1947: Eminent Immunologist Urges Australian Government to Develop Biological Weapons

Immunologist Sir Macfarlane Burnet, Nobel prize winner and first winner of the ‘Australian of the Year’ award, urges the Australian government to develop biological and chemical weapons to use against Indonesia and other countries of Southeast Asia. In 1998, Canberra historian Philip Dorling will obtaim a declassified 1947 report from the Australian National Archives which reveals that in his advisory role on biological warfare, Burnet had recommended development of biological and chemical weapons to target food crops and spread infectious diseases in the “overpopulated” tropical countries of Southeast Asia. “Specifically to the Australian situation, the most effective counter-offensive to threatened invasion by overpopulated Asiatic countries would be directed towards the destruction by biological or chemical means of tropical food crops and the dissemination of infectious disease capable of spreading in tropical but not under Australian conditions,” Burnet writes. [Age (Melbourne), 3/10/2002]