The UK Biological Weapons Program - Deadly Cultures: Biological Weapons Since 1945 - page 67

largely apply to BW weapons.” 78 And this position was underlined in De-
cember 1956, when the minister of supply was provided with a reap-
praisal of the 1953 directive. He was informed that defense research was
“going pretty well” but that the offensive aspects of the directive were in
doubt, in particular, production “of agents and charged weapons. Tacitly,
mainly through the pressure of economy and partly through some belief
that the BW policy on weapons should approach the CW one, less and
less work is being done under these heads.” 79
The same memorandum stated that “if Government policy permitted,”
it would be more accurate to delete those parts of the directive relating to
determining suitable biological agents, to bulk production and storage of
agents and filling weapons, and to suitable forms of weapons. Instead, the
directive was maintained by the Ministry, but defensive parts had been
assigned a higher priority than offensive aspects. In all practical respects,
the British biological warfare program was now defensive only.
Renewed Threat: “Fully Utilizing the Insidious Nature of
Biological Agents”
The move to a defensive program did not, as might have been expected,
amount to a retreat from an ambitious research program at the Micro-
biological Research Establishment. Whether as a deliberate strategy or
through more indirect means, it was imperative for those involved in the
area that the status of biological warfare be revived within the ambit of a
defensively orientated policy regime. Scientists, in the new policy envi-
ronment, began to reconceptualize the potential threat, no longer as an
on-target attack with a bomb, but in terms of sabotage and coverage of
very large areas with pathogens.
British scientists put the case for revising how the threat was to be
construed to the Americans and Canadians at their annual collaborative
conference in 1956. This presentation is worth quoting at length, as it
provides an insight into the thinking behind the large area threat. The ex-
tract also demonstrates how the divergence in policy between the UK and
the US, which was still wedded to an offensive program, translated into
differences in conceptualizing the goals of their respective research ef-
forts: