Analysis and Implications - Deadly Cultures: Biological Weapons Since 1945 - page 356

riods: before the entry into force of the Biological Weapons Convention
(BWC), and since.
Before the Entry into Force of the BWC
In 1945, following the end of World War II, a number of states—Canada,
the UK, the US, and the USSR—continued or, in the case of France,
quickly restarted national programs to study or develop BW. They did so
because of the seemingly devastating potential of the weapons, a poten-
tial recognized by their inclusion in the category of “weapons of mass de-
struction” that the Security Council of the United Nations was at that
time defining. In most of these countries the priority assigned to BW
during the late 1940s and early 1950s was comparable to that given to
nuclear weapons. Although all had signed and, except for the US, had
ratified the Geneva Protocol of 1925, which prohibited the use in war of
asphyxiating, poisonous, or other gases, and of bacteriological means of
warfare, all had entered reservations to the effect that they would not be
bound by the prohibition in regard to states not party to the treaty, to an
adversary that resorted to the prohibited weapons, or to an ally of such
an adversary.
Within a decade the UK had begun to produce nuclear weapons and
had reduced the priority accorded to its BW program, which was in effect
abandoned altogether in the late 1950s. As for Canada, the NATO alliance
and its security provisions seem to have served as sufficient reason for the
country no longer to seek its own BW after 1956. France exploded its first
nuclear device in 1960 and had also by then begun to shut down its BW
program. Consequently, by the latter part of the 1960s only the USSR and
the US of those five countries were continuing their offensive biological
warfare programs with any vigor, alongside nuclear and chemical weap-
ons (CW) programs.
Perceptions of the utility of BW had been changing during the 1950s
and 1960s as nuclear weapons came increasingly to be regarded as an ul-
timate weapon that, in the hands of the two alliance leaders, could en-
hance the security of all member states of NATO and the Warsaw Pact.
Concepts of “limited war” and—as always throughout the long history of
biological warfare—sabotage and other covert operations now dominated
the uses seen, at least in the West, for BW. Simultaneously, the technol-