Historical Context and Overview - Deadly Cultures: Biological Weapons Since 1945 - page 6

sassination and covert use. Both programs ended in the 1990s—Iraq's
with defeat in the Gulf Wars, and South Africa's voluntarily, when the
government changed and apartheid ended.
South Africa and Iraq are probably not the only countries to have be-
gun offensive BW programs since 1945. Intelligence agencies of several
countries have identified a number of possible proliferators of BW. We do
not include chapters on these allegations, because the documentary ma-
terials upon which they are based are classified, and very little can be said
about them. In the final chapter we will return to the issue of suspected
proliferation and its implications for BW control.
Although quite a few countries had offensive BW programs after 1945,
there are no confirmed instances in which they used these weapons.
However, there are allegations of covert state use of BW, and several in-
stances of terrorist use, or attempted use. Chapters 13 and 14 address
these instances or allegations of BW use against humans.
Several of these allegations concern agricultural targets, highlighting
the fact that biological weapons include agents that attack crops and do-
mestic animals, as well as agents that affect humans. Our chapters on the
national programs of offensive BW development make it clear that, as
before 1945, most of them have included antiagricultural efforts. Chap-
ters 10 and 11 address the development and use of anticrop and anti-
animal BW.
At the end of the 60-year period covered here, BW are conceived in
much more nuanced terms than at the beginning. In 1945 the landscape
of BW included two major types of agent: infectious agents (viruses, bac-
teria, and fungi) that multiply within the host body to cause disease; and
the protein toxins that are excreted from many bacteria and can cause
acute toxemia at low doses. Agents were described as either lethal or in-
capacitating, depending on the proportion of victims that died and on
their intended use. BW were clearly distinguished from CW, which were
low-molecular-weight synthetic chemicals. Now, however, BW are rec-
ognized as part of a spectrum of agents that includes traditional CW
agents like mustard and chlorine at one end, and traditional infectious
agents like anthrax and plague at the other. In between are protein tox-
ins; small-molecule toxins of biological origin like some snake and insect
venoms; bioregulators and hormones—natural mediators of human, ani-
mal, and plant physiology that can be highly toxic at very small doses;