The UK Biological Weapons Program - Deadly Cultures: Biological Weapons Since 1945 - page 69

“that the manufacture and dropping of bombs was not the best way
to employ BW, and that sabotage in its various forms was probably the
most effective method.” 82 Henderson, however, remained skeptical about
whether this opinion would even be minuted in the conference pro-
ceedings.
A few months later, in the June meeting of the BRAB, mention was
made of new possibilities for waging biological warfare. During the meet-
ing, Henderson reported to the board that collaboration with the US was
being threatened by shifting policy in the UK, noting that “the Americans
had begun to regard us as poor allies owing to their belief that we were
retrenching in BW policy.” The US was continuing work in an offensive
direction, and according to the chief scientist, Owen Wansbrough-Jones,
US “production was keyed to policy and was directed at the manufacture
of bomb fillings.” The British scientists were less enamored with bombs,
and, taking the chief scientist's lead, the BRAB recommended “that work
on the development of bomb clusters should cease.” 83 Although there is
no open record of whether this recommendation was endorsed at higher
levels, the BRAB did not discuss bombs again. It is not even clear how
much work was being performed on bombs at this time, since the Air
Staff Target had been watered down in July 1954 from a specific require-
ment for a bomb to a general request for long-term research on the topic.
Instead of bombs, the topic of large area coverage soon received serious
attention from scientists and advisors on other committees. In June 1957
a new Offensive Evaluation Committee held its first meeting within the
Ministry of Supply. At the inaugural meeting “consideration was given to
proposals that direct attack by conventional weapons limits the effective-
ness of BW and that clandestine, off-target methods fully utilizing the in-
sidious nature of biological agents would possibly enable a single aircraft
to attack effectively tens of thousands of square miles.” 84
This new threat, now dubbed the large area concept (LAC) by scien-
tists, envisaged an aircraft or ship spreading a line of pathogenic biological
agent some miles away from an area (off-target) and thus spreading a
deadly cloud across an entire region.
In a later report, John Morton of the MRE, who had essentially been in
charge of the earlier sea trials, claimed that interest in the LAC had origi-
nated in the US some ten years previously but “did not catch on” because
its success depended on meteorological conditions that would require a