen Frederick's environment, increase housing costs and traffic, and heighten the potential for accidental or intentional release of agents used in the laboratories into the city.

"We're trying to stop expansion from a local, national and international perspective," Mr. Kissin said Thursday. "This is all about starting the new bioarms race. That's the last thing the world needs."

The new campus will include the National Biodefense Analysis and Countermeasures Center, or NBACC, set to break ground in late June.

The Department of Homeland Security's NBACC is designed for about 120 employees in 160,000 square feet of laboratory and administrative space.

NBACC will hold both the National Bioforensic Analysis Center and the Biological Threat Characterization Center (BTCC).

NBFAC is designated as the lead federal facility to perform forensic analysis of evidence after a biological attack. According to the DHS, the BTCC will conduct studies and laboratory experiments to better understand biological threats, assess vulnerabilities and determine potential impacts.

While Fort Detrick officials have staunchly maintained the base's work is solely defensive in nature, NBACC's opponents argue the laboratory's mission crosses the line between defensive and offensive biological weapons research.

Some subtleties in the wording of the Biological and Toxin Weapons Convention (BWC) have muddied the line between research that is or is not clearly permitted under the BWC, said Milton Leitenberg, an expert on biological weapons and a senior research scholar in the University of Maryland's School of Public Policy.

The convention, which the United States signed in 1972, prohibits the development, production, stockpiling and acquisition of biological weapons. The U.S. Department of Homeland Security has argued this definition refers only to offensive biological weapons.