Australia Special Weapons

Australia: Biological weapons

The Australian Department of Defence formed the New Weapons and Equipment Development Committee soon after the end of WW2. Documents in the National Archives, declassified in 1998, revealed the extent to which Australia considered the development of biological weapons in the 1940s and 50s.

Secretary of the Department F.G. Sheddon sought the advice of leading microbiologist Sir Frank Macfarlane Burnet in December 1946. Burnet was Director of the Walter and Eliza Hall Institute for Medical Research, and won the Nobel Prize for medicine in 1960. Sheddon asked whether Australia had the capability to develop biological weapons that would work in tropical Asia without spreading to Australia's more temperate population centres.

Burnet wrote a comprehensive memo to the Department of Defence in which he said Australia should develop biological weapons that would work in tropical Asia without spreading to Australia's more temperate population centres.

In a meeting with Sheddon in January 1947, Burnet argued that Australia's temperate climate could give it a significant military advantage.

Burnet was invited to join the chemical and biological warfare subcommittee of the New Weapons and Equipment Development Committee in September 1947. The committee prepared a report, of which Burnet was the principal author, entitled Note on War from a Biological Angle suggesting that biological warfare could be a powerful weapon to help defend a sparsely populated Australia. The report urged the government to encourage Australian universities to research areas of biological science of relevance to biological weapons.

The minute of a meeting in February 1948 note that Burnet "was of the opinion that if Australia undertakes work in this field it should be on the tropical offensive side rather than the defensive."

Burnet and a delegation of the chemical and biological warfare subcommittee visited the UK in 1950 to examine British chemical and biological warfare research. In a report of the visit Burnet concluded that "In a country of low sanitation the introduction of an exotic intestinal pathogen, e.g. by water contamination, might initiate widespread dissemination."

The subcommittee recommended that "the possibilities of an attack on the food supplies of S-E Asia and Indonesia using B.W. agents should be considered by a small study group".

It 1951 it recommended that "a panel reporting to the chemical and biological warfare subcommittee should be authorised to report on the offensive potentiality of biological agents likely to be effective against the local food supplies of South-East Asia and Indonesia".

The activities of the chemical and biological warfare subcommittee were scaled back soon after, as Prime Minister Robert Menzies was more interested in trying to acquire nuclear weapons.

Australia signed the Biological Weapons Convention in 1972 and chairs the Australia Group.

Resources


http://www.fas.org/nuke/guide/australia/cw.html
Prepared by David Bromage
Maintained by Steven Aftergood
Updated September 2, 2002