The UK Biological Weapons Program - Deadly Cultures: Biological Weapons Since 1945 - page 83

2001, the government split the DERA into two organizations, one pub-
licly and one privately owned. The public organization was renamed the
Defence Science and Technology Laboratory (Dstl), and it contained the
CBDE, now known as Dstl Chemical and Biological Sciences.
Conclusion
The British BW program stands as one of the most significant of the 20th
century in its scale, scope, and degree of integration with the state. The
program, commenced in order to prepare against a similar attack from
Germany, continued throughout the Cold War with the constant threat
of the Soviet Union providing a raison d'être. It would, however, be over-
simplifying to claim that the only, or even the main, influence on the de-
velopment of both policy and program was a straightforward reaction to
the perceived threat or, more accurately, to uncertainty over the threat.
The gradual change to, and subsequent maintenance of, a defensive pol-
icy was undoubtedly informed by the various, but nebulous, assessments
of the Joint Intelligence Committee. It was also clearly a result of changes
in the relative priority of biological, chemical, and nuclear weapons in
the minds of the military and political authorities, as they witnessed na-
tional and international tests demonstrating the power of nuclear weap-
onry and concurrently struggled with an increasingly stretched defense
budget.
Changing policy was also accompanied by various and changing inter-
pretations of how to implement policy and also of the manner of the
threat. After World War II, the term biological weapon referred primarily
to bombs, and here scientists and policymakers could draw close par-
allels with nuclear weapons. As the race to develop a biological bomb
was called off, scientific—and only later political and military—attention
shifted to the LAC. Large-scale outdoor trials to determine the extent of
this threat were readily justified as conforming first to the new defensive
policy, and then as research on “offensive aspects” of biological warfare.
By the late 1960s, when a Soviet attack on the UK was deemed feasible
but unlikely, the term offensive aspects was dropped from Whitehall discus-
sions in favor of emphasizing that British research was aimed at develop-
ing defensive measures. Throughout all of these changes, the threat from
sabotage remained ubiquitous but relatively disregarded.