The UK Biological Weapons Program - Deadly Cultures: Biological Weapons Since 1945 - page 64

The two directives help to explain the shift from “trials to experiments”
noted in the introduction to the Operation Ozone trial report. While this
shift was interpreted in the Ozone report as a positive move away from ad
hoc testing, it could equally be construed as implementing the policy shift
to longer-term projects and, significantly, as a mark of the decline of mili-
tary interest in BW. Accordingly, the BW scientists did not benefit in the
longer term. In March 1954 a DRPC review of defense R&D reported that
work on WMD had been fruitful only with respect to nuclear warfare. 66
The review continued in the same negative vein: “It is still too soon in so
new a field as biological warfare to forecast with any certainty what de-
velopments may yet arise...Development of offensive biological weap-
ons has been largely disappointing...Apart altogether from the political
issues which must be faced before biological warfare could be initiated,
the use of such weapons must be limited even in the strategic role to
attritional forms of warfare.” 67
A few months later the DRPC produced a final version of this review,
which opened with a statement of “new” defense policy. This was inter-
preted as meaning that “to prevent global war we need a deterrent that
includes nuclear weapons and their means of delivery; we must be pre-
pared for warm wars, which we define as peripheral wars of the Korean
or Indo-China type.” 68 Biological warfare received only brief attention in
this final version, including a recommendation that “with regard to of-
fensive BW, it is stated that basic research that is necessary for a proper
assessment of the problem of defence is also necessary for work on the of-
fence. On the other hand, it was considered that we could not afford to
undertake any work that had not primarily a defensive bias. Our effort
should be limited to the defence aspect of BW.” 69
This recommendation had already been acted on by the Air Ministry,
which in July 1954 cancelled its requirement for an antipersonnel bio-
logical bomb. Although the memorandum cancelling the weapon noted
that the Air Staff would “ultimately require toxic biological weapons,” it
would not need them just yet:
It is now apparent that because of the magnitude of the problem a great
deal of research still remains to be done in both the agent and weapon
fields before a satisfactory weapon can be recommended to the Service.
Moreover, it appears that the storage, transportation, testing and prepa-