Details the chemical and biological weapons program of South Africa.

This unique book analyzes the origins and development of the South African chemical and biological warfare (CBW) program, as well as its rollback. It concludes with a profile of South Africa as a state that produced weapons of mass destruction and with a list of outstanding questions. More than 20 policy lessons, based on the South African case, are presented, which should be considered in future CBW non-proliferation studies. From the 1960s until the 1990s, apartheid South Africa was an isolated state that felt threatened by growing domestic unrest, as well as by a more powerful state actor, the Soviet Union, which was helping hostile regimes and liberation movements in southern Africa. One response of the apartheid regime to changing threat perceptions outside and inside of South Africa was to develop a new and more sophisticated CBW program, code-named "Project Coast," and to accelerate a nuclear weapons program. The CBW decision-making process was secretive and controlled by the military and enabled a very sophisticated program to be developed with little outside scrutiny. Military and police units used chemical and biological agents for counter-insurgency warfare, assassination, and execution of war prisoners. As the regime felt increasingly threatened by opposition at home, top political leaders approved plans for research and development of exotic means to neutralize opponents, large-scale offensive uses of the program, and weaponization. However, the plans were not operationalized. The end of the external threat led to a decision to unilaterally dismantle the program, prior to a shift to majority rule. Lack of civilian control over military programs made the rollback difficult, rife with corruption, and left proliferation concerns in place. Ultimately, the United States, Great Britain, and other countries pressured the South African government to ensure that the CBW program was dismantled and the former project manager, Dr. Wouter Basson, constrained. However, Basson secretly retained copies of Project Coast documents, which helped to perpetuate proliferation concerns. Project Coast was not the first CBW program that the South African government had developed. From 1914-1918 and 1939-1945, South African troops fought in the two World Wars and faced the threat of CBW. Although the 1925 Geneva Convention banned the use of chemical and biological weapons in warfare, Japan and possibly the Soviet Union employed such weapons in WWII. As early as the 1930s, widespread evidence emerged of the efficacy of biological warfare (BW) based on scientific work conducted in the US, United Kingdom, and the Soviet Union. The South African scientific and military communities kept pace with the various developments in CBW.

This is a tale of military machination and scientific subterfuge, of combatants who disappeared without trace, and bizarre experiments carried out behind locked doors. In waging ‘total war’ during the 1970s and 1980s, South African securocrats demanded a ‘total strategy’, including secret and unconventional means to fight the perceived ‘total onslaught’ against the apartheid regime. Against that background, a group of scientists under military guidance crossed the threshold of an arcane realm, familiar to ordinary citizens only through the imaginations of fiction writers – a world marked by covert operations and germ warfare, high-stakes deals in the international arms bazaar, smoke and mirrors, plausible deniability. A world where intrigue and double-crossing are routine, where secret missions and sinister sub-plots are the milestones for life in the fast lane. Set against the backdrop of the international Cold War and South Africa’s bloody passage to democracy, the events related in this book were uncovered during ten years of investigation and made public by the trial of Wouter Basson, the first criminal prosecution in the world of the head of an official chemical and biological warfare programme. As the authors take you from combat zone to courtroom, read how one of the apartheid era’s best-kept secrets became the subject of one of the ‘new’ South Africa’s costliest legal exercises – and how the former military officer at the heart of both walked away a free man. Ten years have passed since Wouter Basson was acquitted of the criminal charges brought against him and Secrets and Lies was originally published. This eBook edition comes with a brand new foreword by author Chandre Gould.

This is a curated and comprehensive collection of the most important works covering matters related to national security, diplomacy, defense, war, strategy, and tactics. The collection spans centuries of thought and experience, and includes the latest analysis of international threats, both conventional and asymmetric. It also includes riveting first person accounts of historic battles and wars.Some of the books in this Series are reproductions of historical works preserved by some of the leading libraries in the world. As with any reproduction of a historical artifact, some of these books contain missing or blurred pages, poor pictures, errant marks, etc. We believe these books are essential to this collection and the study of war, and have therefore brought them back into print, despite these imperfections.We hope you enjoy the unmatched breadth and depth of this collection, from the historical to the just-published works.

South Africa's Weapons of Mass Destruction offers an in-depth view of the secret development and voluntary disarmament of South Africa's nuclear, biological, and chemical weapons program, Project Coast. Helen E. Purkitt and Stephen F. Burgess explore how systems used for nuclear, biological, and chemical weapons in South Africa were acquired and established beyond the gaze of international and domestic political actors. On the basis of archival evidence from Project Coast and their own extensive interviews with military and political officials, Purkitt and Burgess consider what motivates countries to acquire and build such powerful weaponry and examine when and how decisions are made to dismantle a military arsenal voluntarily. Questions such as how to destroy weapons safely and keep them from reappearing on international markets are considered along with comparative strategies for successful disarmament in other nation-states.