Paul Linebarger, aka science fiction writer Cordwainer Smith, was hired to study anticrop warfare in 1962. Linebarger and his colleagues wrote: “The advent of modern biological and chemical agents which can effectively attack and destroy a variety of crops now makes it possible to consider the delivery of such agents on a strategic scale to wipe out entire crops of a region or country, thus leaving the target nation in a state of famine and subsequent starvation.”

Nicholson Baker, Baseless- My Search for Sec…, loc. 1047