He also drew attention to "Project Coast", the name given to chemical and biological warfare programmes run by South Africa in the 1970s and 1980s. Project Coast included attempts to develop genetically engineered diseases and toxins that would affect blacks more than whites. The idea being to apply treatments to a population to correct any ethnic imbalance. Stamps' suggestion that various epidemics in Rhodesia in the 1970s (notably, an anthrax epidemic in 1978) may have been the result of a biological attack was widely disbelieved. A 'Southern African Research and Documentation Centre' report has claimed an unnamed former senior member of the Rhodesian Security Forces, and Colonel Lionel Dyke, a Mugabe ally who participated in the Gukurahundi, stated that anthrax and cholera spores (supplied by the South African Defence Force) were deliberately spread in the TTLs during the closing stages of the civil war.