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[3.0] A History Of Biological Warfare
v1.0.3 / 3 of 4 / 01 may 02 / [EMAIL PROTECTED] / public domain
* Chemical weapons were the first weapon of mass destruction to be invented. After World War I, however, weapons makers realized that nature herself could provide potentially even deadlier weapons of mass destruction, in the form of pathogens and biotoxins that could be cultured, stockpiled, and used to kill on a massive scale.
[3.1] 1932-1942: THE ORIGINS OF BIOLOGICAL WARFARE / UNIT 731
[3.2] 1942-1945: THE ALLIED BIOWARFARE PROGRAM
[3.3] 1945-1972: COLD WAR BIOWEAPONS DEVELOPMENT
[3.4] 1973-2000: BIOWARFARE UNDERGROUND
[3.1] 1932-1942: THE ORIGINS OF BIOLOGICAL WARFARE / UNIT 731
* The use of disease as a weapon is nothing new. Centuries ago, armies would occasionally catapult the bodies of people who had died of plagues into cities under siege in hopes of spreading disease, a tactic that often proved successful. English colonists in the New World on occasion gave blankets and other items that had belonged to people who had died of smallpox to local native tribes, and the results could be devastating as the natives had little resistance to the disease.
These were purely opportunistic schemes. Methodical development of pathogens and as potent biological toxins as weapons of mass destruction had to wait until the development of modern medical theory and the discovery of pathogens, in the last part of the 19th century.
Although the knowledge to manufacture biological weapons was available in the First World War, there is no strong evidence that anyone did, although rumors of biological warfare were widespread at the time. The possibility of biological warfare was certainly evident, and the Geneva Protocol of 1925 included clauses forbidding biological warfare.
Development of biological weapons did not actually begin in earnest until the 1930s, with Japan taking the lead. The effort was directed by a single domineering figure, an Imperial Japanese Army officer and medical doctor named Shirou Ishii.
Ishii returned from a European tour in 1932, bringing with him a conviction that biological warfare was the weapon of the future. Ironically, the fact that the Geneva Protocol had banned bioweapons helped draw his attention to them, since the ban implied that people found such weapons unusually dangerous and frightening.
The Japanese invaded the Chinese province of Manchuria in 1932, and set it up as the Japanese puppet state of "Manchukuo". In 1935, Ishii managed to convince his superiors of the potential usefulness of bioweapons, and so they set him up in a hospital in Harbin, Manchuria, to conduct small-scale experiments with dangerous pathogens. By 1937, Ishii's work had proved promising enough for the Japanese War Ministry to approve the construction of a full-scale bioweapons research and development complex, at a small town named Pingfan, about 65 kilometers (40 miles) south of Harbin.
The Imperial Japanese Army had attacked China proper in that year. The Japanese were able to win almost every battle they fought, but they were entirely outnumbered by the numerous Chinese. The Japanese turned to biological weapons as a potential equalizer. It is also possible that they hoped to exterminate Chinese in areas Japan intended to colonize.
The Pingfan Institute was completed in 1939. Ishii, now a general, was in charge of the research organization, which was given the cover designation "Water Purification Unit 731". The Pingfan complex covered over three square kilometers and included an airfield, barracks, and laboratories.
Japanese recruits arriving there found it an odd place; none of the vehicles carried any identifying marks, for example. They quickly found out that it had other strange and much more unpleasant features. One Japanese veteran who was a technician at the Pingfan site recalled there were many doctors and professors there, giving it something of the air of a university medical research facility, but noted that it was in fact the opposite: "Here, they were trying to find ways to kill people."
There was a certain scientific challenge in this effort. The understanding of pathogens and their actions in causing disease and epidemics was crude, and there was, and is, still much to learn. There were also the practical problems of developing biological weapons, such as selecting the appropriate pathogen, determining the lethal dosage, and engineering the right techniques for production, storage, transport, and dispersal. Unit 731 also worked on defensive measures, primarily the large-scale production of vaccines.
Unit 731 studied almost every major known pathogen for its utility as a weapon. Some of the more significant included:
- "Anthrax", a highly lethal disease of livestock and humans. Anthrax is a
bacterial infection that can be acquired by contact with infected
victims, or by inhalation of anthrax spores. When anthrax is acquired by
contact, it can create hideous sores that may lead to death by blood
poisoning. When inhaled, it leads to a lung infection that kills by
toxic shock in a few days. Lethality of airborne anthrax is 90%. It is,
however, not strongly contagious.
Anthrax would become the lethal bioagent of choice for future bioweapon development programs. It forms spores that are very hardy and easy to store for long periods of time, and can be conveniently packed into munitions. Anthrax spores are so hardy, in fact, that they will persist in an area over which they have been spread for decades.
- "Plague", the "Black Death" of Medieval times, is caused by infection from
a bacterium named Yersinia Pestis. It has three forms: "bubonic
plague", when spread by fleas or other parasites; "pneumonic plague", when
spread by inhaling the bacteria; and "septicemic plague", when spread by
contact.
Pneumonic plague has a lethality of 95% or more. Although bubonic plague is somewhat less lethal, its spreads more easily and is more useful as a weapon. However, bubonic plague still isn't all that good a biowarfare agent, as it requires cultivation, storage, and distribution of live fleas.
- "Gas gangrene", a condition caused by the infection of wounds by the
Clostridium perfringens bacterium, characterized by stinking
putrefaction of the flesh.
- "Brucellosis", a bacterial disease caused by various pathogens of the
genus Brucella that infects livestock and humans. It is not very
lethal, but it is highly contagious and can incapacitate a victim for a
week or more.
- "Glanders", a disease of horses and humans that eats away the mucous
linings of nose and respiratory tract, and attacks the lymphatic system.
It is caused by the bacterium Pseudomonas mallei. It is uncertain if
the Japanese were interested in glanders for killing horses and mules, or
humans, or, most likely, both.
- Bacteria related to food poisoning, including the Salmonella and Clostridium botulinum bacteria, which secrete extremely deadly biotoxins. The toxins were potential bioagents in themselves, particularly botulism toxin. The lethal dose of botulism toxin is very small, and the toxin is easily produced in quantity and stored for long periods of time.
Other diseases investigated included typhus, typhoid, cholera, tetanus, smallpox, tick encephalitis, tuberculosis, and tularemia. Tularemia infects rabbits as well as humans, and so is known as "rabbit fever". Like brucellosis, tularemia is rarely fatal in humans but can make a target wretchedly sick for a few weeks. The Japanese also experimented with exotic biotoxins, such as blowfish poison.
* The Japanese had to produce pathogens in quantity for tests and, if they proved worthy, production. Unit 731 researchers devised a scheme using trays of meat and broth as cultures. The trays were kept in incubators and the scum of bacteria produced was skimmed off every few days. The smell of rotten meat was almost overpowering. Eventually, Pingfan was believed to have been capable of producing tonnes of pathogens every month.
Having obtained pathogens, the next step was to determine their effectiveness. There were plenty of Chinese available for use as involuntary test subjects. The Japanese would put up posters warning the Chinese that epidemics of the appropriate diseases had broken out, and then a squad of soldiers would go out and dump pathogens discreetly into the well of a village. Three or four days later, they would return to inspect the ill. The soldiers would anesthetize them, cut them open and take samples, and sew them back up again. "Then we threw the bodies down the well," as a veteran of the program recalled. The soldiers torched the village and left.
The tests were very successful. General Ishii then decided to perform more controlled tests in deep secrecy on Chinese prisoners taken to the compound at Pingfan. Many of these people were simply rounded up off the streets of Harbin to meet quotas set by Unit 731 officers. At least 3,000 were taken there, and very few, if any, ever came back. The cover story for the compound was that it was a lumberyard, and so Unit 731 personnel referred to the prisoners as "maruta", or "logs".
Prisoners were assigned serial numbers 1 through 200. Once that block had all been killed, the serial number count started over again through the next 200, and so on. Japanese veterans of Unit 731 recollect the place as a kind of hell on earth, but the Imperial Japanese Army demanded unhesitating obedience, and a failure to deliver it was immediately and severely punished.
Chinese prisoners were tied to poles out in the open and forced to look into the sky as airplanes flew over and sprayed bacteria on them. The prisoners were carefully observed and their condition recorded with colored drawings as they sickened and died. Others were tied to stakes or panels and arranged around fragmentation bombs containing Clostridium perfringens bacteria. The bomb was detonated, and the test subjects were studied as they developed gas gangrene from their wounds. When test subjects died, their corpses were burned in a crematorium.
* By 1940, Unit 731 had developed a ceramic anthrax bomb, and built 4,000 of them. They were also considering ways of delivering bubonic plague. Researchers at Pingfan bred plague-infested rats in quantity and then gathered the fleas from the rats. The fleas could then be distributed as a bioagent vector, using tubular baskets strapped to the bomb pylons of aircraft.
In October 1940, a Japanese aircraft flew low over the city of Ningpo, which was still held by the Nationalist Chinese, and dispersed a spray containing plague-infested fleas. The results were appalling. Roughly 500 people died and the city was panic-stricken.
"There were so many people and not enough coffins," one survivor recalled. "So two people would share a coffin." It is thought that more attacks may have taken place in China, but records of such activities were destroyed by the Japanese at the end of the war and nobody knows for sure.
The researchers at Unit 731 went on to even more imaginative biowarfare studies. They decided to use Chinese prisoners not merely to test pathogens, but to actually act as production incubators to breed them. The researchers believed that pathogens that managed to overcome the body's defenses were likely more virulent.
The prisoners were injected with pathogens. When they reached their limit, the prisoners were chloroformed and all the blood was drained from their bodies. When the blood flow from a prisoner slowed down, a soldier would jump on the man's chest to force out the last drops. "They did not leave even one drop of blood in the body!" one Japanese veteran recollected.
With such extensive handling of pathogens, there were likely to be accidents, and it is believed that hundreds of Japanese staff of Unit 731 died from the pathogens they handled. Despite this problem, Ishii's bioweapons research empire spread, establishing 18 satellite stations in China and in other locations ranging from Hokkaido to the Dutch East Indies. The Japanese bioweapon researchers not only investigated pathogens to attack people, they also studied chemical herbicides and pathogens to destroy crops.
The most intensively studied plant pathogens were "fungal smuts" and "nematode worms" intended to attack Soviet and North American wheat fields. Smuts in particular were potentially highly effective bioagents. The head of a wheat plant infected by wheat smut turns into a blackened mass of spores that are released into the air to infect other wheat plants downwind. The Japanese developed a production facility that could generate about 90 kilograms of smuts annually.
[3.2] 1942-1945: THE ALLIED BIOWARFARE PROGRAM
* By mid-1942, word of Japanese bioweapons development was leaking out to the Allies, and in July 1942 Winston Churchill placed the issue on the top level of priority for discussion by Allied leadership. In fact, the British had been thinking about biological warfare since 1934. The prime mover was a Whitehall bureaucrat named Sir Maurice Hankey, who, like Shirou Ishii, had been inspired to consider bioweapons by the fact that the Geneva Protocol tried to ban them.
In the prewar period, British biowarfare efforts were minimal, consisting of a few committees issuing reports and, as war approached, funding for limited defensive measures. When war broke out in 1939, considerations for offensive biowarfare rose in importance, and the British government established a small laboratory at Porton Down, run by a medical researcher named Paul Fildes.
Fildes began to conduct small-scale experiments to evaluate pathogens and biotoxins for use as weapons, and in late 1941 recommended the production of millions of anthrax-laced cattle cakes that would be dropped by air over Germany. Production of the cattle cakes was approved, and a large stockpile of them was stored at Porton Down until the end of the war, when they were all incinerated.
Biotoxins had a particular appeal for clandestine operations in occupied Europe, setting a precedent for later interest by intelligence services in such weapons. Porton Down is known to have produced botulism toxin under the designation "BTX", and although the records are unclear, a BTX-laced grenade may have been used to assassinate SS General Reinhard Heydrich, a senior and highly competent Nazi officer who was then in charge of occupied Czechoslovakia.
The intelligence information leaking out about Japanese bioweapon experiments only increased the priority of Allied efforts to build their own biowarfare capability. In the summer of 1942, the British conducted their first large-scale biowarfare experiment on Gruinard Island, off the coast of Scotland. A film was made of the experiment, and remained classified until 1997.
Sheep were taken to an open field, secured in wooden frames, and exposed to a bomb that scattered anthrax spores. The sheep started dying three days later. They were examined and then burned. Other tests involved dropping anthrax bombs from a Wellington bomber.
Safety precautions were slipshod, and it is a wonder that there were not calamities among the personnel involved or innocent bystanders. One worker in the program recalled helping a medical researcher pour a thick soup of anthrax agent into a bomb, without use of protective clothing or any other safety measures. Despite attempts to disinfect Gruinard Island, the anthrax spores left there by the experiments kept the island in quarantine for five decades.
The final report on the Gruinard Island experiments suggested that anthrax could be used to render whole cities uninhabitable "for generations". Biological weapons were potentially orders of magnitude more effective than chemical weapons.
* In the meantime, the British had been working with the Canadian government to set up a bioweapons test range at Suffield, in the province of Alberta. The area was empty and isolated, and experiments could be performed with greater safety than any location available in the British Isles.
The entry of America into the war in late 1941 added more momentum to the Allied bioweapons effort. The US had considered the possibility of biological warfare, and government reports had been written and distributed to detail defensive and offensive measures.
With a real war on, the American Chemical Warfare Service, with British assistance, built up biowarfare research facilities, including test stations near Dugway and near Pascagoula, Mississippi; a potential production facility at Vigo, near Terra Haute, Indiana; and the master research and development center at Camp Dietrich, Maryland.
The British work on anthrax, or "N" as it was codenamed, as a weapon led in 1943 to the design of an "N" bomb suitable for mass production by the Americans. This munition weighed 1.8 kilograms (4 pounds). 106 of these "bomblets" were to be packed into a 225 kilogram (500 pound) cluster-bomb canister and dropped over enemy population centers.
The whole effort was protected by the highest level of secrecy, TOP SECRET:GUARD, which the Americans described jokingly as DESTROY BEFORE READING. An initial pilot batch of 5,000 N bombs was produced at Camp Dietrich in May 1944, and medium-scale production at a rate of about 50,000 bomblets a month followed. The bomblets were turned over to the British, who stockpiled them.
The plant at Vigo, Indiana, was designed for production of 500,000 anthrax bombs per month. The plant was never put into operation, partly because of extreme concerns over its safety. By the end of the war, it had been converted to antibiotic production, though it could have easily been converted back to bioweapons manufacture if the need had arisen.
* The drastic nature of anthrax was not lost on the Americans, and so they searched for a bioagent that could incapacitate, rather than kill. They found brucellosis a promising agent. The infectious dose was much smaller than that of anthrax, meaning a single bomber could attack a much larger area with the same weight of bombs, and a city that had been attacked with brucellosis would be safe to enter a week or so after the attack.
Brucellosis was, on the other hand, wildly infectious, and many of the people who worked with it in the weapons development program came down with it. However, other than a few days of nasty chills, pains, fever, and headaches, it rarely did much harm. Brucellosis weapons were in an advanced state of development at the end of the war.
* The Americans also investigated anti-crop bioagents, including "potato blights" and "wheat rusts"; "sclerotium rot", which can attack soybeans, sugar beets, sweet potatoes, and cotton; and "blast diseases" to attack rice.
There is some suspicion that crop bioweapons might have been used by the Allies. In the fall of 1944, the German potato crop was infested by a huge plague of Colorado beetles, and in 1945 the Japanese rice crop was badly afflicted by rice blast. However, in the absence of any evidence supporting such suspicions, it seems more likely these incidents were due to natural causes.
* The Soviet biowarfare program during World War II remains somewhat mysterious, and considering the fact that many records were destroyed later, will probably always remain so.
Ken Alibek (originally Kanatjan Alibekov), a senior official of the Soviet "Biopreparat" bioweapons organization in the late 1980s and early 1990s, emigrated to the United States in 1992 and provided a history of the Soviet bioweapons program. While Russian expatriates have been known to tell exaggerated stories for self-serving reasons, Alibek's comments sound entirely plausible.
According to Alibek, the Soviet bioweapons effort began in 1928, three years after the USSR signed the Geneva Procotols. The initial focus was to "weaponize" typhus, with the work supervised by the state security apparatus, the "GPU", which would eventually evolve into the KGB. The effort then expanded, with new facilities built in the network of GPU prison camps. The prime testing ground was at Solovetsky Island, in the Arctic, north of Leningrad in the White Sea.
Prisoners may have been used in tests of biological agents. Certainly there were many casualties among researchers and workers as well, whose lives were made even more miserable during the purges of the 1930s by the influence of Trofim Lysenko, a quack biologist who managed to get Stalin's ear. Those biologists who differed with Lysenko were sent to prison camps or worse, and Lysenko did much to hinder the Soviet biowarfare effort.
When the Soviet Union was invaded by Hitler's forces in the summer of 1941, bioweapons facilities in the west were relocated by train to the east, in the Ural mountains. A train carrying pathogens and other materials was passing though the city of Gorky when the Germans decided to bomb the place, panicking supervisors on the train, who ordered the train to keep on rolling through the city. The town of Kirov became the main bioweapons facility after the move. The Soviets also found a new testing ground, at Rebirth Island in the Aral Sea.
During the summer of 1942, when the Germans were pushing through the USSR towards the Caucasus and Stalingrad, there was an outbreak of tularemia of unprecedented magnitude among both German and Soviet troops. Alibek felt certain the outbreak had been a bioweapons attack that had gone wrong, and "old-timers" in the Biopreparat organization told him stories that reinforced his suspicions.
There was also an outbreak of "Q fever" among German troops on leave in the Crimea in 1943. Alibek never investigated the matter in detail, but believed it might very well have been a bioweapons attack or test. Q fever, once known as "Query fever", is a bacterial disease of sheep, goats, and cows carried by ticks. Animals can be infected by breathing dried tick feces, and humans in proximity to the animals can be infected as well.
Q fever causes a sudden fever, aches, and general ill health, but it rarely leads to complications, except for pneumonia, lasts only a few weeks, and is rarely fatal. Outbreaks of Q fever were unheard of in the Soviet Union before that time, and it was heavily investigated as a biowarfare agent by Soviet researchers later.
[3.3] 1945-1972: COLD WAR BIOWEAPONS DEVELOPMENT
* When Germany surrendered in May 1945, the Allies got a nasty surprise from Nazi nerve gases. There was no such shock from Nazi bioweapons research. The Germans had never gone beyond preliminary investigations in bioweapons research, though some brutal experiments had been performed on concentration camp prisoners.
The German disinterest in biological warfare was partially due to the fact that Germany was situated in the middle of Europe, and the countries that would be logical targets for bioweapon attacks were right on Germany's borders. Since pathogens are poor respecters of borders, the Germans had strong reasons to not develop bioweapons.
England, separated from potential enemies by the English Channel, was in a better position to conduct biowarfare, and the Americans were in an even safer position, with their enemies oceans away. Similarly, as an island nation, Japan had a degree of separation from China that made bioweapons attractive to the Japanese.
General Ishii's bioweapons research staff at Pingfan kept up their efforts until the very end of the war. In fact, the Japanese had even developed a technology that could have allowed them to conduct biological attacks on the United States, in the form of balloons that were released into the jet stream to float across the Pacific to North America.
The "fusen bakudan (fire bombs)" carried incendiary bombs that were dropped automatically when a timer ran out. Hundreds were launched beginning in the fall of 1944 and into early 1945, and a good number of them reached the US and Canada. They did very little damage, but the Japanese had considered using them for biological attacks, which could have potentially made them more dangerous.
The Americans developed a weapon of mass destruction that outdid anything the Japanese had. The US dropped two atomic bombs on Japan in August 1945, and the USSR declared war on Japan at the same time and invaded Manchuria. Japan surrendered. The Pingfan complex was demolished ahead of the advancing Soviets, and Unit 731's most incriminating records were destroyed. Ishii and his men did make sure they saved a significant set of documents relating to scientific observations made at Pingfan, and set them aside in a safe place.
Stories persist that the Unit 731 dissected prisoners without anesthesia; that Allied prisoners of war were among the test subjects; and that Japanese soldiers passed out anthrax-laced candy to Chinese children. The destruction of records makes these stories unproveable, and the full truth will never be known. In any case, the things Unit 731 researchers were actually known to have done were damning enough to make the more lurid accusations irrelevant, though at the same time they make such accusations more believable as well.
* The Americans, now Japan's masters, only knew vague rumors about the activities of Unit 731. They interrogated Ishii, who had returned to Japan, and he simply told them that he had conducted research on defenses against bioweapons. There was no evidence to dispute this claim until the Soviets began to sort out what they captured at Pingfan and elsewhere in Manchuria. The Soviets then asked the Americans to turn Shirou Ishii and his officers over to them.
The Americans were halfway inclined to go along with the request until Ishii, justifiably panicked by the idea of being handed over by the Soviets, confessed that Unit 731 had in fact been involved in offensive bioweapons development, and had conducted field trials against Chinese civilians.
There was some uncertainty among the Americans that even these confessions provided enough evidence to make a case against Ishii and his assistants that would stand up in court. In the meantime, American biowarfare researchers from Camp Dietrich interviewed Ishii and his colleagues. The details of Unit 731's activities became more ghastly the more the Americans probed, but the interviewers also became more fascinated.
Unit 731 had performed experiments, documented with extensive data files and detailed color drawings, that American bioweapons researchers would never have been allowed to conduct. Ishii and his people promised to cooperate and provide the data they had carefully saved. The Camp Dietrich group produced a report recommending that charges against Ishii and his men be dropped, in recognition of the value of cooperation with the Japanese and learning from their wartime experience.
The recommendation was adopted. Ishii and his colleagues went free, and the activities of Unit 731 were kept quiet. At the time the Americans had the Bomb and the Soviets did not. Many American officials believed the USSR would never be able to build the Bomb, and so would likely seek equalizers in the form of chemical biological weapons. The Americans needed to counter such a move.
Shirou Ishii died of cancer at his home in 1959. He was never arraigned for any war crimes. The data provided by Ishii and his men proved to be sloppy and of little value, despite the suffering that had gone into its creation. The Japanese had neither mastered the production of biowarfare agents nor devised effective delivery systems. Ishii had got the better part of his deal with the Americans.
* As the Cold War intensified, American research into bioweapons accelerated. In 1948, the US built a huge sealed spherical test chamber at Fort Dietrich, Maryland, to test the aerosol dispersal of pathogens. This test chamber was known as the "Eight Ball". In 1953, Camp Dietrich became Fort Dietrich, and would continue to be a center of bioweapon development into the late 1960s. Tests of bioweapon technologies were performed through the 1950s at the Dugway Proving Grounds. Somewhat startling mock bioweapon attacks were also performed by biowarfare researchers in several US cities, using harmless bacteria.
Initial American bioweapon production in the postwar period focused on the plant pathogens investigated during the war: smuts, blights, blasts, rusts, and rots.
Feathers were found to be an excellent storage medium for plant pathogens, and cluster munitions were built that were packed full of turkey feathers dusted with pathogens. When the dispenser burst open at altitude, the feathers scattered in the wind over a wide area. The Americans also borrowed the fusen bakudan idea from the Japanese, and invented a balloon that could float over enemy territory and release canisters of bioagents after a preset period of time. Anti-crop biological munitions were put into production for the US Air Force in 1951. It was the first recorded instance of peacetime production of bioweapons.
Eventually, the US produced what is estimated at about 30 tonnes of wheat rusts, which would have been sufficient to attack the entire Earth's wheat crop. The spores of the rust used, Puccina graminus triciti, could remain effective after being stored in cool places for two years, and the rust would propagate rapidly after dispersal. The main intended target was the wheat region of the Ukraine. The US also stockpiled roughly a tonne of rice blast disease, intended to attack the ricefields of China.
* American bioweapon developers were not ignoring human pathogens. Anthrax remained the choice for a lethal bioagent. Many studies were performed with it, and anthrax weapons were produced.
Determining the lethal dose was a problem. No human experiments were performed, but tests done on 3,000 monkeys showed that 3,000 spores each could kill half of them. However, as with many pathogens, the action of anthrax is highly species-specific, and the monkey trials were not certain to be valid for humans. Guinea pigs, for instance, required 50,000 spores each, while mice would only take a hundred. Somehow unsurprisingly, rats seemed largely indifferent to anthrax. The conclusion was to use several times the maximum conceivable lethal dose.
Since anthrax was such a drastic weapon, research also continued into less-lethal pathogens. Brucellosis remained an interesting bioagent, as was tularemia. The Americans also considered "psittacosis" as a biowarfare agent. Psittacosis is a nasty disease in birds and is sometimes known as "parrot fever". In humans, psittacosis causes a high fever and can lead to pneumonia. About one in five human victims would die.
Brucellosis and tularemia pathogens were actually put into production. Spraying systems and cluster munitions for dispersing bioagents were developed, and other options were investigated, such as mass breeding of mosquitoes to carry yellow fever. Activity remained high at Fort Dietrich into the 1960s. Defensive measures, including the development and production of vaccines, were pursued as well.
* The US Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) also studied a wide range of sometimes bizarre drugs and toxins for use in clandestine activities. For example, extremely lethal and fast-acting shellfish toxins were used as an alternative to the relatively slow and painful cyanide pills carried by agents to allow them to commit suicide if captured.
When a CIA Lockheed U-2 spy plane was shot down over Russia on 1 May 1960, the pilot, Francis Gary Powers, carried a silver dollar bored with a hole containing a needle coated with such a toxin. Powers did not use the needle, and warned his captors to be careful in handling the silver dollar. The Russians pricked a dog with the needle, and the dog died in ten seconds.
The CIA also developed an electric dart gun that could fire a poison-tipped dart up to about 100 meters. The dart was so small that the victim might not even notice that he had been shot by it, and would then die quickly and mysteriously.
Although the CIA is now officially out of the poisons business, and given the political liability of such work probably out of it unofficially as well, investigations into new and better poisons have continued. Modern candidates include "saxitoxins", which are produced by marine microorganisms named "dinoflagellates" associated with toxic "red tides" and shellfish poisoning; a neurostransmitter named "substance P" that is lethal in extremely small quantities; and "RNA" genetic material custom-designed to jam or activate specific genes in a victim.
In any case, such toxins are in general not appropriate for battleground or strategic use, and so amount to little more than a James Bond story in the history of the development of chemical and biological weapons of mass destruction.
* While the Americans stockpiled bioweapons, the British were winding down bioweapon development efforts at Porton Down. By the 1960s, their biowarfare research efforts were strictly defensive.
In 1968, British delegates at an international disarmament forum in Geneva suggested that proposals to limit chemical and biological weapons might be more effective if the two subjects were discussed separately. After all, there was a precedent for use of chemical weapons, but not for the use of bioweapons. The British introduced a draft of a "Biological & Toxic Weapons Convention" or "BTWC", sometimes referred to as the "BWC", that would require signatories to renounce bioweapons. The Soviets objected heavily at first, and the Americans were not enthusiastic.
However, US public opinion was strongly against bioweapons, and even disregarding ethical concerns, there was a practical reason to abandon them. America had the Bomb, which was as formidable a deterrent as existed, and only the most advanced countries were capable of building nuclear weapons. As noted the previous chapter concerning chemical weapons, anyone could build bioweapons, even in principle terrorist groups, and it was not in the advantage of the US to do anything to encourage the development of bioweapons.
On 25 November 1969, President Nixon formally announced that the US would abandon offensive bioweapons. The Eight Ball was shut down and hundreds of researchers taken off the program. In hindsight, Nixon's decision, though largely forgotten, was one of the most significant and positive actions of his administration. The unilateral American decision broke the ice for other countries to give up bioweapons as well. On 4 April 1972, the US and the USSR signed the BTWC, and eventually a total of over 141 countries signed up. The BTWC was a significant step forward, though it suffered from weak verification and enforcement provisions.
* The Soviets found the information on biowarfare captured from the Japanese much more useful than had the Americans. The Soviets used Japanese plans to build a new and sophisticated bioweapons plant in Sverdlosk in 1946.
In the mid-1950s, responsibility for bioweapons research and development was transferred from the KGB to the Red Army, and the program expanded dramatically. Bioweapons research facilities were built in cities to help conceal their purpose. Even the Ministry of Agriculture was brought into the task, setting up a branch to develop bioagents to attack crops and livestock.
After signing the BTWC in 1972, the Soviets did not abandon their offensive bioweapons effort. Indeed, in 1973 Premier Leonid Brezhnev signed a decree ordering a comprehensive update and expansion of the entire Soviet biowarfare apparatus, which finally managed to shake the debilitating influence of Trofim Lysenko. Lysenko died in 1976. His authority had declined after the death of Stalin in 1953, but he had done much to damage Soviet biology, and the damage took a long time to correct.
The Soviets justified their clandestine bioweapons effort, when they bothered to, with the belief that the Americans were also cheating on the BTWC. In fact, as noted, this was not true. The US had no particular need for bioweapons and had judged them more trouble than they were worth.
The paranoia over American clandestine bioweapons research also reflected the inability of Soviet leadership to understand that the US military is firmly under the control of their civilian masters, the politicians, and that American politicians may not be honest to a fault but still have a direct and vested interest in being sensitive to public opinion.
[3.4] 1973-2000: BIOWARFARE UNDERGROUND
* Ken Alibek reported that after the USSR signed the BTWC, the country continued to produce and stockpile bioagents, such as anthrax and pneumonic plague. The Soviets had production facilities able to produce thousands of tonnes of anthrax a year.
They also produced tonnes of "weaponized" smallpox virus, which was felt to be a good bioagent because it was extinct in the wild and so defenses against it were poor, and experimented with the "Marburg" hemorrhagic fever virus, which causes massive hemorrhaging and has about 90% lethality. Weaponizing viruses is difficult and technically an impressive feat. Ironically, the USSR had been a major backer of the program to eliminate smallpox in the wild.
Missiles with bioagent warheads were tested, and there were field tests using aircraft to disperse harmless bacteria over civilian populations, as well as dispersal tests of harmless bacteria in the Moscow Metro.
Not all the releases were so harmless. In November 1979, a magazine published by Soviet emigres in West Germany printed an article based on reports by Soviet emigres of a mass outbreak of anthrax in April 1979 in the city of Sverdlosk that killed at least a hundred people. The articles suggested the outbreak was due to a containment failure at a bioweapons research facility outside the city, operating in clear violation of the USSR's commitment to the BTWC.
In 1980, the Soviets admitted that there had been an outbreak of anthrax as reported, but stated that it was due to tainted meat. This was plausible, since anthrax was in fact a problem in parts of the Soviet Union. However, in 1993, after the fall of the USSR, the Russians admitted that the outbreak was in fact due to an accident at the major bioweapons facility in Sverdlosk. Somebody had removed a clogged filter from an air-purification system, and other workers reactivated the system without noticing that the filter had been removed. The cover-up effort had involved destruction of evidence and records, and even the arrest and conviction of a few black-market meat dealers for selling tainted meat.
The party boss in Sverdlosk, the volatile Boris Yeltsin, had stormed over to the biowarfare complex and demanded admission, but was refused. He was ordered to go along with the cover-up. The cover-up was so thorough that a group of American medical researchers who came to the USSR in the late 1980s left with the impression that the anthrax outbreak had in fact been a natural occurrence.
By that time, the Americans were very suspicious that the USSR was massively violating the BTWC, and the Soviets were spending a large amount of money and effort to conceal the truth from snoops from the West. The 1989 defection of Vladimir Pasechnik, a senior Biopreparat official, did much to confirm Western suspicions, which were solidly validated later when Alibek came to the US.
After Yeltsin became the first Russian president after the fall of the USSR, he ordered the complete destruction of all remaining bioweapons, and shutdown of bioweapon research and manufacturing facilities. In 1992, Russia signed an agreement with the US and Britain to obtain cooperation in converting or dismantling the offensive bioweapons apparatus.
Yeltsin offered to allow open inspection of Biopreparat facilities, but a separate set of biowarfare facilities, run directly by the Ministry of Defense (MOD) ostensibly for developing vaccines and other countermeasures, remained off limits. Much to everyone's surprise, in June 1994 Russian officials offered to allow free inspections of these facilities as well, but due to various squabblings and difficulties the West didn't take them up on the offer, and it was withdrawn a few months later. Suspicions remain that the Russians are up to no good.
* The Soviets also tinkered with biotoxins for clandestine actions, using them in a number of occasions against defectors living in the West. The most significant of these incidents was the murder of a Bulgarian dissident living in London named Georgi Markov. On 7 September 1978, Markov was on the streets of London when he felt a sudden slight sting and turned around to see a man fumbling with an umbrella. Markov mentioned the incident to his wife.
He then fell increasingly ill over the next few days, and finally died. Examination of his body uncovered a tiny pellet, the size of a pinhead and with four holes in it. The pellet had most likely contained a poison, but there wasn't enough trace of it to determine what kind of poison.
Another Bulgarian exile named Vladimir Kostov who live in Paris read about Markov's death in the newpapers, and reported that about ten days before reading about the incident, somebody had stuck him in the back with something sharp, and he'd been ill for days. French doctors gave him a very thorough examination and found another pellet like that recovered from Markov. They forwarded the pellet to Scotland Yard, and British forensic pathologists found that the pellet contained traces of a poison named "ricin".
Ricin is derived from the castor oil plant and is highly lethal. Markov's murderer was never caught, but the killer was believed to have been an agent of the Bulgarian secret police. A Soviet emigre was also murdered with a ricin pellet in the US in 1980, apparently by KGB agents.
As with the CIA experiments, such "cloak and dagger" activities were a sideline relative to the development of bioweapons of mass destruction by the USSR and its allies.
* Lingering bioweapon production in Russia is a plausible threat, but the development of bioweapons in states such as Iran, Libya, and North Korea presents a more immediate worry. Rumors of bioweapons development in these countries was given substance by the discoveries of UN officials of the "United Nations Special Commission on Iraq (UNSCOM)", responsible for disarming Iraq after that country's 1991 defeat in the Gulf War. UNSCOM inspectors discovered an Iraqi bioweapons development and production effort of surprising scale.
For four years after the end of the war, the Iraqis denied that they had developed and manufactured bioweapons. UNSCOM was skeptical, to put it mildly. The Iraqis had purchased a spray dryer, useful for drying out bacteria so it could be stored, and four filling machines that could be used to pack biological agents into shells, bombs, and warheads. These items had other uses, but the Iraqis never gave any convincing explanation of what they were purchased to do.
Even more ominously, the Iraqis had purchased some 39 tonnes of biological growth medium, in containers ranging in size from 25 to 100 kilograms, when it normally is shipped in 1-kilogram packages. There was no conceivable reason for ordering biological growth medium in such quantities or in such large containers except for very-large-scale cultivation of microbial agents. UNSCOM found 22 tonnes of the medium in storage, but the rest remains unaccounted for.
UNSCOM pressed the Iraqis for answers. In July 1995, Iraq admitted they had a biowarfare program, and provided what they called a "full, final, and complete" disclosure. UNSCOM found plenty of holes in the story, however, and a month later Hussein Kamel Hassan, who had been in charge of military production and was Saddam Hussein's son-in-law, defected to Jordan. Tipped off, UNSCOM found a huge stash of documents in a shed on a "chicken farm" under his control that provided a detailed description of the Iraqi biowarfare program. Hussein Kamel Hassan would return to Iraq some time later in an unbelievable lapse of judgement and die in a gun battle.
The Iraqis then declared the previous "full, final, and complete" disclosure to be "incomplete and invalid" and released a new one. It revealed that the Iraqis had begun the program in 1985, obtained their first pathogens in 1986, and by the eve of the Gulf War had extensive stockpiles of bioweapons. The Iraqis admitted to working on a wide range of pathogens and biotoxins:
- Anthrax, of course. Iraqi documents show they produced 8,500 liters of
anthrax and loaded 6,500 liters of it into weapons.
- Botulinism toxin. The Iraqis said they produced 19,000 liters and put
10,000 of it into weapons.
- "Aflatoxin": This is another toxin related to food poisoning, and is
produced by fungal contamination of peanuts and other crops. The Iraqis
produced 2,200 liters of aflatoxin and put 1,580 of that into weapons.
Aflatoxin is an odd candidate as a bioweapon, since its major effect is to
cause liver cancer in its victims a decade or so after exposure.
- Other bioweapon investigations that never reached the production stage included the gas gangrene bacteria; wheat rust; ricin; "haemorrhagic conjunctivitis" virus, which causes pain and temporary blindness; "rotavirus", which cause severe diarrhoea; and "camel pox" virus, an odd choice even by the sometimes puzzling standards of bioweapons, since even in the Middle East the camel is no longer of major strategic importance.
The bioweapons were not used in the Gulf War, as the Iraqi army did not have the proper supplies of vaccines needed to protect their own troops, and were not fired in Scud missiles at Israel and other remote targets because of the likelihood of massive retaliation.
UNSCOM was forced to leave the country in 1998, and the Iraqis are almost certainly working on bioweapons as they please, restrained only by the constraints on their resources from the UN trade embargo. The evidence obtained by UNSCOM in Iraq only hints at what other bioweapons efforts may be taking place in other countries.
With the widespread introduction of "genetic modification" technologies, even relatively poor countries can develop bioweapons undreamed of by Shirou Ishii and his contemporaries. For example, influenza might be genetically modified with Marburg or Ebola components to produce a "doomsday bioweapon" of unprecedented lethality and contagiousness. Such a bioweapon would be too dangerous and indiscriminate to be actually used in combat as such, but it would be useful as a form of blackmail.
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