Analysis and Implications - Deadly Cultures: Biological Weapons Since 1945 - page 359

in open official documentation or in the declaration made by South Af-
rica under the BWC confidence-building measures. Its objectives appear
to have been more toward possible use in sabotage and assassination than
as a potential weapon to be used in general war. A change in government
together with joint UK-US démarches to South Africa led to the aban-
donment of what had been a well-hidden secret program known to rela-
tively few in South Africa, which was in clear violation of South Africa's
obligations since 1975 as a State Party to the BWC.
The Iraqi BW program is now known to have started in 1974, two
years after Iraq had signed the BWC. It is clear that Iraq sought nuclear,
biological, and chemical weapons in order to enhance its military capabil-
ity and influence in the region. Iraq used CW, including nerve gases, ex-
tensively during its 1980-1988 war with Iran. As with past CW programs
elsewhere in the world, the Iraqi one soon sought to develop toxins and
pathogenic bacteria as a means of increasing the potency of the payloads
carried by the weapons.
The termination of Iraq's BW program was demanded by the UN Secu-
rity Council in its Resolution 687 (1991), after the response by the US-led
coalition forces to the Iraqi attack on Kuwait. This resolution required
not only that all Iraqi WMD be destroyed under the supervision of the
United Nations Special Commission (UNSCOM) on Iraq, but also that
Iraq ratify the BWC, which it duly did on 18 April 1991. The eradication
of the Iraqi WMD programs and the ongoing monitoring and verification
program to ensure that Iraq did not continue or resume WMD activities
were to be carried out under the supervision of UNSCOM. It came to be
widely believed that Iraq did not in fact abandon its WMD work but
instead endeavored to conceal whatever it could of its past programs
and to continue work to develop and acquire such weapons. It is evident
that the Iraqi government took no steps to abandon its BW program or
to build international confidence that it had renounced the program.
Concerns and suspicions continued throughout the UNSCOM years
and the rather different UNMOVIC years that succeeded them. Since
the US-led invasion of Iraq in 2003, the Iraq Survey Group has under-
taken detailed investigations from which it appears that Iraq was intent
on preserving at least the capacity to restart an offensive program, but
was not actively engaged in production or stockpiling of BW during this
period.
Thus the straightforward answers to our three questions are not in dis-