The UK Biological Weapons Program - Deadly Cultures: Biological Weapons Since 1945 - page 47

CHAPTER 3
The UK Biological
Weapons Program
BRIAN BALMER
British involvement with biological weapons (BW) re-
search and policy shares with its international counterparts an atmo-
sphere of exceptional secrecy. During the Cold War, radical changes in
outlook and practice occurred behind firmly closed doors as Britain
moved from its aim of developing a biological bomb to a defensive stance
that emphasized the need to protect against a potential biological attack.
This chapter draws on archival material in the Public Record Office, Kew,
to provide an overview of this transition from the early Cold War, when
the Chiefs of Staff gave equal priority to biological warfare and atomic
warfare, through the shift to a defensive outlook in the 1950s, the emer-
gence of large-scale outdoor trials in the 1960s and 1970s, and finally the
“civilianizing” of much of the BW research program. The resurgence of
an offensive outlook with regard to biochemical agents (midspectrum
agents) in the 1960s is treated in Chapter 12.
Existing accounts of British BW focus variously on research at Porton
Down, 1 international collaboration, 2 science policy and scientific advis-
ers, 3 and the ethics of scientists involved in the program. 4 This chapter in-
evitably covers some of the same ground, concentrating on the period
until the early 1970s, when the public record closes. It supplements pre-
vious accounts with new material that allows us to locate BW more fully
in relation to the strategic thinking of the Chiefs of Staff, especially in
relation to atomic warfare. It also provides more, recently declassified,
details of the significant series of sea trials between 1949 and 1952. And,
although the details of negotiations around the Biological Weapons Con-
vention (BWC) have been left to another chapter (see Chapter 15), addi-
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