Cahal Milmo | June 26

The Independent - Sewing machine needle tipped with anthrax was developed for war effort

Tipped with a sewing machine needle and finished with a tail made from a drinking straw, they looked more like a schoolboy's toy than a terrifying weapon. For Britain's wartime scientists, however, these tiny projectiles were the sharp end of a chilling project to secure victory over the Nazis by bombarding German troops with poisoned darts.

A secret file that details British research to develop the lethal anti-personnel darts, carrying a toxin likely to have been anthrax or ricin, casts rare light on the work that was carried out by the Allies during the Second World War into chemical and biological weapons that could be deployed against Hitler's forces.

The document, released at the National Archives in Kew, London, reveals how scientists at Porton Down in Wiltshire, the site of Britain's top secret weapons laboratory, worked between 1941 and 1944 to perfect the projectiles to ensure the maximum number of casualties and the quickest death for enemy soldiers.

Entitled Research Into Use of Anthrax and Other Poisons for Biological Warfare, the report said the idea of using darts dated back to the First World War but the novelty of adding a poison, either coated on to a grooved point or injected through a hollow needle, meant that a viable weapon to cause "death or disablement" had been created.