Picture 13 former soap-makers using syringes to inject one of the deadliest pathogens on Earth into five million bite-sized cattle snacks. It sounds like dark satire, but it was a real, meticulously planned British bioweapon program built between 1942 and 1944.

This episode dives into Operation Vegetarian, the classified plan to collapse Nazi Germany’s food web by feeding anthrax-laced linseed cakes to grazing cattle. We trace the civilian factories, the diabolical timing, the catastrophic Scottish test site, and why the success of conventional warfare ultimately made this weapon too dangerous to ever use.

• How Porton Down’s Paul Fildes engineered an ecological cascade failure aimed at Germany’s protein and dairy supply
• Why a soap company was hired to cut anthrax cakes to exactly 2.5 cm and 10 grams, targeting over 5 million pieces
• The 1940s Gruinard Island sheep tests, where a storm washed an infected carcass to the mainland and triggered an outbreak
• The summer-only drop window designed to weaponize hungry cattle and depleted pastures, plus modified Lancaster flare chutes
• How D-Day rendered the plan suicidal, leading to incineration of the cakes and a 47-year quarantine of Gruinard Island until 1990