The South African Biological Weapons Program - Deadly Cultures: Biological Weapons Since 1945 - page 200

terotoxemia vaccine. When I started doing that work, I was surprised to
find that I was left in peace. I could go into the lab and do the work that
interested me, and I was very happy there.” 42
One aspect of RRL's work, which received much media attention dur-
ing the 1998 TRC hearings, was the development of an antifertility vac-
cine. This was a personal project of Goosen's, who believed the vaccine
was to have been administered to black women without their knowl-
edge. 43 Dr. Schalk Van Rensburg, who oversaw the fertility project, con-
firmed that this was indeed its purpose. RRL documents reveal that many
projects were registered on both male and female antifertility vaccines,
but no vaccine was ever produced because development did not get that
far. 44
In 1987 senior management at RRL commissioned the company Foster
Wheeler to produce plans for an upgraded facility that would include
freeze-drying and storage capacities and a biosafety level 4 laboratory for
dealing with highly virulent strains. 45 Several laboratories were planned
to deal with, inter alia, toxins, industrial chemicals, and nerve agents.
Odendaal says the intention was to produce aflatoxins, T2 toxin, anthrax,
Brucella, Salmonella, botulinum, and tetanus toxins. 46 He was convinced
that the purpose of the new facility was to allow RRL to move into large-
scale BW production. “At the end of the program we were planning a
multimillion-rand containment facility; the plans had been drawn up,
and it was going to be built. This was going to be a state-of-the-art, large-
scale production facility. We were going to make big quantities . . . that
was why we wanted large volumes.” 47
What is not clear is how or where these biological agents would have
been used. As far as can be established from the documentation available,
no military doctrine or strategy was developed to encompass the use
of BW.
Changing Gears
In 1991, two years after dropping plans to upgrade RRL facilities, Basson
proposed that both RRL and Delta G be privatized. He told the minister of
defense that the company had attracted a great deal of commercial inter-
est as well as the interest of scientists because of its sophisticated facilities:
“the size and nature of the facility that was established to ensure good re-