The second of six parts on the apartheid-era biological programmes that went by the benign name of Project Coast - a covert endeavour representing some of the worst practices in building and dismantling a biological weapons capability responsibly. Profound lessons can be learnt about how to - and how not to - govern high-consequence projects.

South Africa signed the Biological and Toxin Weapons Convention (BTWC), the first multilateral treaty to ban an entire class of weapons, on 10 April 1972, and ratified it in November 1975.

Fifty-plus years later, and as concerns mount about the use of chemical and possible use of biological weapons in what has become known as grey warfare in Ukraine and elsewhere, it is an appropriate time to reflect on the rise and decline of South Africa's biological weapons programme, the only country in Africa to develop biological (and nuclear) capabilities.

There are profound lessons to be learnt about how to - and how not to - govern the dismantling of high-consequence programmes such as these. In this six-part series, we focus on the biological programmes that went by the benign name of Project Coast, a covert endeavour that collectively represents some of the worst practices when it comes to building and dismantling a biological weapons programme responsibly.

Follow us on WhatsApp | LinkedIn for the latest headlines

Read part one of the series here.

Project Coast built on a prior but more limited chemical weapons programme that focused on producing mustard gas for the Allied battle against Hitler's Nazi Germany in the 1940s.

The mustard gas was produced at...