Decades after Project Coast, South Africa has rebuilt its biosecurity around peace. But new global threats demand stronger national and regional governance.

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

More than 50 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 the biological weapons programme in South Africa - the only country in Africa to develop both 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.

Read parts one, two, three, four and five of the series here.

With Project Coast's records destroyed or missing, researchers estimate that its lead officer, Wouter Basson, led a team of about...