Analysis and Implications - Deadly Cultures: Biological Weapons Since 1945 - page 361

With the increasing importance of nuclear weapons, BW were aban-
doned in the 1950s by the UK and incrementally by France in the 1960s.
The nuclear capabilities of NATO led Canada likewise to abandon BW. The
1960s and early 1970s saw the US abandonment of its BW program (in
1969) and the negotiation of the BWC. However, following the entry into
force of the BWC, the Soviet Union, one of the three co-depositaries, con-
tinued and accelerated its BW program for reasons that are still unclear.
The South African program in the 1980s was much smaller in scale, ap-
parently focusing on sabotage and assassination applications. The Iraqi
program had broader aims, with the production in the late 1980s of sig-
nificant amounts of agent for delivery in missile warheads and aerial
bombs. The anthrax letter attacks in the US in the autumn of 2001, which
have produced so many concerns about bioterrorism attacks, are best re-
garded as being aimed at sabotage and creating alarm.
In the years after World War II the approach adopted, at least in the
West, was to acquire BW to be used to retaliate in kind should such weap-
ons be used against the possessor state. Consequently, the requirement
was for a an offensive capability available for use on short notice. Follow-
ing the entry into force of the BWC and its prohibition of the develop-
ment, production, and stockpiling of BW, there are some indications—to
some extent in Russia and also in Iraq—that with a change in the concept
of use away from an ability to retaliate in kind to an ability to launch a
first-strike BW attack, the focus was more on a capability to produce such
weapons immediately before their use. Iraq had certainly followed this
approach in regard to CW, thereby avoiding the need to produce agents of
sufficient purity that they could be stored for years. It is also clear that a
policy to produce and use BW without the need for a stockpile of agents
or of filled munitions could make it much harder for an international in-
spectorate to detect noncompliant activities.
The Limitations of Intelligence
A fundamental characteristic of BW is the dual-use nature of both the
agents and the equipment needed to produce the agents. As biological
agents (microbes and toxins) occur in nature, the presence or absence of
a particular agent or toxin cannot by itself be regarded as evidence of a
prohibited activity. Nor does the presence or absence of equipment to