Margaret Thatcher was secretly plotting to sabotage Peru's cocaine crop using weaponised moths. In 1989 the former UK Prime Minister is believed to have been briefed on an outlandish strategy to crackdown on drugs being imported into Britain by using Eloria noyesi moths as a "smart bomb" to decimate harvests in South America. The Peruvian government is said to have asked Thatcher's team to instruct military scientists at the UK's top secret defence research campus at Porton Down, near Salisbury, to start breeding thousands of moths in a bid to cripple the cocaine industry. The plan was then to fly the moths to Peru where they would be dropped over the drug plantation fields via helicopter. The UK government is said to have spent £100,000 on drawing up the plan even though it was never put into operation.