The secret story of chemical and biological warfare.
A Higher Form of Killing was first published to great acclaim in 1982. The authors have written a new Introduction and a new Epilogue to take account of the events that have happened since the early 1980s - including the break-up of the former Soviet Union and the black market that appeared in chemical and biological weapons, the acquisition of these weapons by various Third World states, the attempts of various countries like Iraq to build up arsenals of these weapons and, most recently, the use of these weapons in terrorist attacks. As the authors point out, the two generations since the Second World War lived with the threat of nuclear annihilation. Now a new generation must learn to live with weapons that are more insidious and potentially more devastating.
The proliferation of chemical and biological weapons is the greatest threat the world faces today. Far easier to make than nuclear bombs, their effects are scarcely less devastating. And many of the world's most dangerous regimes - Iraq, Iran, Syria, Libya and North Korea - either possess them, or are trying to get hold of them. In the hands of terrorists, they could kill thousands, or even millions.
Updated in the aftermath of the September 11 attacks, this classic account of the history of chemical and biological warfare, by two of Britain's leading journalists, spans almost a century of horror, from the mustard gas and germ weapons built up by Saddam Hussein.
