"The noise of fourteen thousand aeroplanes advancing in open order. But in Kurfurstendammm ... the explosion of anthrax bombs is hardly louder than the popping of a paper bag."
Biological warfare is nothing new. In the summer of 1347 the Tartar siege of the Genoese trading outpost of Caffa on the Black Sea, entered its third fruitless year. Without warning, an epidemic broke out among the besiegers, killing hundreds and rapidly reducing the assembled force. Driven by both desperation and frustration the Mongol general ordered that the bodies of newly dead be placed in catapults and thrown over the walls into the city. The residents, upon whom were "projected mountains of dead" from whom "the Christians could neither hide nor flee or be freed from such a disaster," began to die as well. While Caffa filled with the plague, some survivors fled, carrying the disease with them to Constantinople, Messina and Venice, starting the Black Death. Within three years, at least a third of Europe died.
In 1763, Lord Amherst, the British commander-in-chief of the American colonies responded to an Indian rebellion during the French and Indian War by attempting to annihilate them. He ordered that blankets taken from the beds of smallpox patients be given to the natives. A few months later, smallpox broke out and, lacking immunity, the Indians were ravaged by disease.
An overwhelming body of circumstantial and epidemiologic evidence supports charges that the Japanese used biological weapons against the Chinese in World War II. Charges were leveled in 1950 that the United States used biological weapons against the North Koreans and Chinese in the Korean War. The specter of "germ warfare" loomed again when charges were made by some nations that the Acquired Immunodeficiency Syndrome (AIDS) was developed and initially spread by the United States Central Intelligence Agency. More recently, concerns about the potential use of anthrax by Iraq's Saddam Hussein were raised during Operations Desert Shield and Desert Storm.
What is Biological Warfare?
Biological warfare is a loose term used to describe both the deliberate spreading of disease-causing agents and/or the utilization of microbiologically produced biotoxins (e.g. botulinum toxin, ricin, grayanotoxins). The latter do not represent true biological warfare however since the toxin- producing organism does not have to be introduced into the target, only its metabolic by-product, the toxin.
For clarity, in this article "biological warfare" means the deliberate introduction of microbial agents for the purposes of causing disease. The subject of extracellular biotoxins will be discussed in a future article. It required the invention of the microscope and the development of the "Germ Theory" before diseases could be spread in the sophisticated way that poison was. By the end of the Nineteenth Century, Robert Koch, Louis Pasteur and others had ended the explanation of infectious diseases as the result of mysterious miasmas or elemental imbalances of the humors.
Instead they proved that bacteria, fungi, viruses and parasites were the culprits. Once known, they were then isolated, cultured and studied and the biochemical mechanisms that made them work examined. It was only a short time before the possibility of their use in warfare was considered by the military establishments of most countries.
World War I and the Geneva Convention
World War I was the first major war fought after the "Germ theory" had achieved a reasonable level of sophistication. Both sides leveled charges of germ warfare against one another. The Germans were accused of having inoculated French horses and mules with glanders (a highly infectious animal disease), and cattle with anthrax. Russia claimed to have captured and executed German spies in 1915 trying to spread plague bacteria. It seems unlikely that these allegation were true. The nations of Europe had difficulty enough in fighting off the natural ravages of disease without deliberately introducing it onto the battlefield. Chemical warfare was difficult enough to control.
Nevertheless by 1925, bacteriological methods of warfare were banned by the Geneva Protocol. Concern by the scientific community that the search for a replacement for mustard gas might lead to the next generation of indiscriminate weapons being biological rather than chemical spurred the decision. The development of mass immunization techniques seemed to offer the chance of overcoming one of the major disadvantages of disease as a weapon -- the 'boomerang' effect on your own troops and civilians. Chemical weapons had already been a horror weapon and the possibility of biological weapons was viewed with even greater orror. It took little to convince the politicians. A solemn covenant against their first use was added to the Geneva Protocol.
In an ironic twist the prohibition came at a time when no nation in the world had a biological weapon nor was there a single laboratory researching into the possibility of developing one. But, instead of forestalling it, the ban led to the start of the biological arms race.
The Japanese Biological Warfare Program
In 1932, a Japanese army major and physician, Shiro Ishii, returned home from a tour of duty in Europe. He was now convinced that biological weapons were an effective means of fighting a war. His logic was flawless --they must be, he argued, otherwise "the statesman at Geneva would not have gone to the trouble of banning them." Biological warfare became an obsession with him. For the next three years he intensively lobbied the Japanese War Ministry which was lukewarm to the idea.
In 1935 Ishii finally received authorization to set up a small biological warfare research center at the Harbin Military Hospital. Bombs were designed and tested, cultures of bacteria prepared and evaluated. In the late 1936 the Kempai, the Japanese military police, arrested five Russian spies in the Kwangtung region of China. All were said to be carrying glass vials containing biological agents --cholera and anthrax -- for sabotage missions. True or not, Ishii used the evidence to spur (and scare) the War Ministry into constructing the world's first major biological warfare installation at Pingfan in 1937. The Pingfan Institute under Ishii, now a major general, had a garrison of 3000 scientists, soldiers and technicians. It also possessed a completely self-contained agricultural area and a flock of 50,000 hens. The latter are important in biological research as chick embryos were the traditional method of growing viruses. Radiating from Pingfan were 198 other biological warfare out- stations with about three hundred persons each. Many of these were on mainland China, but the entire organization extended geographically from Harbin to the Dutch East Indies.
The research was conducted under tight security. Ishii later claimed that even the Emperor was not advised of what was happening at Pingfan. Administratively, the organization was titled Boeki Kyusuibu -- "Anti-Epidemic Water Supply Unit"
Post-war investigations of the Pingfan Institute revealed that both offensive and defensive weapons were under development. Included among its stockpiles were typhus, typhoid, anthrax, cholera, plague, salmonella, tetanus, botulism, brucellosis, gas gangrene, smallpox, tick encephalitis, tuberculosis , tularemia and glanders. Defensive capabilities included vaccine production facilities able to produce twenty million doses annually.
Significantly, vaccines were under development for every disease in the Pingfan stockpile. The facility also cultivated the flea that carried plague bacilli. Experiments dropping these fleas inside porcelain bombs. Other studies spraying the fleas from high altitudes. A large number of experiments into the effect of aerosolization -- the process of producing a fine bacteria-laden mist -- were conducted. Initial experiments with animals were largely successful.
In order to determine the effectiveness of the various organisms and devices under "real" conditions, Ishii ordered the use of human subjects drawn from the prisoner of war camps. Thousands of Chinese and POWs of other nationalities were staked out and bombs and other delivery devices ignited nearby. Subjects were then examined as the diseases took their course and the speed and rapidity with which the organism acted carefully recorded.
Concurrent with these experiments there is strong, almost conclusive evidence that the Japanese were engaging in biological warfare against the Chinese. The Chinese town of Chuhsien was circled by a plane bearing Japanese markings in October 1940. The Chinese ambassador to London claimed that it scattered rice and grain mixed with fleas over the western end of the town. Plague broke out a few days later, killing twenty one people.
On November 4, 1941 the same thing was repeated over the town of Changteh in Hunan Province. The Superintendent of the local Presbyterian Hospital, Mrs. E J Bannon, reported that the grain samples and other material brought to her hospital were coated with an organism the laboratory identified as Ysernia pestis -- the bacillus that causes plague. On November 11, the first cases of plague occurred in the city. By the time the epidemic was over three months later, 150 had died. Plague, Mrs. Bannon noted, had not been known in the province prior to then.
The Japanese also devoted considerable time to devising sabotage techniques. Foodstuffs were experimentally contaminated with a biotoxin extracted from pufferfish which brought on death in 30 minutes. Experiments were conducted in the poisoning of water supplies with cholera, typhoid and dysentery in over one thousand wells in Manchuria.
Eventually the Pingfan scientists settled upon anthrax as the best possible disease weapon. The bacteria was hardy, possessing the ability to form nearly indestructible spores when conditions were not right for growth. It could effect both man and livestock. The principal drawback to anthrax was that once used on an area it was virtually impossible to eliminate from the environment and no vaccine was readily available.
Rumors that the Japanese were conducting biological warfare research were passed on to Winston Churchill in July 1942 by Chiang kai-Shek. Churchill then placed them on the agenda of the Pacific War Council.
The British Biological Warfare Program
The British had also been developing a biological warfare program for much the same reasons as the Japanese. Apprehension over the 1925 ban led British authorities to wonder what exactly the potentialities and possibilities of biological warfare were. The question was formally brought by Sir Maurice Hankey, Secretary to both the Cabinet and the Committee on Imperial Defence to the Cabinet in 1936. In response, Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain established the Microbiological Warfare Committee chaired by Hankey, to determine the degree of vulnerability of the British Isles to such an attack.
In March 1937 the Committee submitted its first report. The Committee concluded that "the practical difficulties of introducing bacteria into this country on a large scale were such to render an attempt unlikely." Still they urged the stockpiling of serums and vaccines to meet any potential threat.
The initial British program was primarily designed to stockpile vaccines, fungicides and insecticides. In September 1939, the blitzkrieg raged across Poland. Hankey, now a peer and Minister without Portfolio in Chamberlain's War Cabinet raised the possibility that the Germans might employ biological weapons against the British Isles. Chamberlain instructed Hankey to begin conducting experiments into potential offensive uses of biological weapons "so as to give us greater knowledge as to protect ourselves.
"The work," Hankey wrote in a 1941 report, "was to be conducted in this spirit and not with a view to resort to such methods ourselves." Whatever the "spirit" might have been, the British research into offensive biological weapon began in earnest. Heading up the program was Medical Research Council member Paul Fildes. The site he chose as the home of the British biological warfare program was a sleepy town called Porton Down.
Fear of German technological capabilities, which also drove the Manhattan Project, added impetus to the program. The biological warfare team was convinced that they were in a desperate race with the Nazis. The Germans, they were certain, would have no compunctions about the development or use of such weapons. The British program was both to develop defenses against the expected German biological attack as well creating the means to retaliate in kind. Examination of the question of the vulnerability of the British Isles convinced the Biological Warfare Committee that there was no feasible way to prevent or protect the population. Deterrence must rest in the ability to retaliate. This same attitude would pervade the Americans when the two nation's programs began cooperating after the US entry into the war.
There was grave concern as the war progressed that German V weapons might be used to deliver biological warfare agents into the heart of London or on the invasion forces. Self-inoculating syringes were issued to 117,500 British, American and Canadian troops to protect them against biological attack during the Normandy landing. At British request, Canada sent 235,00 doses of botulism anti-toxin to Britain. "When the V-1 attack was launched in June 1944," recalled Canadian General Brock Chisholm in 1957, "and the first flying bomb went off with a big bang showing it contained only normal high explosives, the General staffs all heaved an immense sigh of relief."
Allied intelligence was as hopelessly wrong in its evaluation of German biological warfare capability as it was in its information on their atomic and chemical warfare programs. The Germans were literally years behind the Allies. According to evidence presented at the Nuremberg Trials, the German decision to investigate biological warfare was not taken until a secret conference of the OKW in July 1943. Hitler had spurned the use or research of the weapons, possibly because of the vast quantities of nerve agent he had stockpiled.
What there was of the German program centered around the Military Medical Academy at Posen under the supervision of a Professor Blome. Experiments were carried out at Natzweiler, Davua and Buchenwald where some concentration camp inmates were deliberately covered with typhus-infected lice. Horrific as these experiments were there is no evidence to suggest that the Germans had even developed a theoretically feasible weapon. So ironically it was the British who manufactured the West's, possibly the world's, first biological weapon.
Like Ishii, the British at Porton Down settled on anthrax as the perfect weapon. In 1942 five million anthrax infected grain cakes (each about half the size of a charcoal briquet) were prepared for use as a "retaliation weapon". Each cake had a small hole bored in it which was then filled with anthrax spores and sealed. Aircraft would then be loaded with these cakes and then strew them over the German countryside. Cattle and other animals would eat the grain resulting in anthrax epidemic in both livestock and people.
Bizarre as the project seems, it would certainly have caused widespread suffering if it had been used against Germany. In addition to the serious food shortages which an anthrax outbreak would have caused there would also have been human casualties. Cutaneous anthrax, which produces skin ulcers is caught by handling contaminated animals. Intestinal anthrax results form eating contaminated met and is fatal 80 percent of the time.
When tests at Gruinard Island (see following box) proved the feasibility of the "anthrax bomb", the project was shelved in favor of production of the anthrax bomb. Development in quantity began when the British and American biological warfare programs pooled their resources in 1942. The bomb, code named "N", was developed in an atmosphere of secrecy rivalled only by the Manhattan Project. In February 1944, for example, when Lord Cherwell, Churchill's scientific adviser, wrote the Prime Minister an account of "N" the official typist left blanks in the typescript which Cherwell then filled in by hand.
The American Biological Warfare Program
The US Army started conducting biological warfare research in 1941 under the direction of the Chemical Warfare Service (CWS). The program was tentative and without real direction. Then in February 1942 a special committee appointed by the National Academy of Sciences submitted a report to Secretary of War Henry L. Stimson containing recommendations for the future of the American biological warfare program. Like an earlier British report, the NAS concluded that an enemy attacking with biological weapons could gravely threaten human beings, crops and livestock. The report stressed the need to develop defenses by producing vaccines and methods to protect the water supply. It also went on to recommend vaguely that the United States conduct research into the "offensive potential of bacterial weapons."
In response Stimson established a "germ warfare" advisory group innocuously named the War Research Service (WRS). The WRS was charged with providing civilian control over the direction of military biological and chemical warfare research. Citing the need for secrecy, Stimson convinced Franklin D. Roosevelt to place the WRS in a New Deal welfare agency, called the Federal Security Agency (which oversaw the Public Health Service and Social Security Administration). George W. Merck, president of the Merck Pharmaceutical firm Merck & Co., was appointed head. The WRS immediately began the task of recruiting scientists from universities and industry and selecting sites.
The actual production and technical aspects of the US biological warfare program remained under the auspices of the CWS. In 1942 and 1943 research facilities were built at Camp (now Fort) Detrick near Frederick, Maryland. As with the British, there was little questioning about the ethics or necessity of the program by its participants. The work seemed necessary, even desirable, in the exceptional situation of World War II. Theodor Rosebury, a Columbia University microbiologist later characterized the mood. "We were fighting a fire [the Axis] and it seemed necessary to risk getting dirty as well as burnt."
With Detrick underway, other facilities were built. A 2000 acre installation for field trials was established on Horn Island bear Pascagoula, Mississippi. A 250 square mile site near the Dugway Proving Ground in Utah was designated for bomb testing. Finally, 6,100 acres were secured for a manufacturing plant to be built in Vigo, Indiana.
With British assistance, the program gained considerable ground and began making biological bombs in late 1943 at Detrick. These prototype 500 pound bombs each held 106 four pound "bomblets" filled with anthrax that would disperse and break on impact. In 1944 the CWS, spurred by the German V-1 attacks, requested funds to produce one million of the bombs every month as soon as the factory in Vigo was completed and on line. The startup date was expected to be August 1945.
In mid-1944 there was a shift in US policy from developing bacteriologic agents aimed against people to those that targeted crops. A range of anti-crop agents --principally fungi - such as Sclerotium rolfsii (Agent C) which rots the stems of tobacco plants, soya beans and sugar beets, sweet potatoes and cotton; and Helminthosporium oryza van Brede de Hann the cause of seedling blights, were identified. At the same time, the CWS' chemical warfare component was putting a crash priority on the development of chemical defoliants, some of which would be used in Vietnam.
Anti-crop agents seemed more palatable to those who might have some reservations about anti-human weapons. American scientists certified that these agents, both biological and chemical, were not poisonous to humans. At Stimson's `request the legal aspects of their use was reviewed. The Judge Advocate's Office concluded that anti-crop agents were legal under the Geneva Convention because they were nontoxic to people. Also the US as a warring nation was "entitled to deprive the enemy of food and water and to destroy the sources of supply in his fields."
The weapons were never used on a large scale, though for tactical rather than ethical considerations. Henry H. Arnold, commander of the Army Air Force, rejected the plan to divert bombers to anti-crop missions arguing that bombing Japan's industry and cities would "have more certain impact." General George Marshall, who wanted to use chemical weapons against Japanese troops in the invasion if necessary, argued against the weapon on different grounds. Destruction of the 1945 rice crop would not have any effect until 1946 he argued. By then the war would have been won and American occupation forces would have the added burden of feeding a hungry civilian population.
There is some evidence that on a couple of occasions the US might have employed some sort of anti-crop agent against both Germany and Japan. In Germany in the autumn of 1944 there was a widespread infestation by Colorado Potato Beetles so severe that the German chemical warfare program was re-geared to developing an insecticide to save Germany's potato crop. From the dock at Nuremberg Hermann Goring accused the Allies of deliberately dropping the insects on Germany. Whether this or other accusations leveled by the vanquished Japanese about Americans spreading blight on the rice harvest are true is a matter of speculation. But both were within the capabilities of the United States and Britain at the time.
Biological Warfare in the Post World War II Era
The conclusion of World War II ended the apparent urgency and fear that biological weapons might be unleashed by either the Japanese or the Nazis. The atomic bomb seemed to provide the ideal means for retaliating against an unconventional attack.
It did not however, end the production and stockpiling of biological weapons by the victors. New enemies were found and the simple fact that such weapons could be built drove the victorious powers to develop more and more of them, either for the purposes of retaliation or for research. There was a belief that the Soviets also had an extensive and elaborate biological warfare program. That biological warfare agents might be used against the United States and its allies was considered a real possibility. But no one really knew for sure.
So, for most of the post-war years, as in World War II Western military microbiologists developed retaliatory germ weapons against a threat they did not know with certainty to exist. Then they attempted to develop defenses against not the known weapons of a future enemy but against the diseases they themselves had refined.
At the same time all American, British and Canadian records of their wartime biological weapons research were placed in the Most Secret category. The British closed their archives to historians until the end of the century and maintained an official silence on both its chemical and biological warfare programs. (Intriguingly, the main index of the Public Records Office in London lists the following as closed to public inspection: the minutes of the Inter-Service Committee on Chemical Warfare (CAB 81/16, 16, 17 and 18); a file entitled "The employment of Chemical Warfare in the War against Japan (CAB 81/9); the minutes of the Bacteriological Warfare Committee (CAB 81/53) and a file entitled "Porton Experiments" (CAB 81/54.))
Both the United States and Great Britain continued their programs. In 1950 a biological weapons plant was built in Pine Bluff, Arkansas to mass produce bacteria at short notice. Research and development continued throughout the 1950's and 1960's to develop new weapons and to determine the most effective means of spread. Some of these experiment, like the notorious "pigeon bomb" seem ludicrous. In 1950, researchers at Detrick claimed that by dusting the feathers of homing pigeons with cereal rust spores they could destroy grain supplies. Eventually the pigeons were abandoned and a cluster bomb filled with turkey feathers was developed in its place.
Other trials seemed reckless. In 1950 the US Navy released clouds of a spray contaminated with Bacillus globigii and Serratia marcessens, two harmless bacteria, in San Francisco Bay. The purpose was to determine whether a Soviet submarine could slip into an American harbor and release biological agents. It was a success. Nearly every one of the 800,000 people exposed to the bacteria inhaled 5000 or more particles. Similar tests releasing reasonably harmless bacteria were conducted in Minneapolis, Winnipeg (with the cooperation of the Canadian government) and off the Bahamas. In a celebrated test in 1966, the Chemical Corps Special Operations Division release clouds of Bacillus subtilis into the New York City subway system. The test showed that the turbulence caused by the trains would carry the bacteria throughout the entire subway line in a matter of a few minutes.
At the same time nearly every disease causing organism known to man was examined in light of its potential as a biological weapon. The United States is known to have developed and stockpiled anthrax (Code named "N"), brucellosis ("US"), tularemia ("UL"), and psitaccosis ("SI"), plague, Rocky Mountain Spotted Fever, Rift Valley fever, Q fever and various forms of encephalomyelitis. At the same time the US biological warfare program was stocking large quantities of wheat rust and rice blast as anti-crop agents.
The Soviet Biological Warfare Program
The Soviet Union's biological warfare program and its extent remained (and remains) unknown. Most of the West's information was developed by patching together a quiltwork of surmise built upon on who received what honors, careful review of published research looking for obvious gaps and the occasional defector. There is little doubt that the USSR conducted extensive research into biological warfare from the 1930's on. But to what degree no one is actually certain. Charges and suspicions, some unfounded, others possibly true, continued even after the United States and Soviet Union agreed to the 1972 Biological Warfare Convention. The treaty followed the unilateral renunciation of the use and stockpiling of biological weapons by then President Richard M. Nixon in 1969. The convention, signed by over a hundred nations to date, is unique in that it is the first, and so far the only, treaty to ban outright an entire class of weapons. Not only the use, but also the manufacturing and stockpiling of biological weapons were prohibited. Unfortunately the treaty contained no inspection provisions and this fueled the fires of suspicion.
In 1979, seven years after the ratification of the treaty, an outbreak of anthrax in Sverdolvsk in the Soviet Union lead to allegations that it had been the result of a Soviet biological weapons plant accident. In Southeast Asia, in 1981, "Yellow Rain", a biotoxic agent, was said to have been used by Soviet-supported forces in Laos and Kampuchea. Belief in Soviet willingness to use biological weapons was enhanced by incontrovertible evidence that chemical weapons were being used in Afghanistan. Yet there was, as before, little hard evidence to support these charges. What evidence existed was subjected to varying interpretations depending on the view point of the interpreter. A reasonable doubt existed, but sufficient evidence suggested that it was possible. As a result, the Dugway Proving Grounds facility began again to experiment with minute quantities to develop defenses against a possible Soviet threat.
Related Biological Warfare
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Biological Warfare (1)
Biological Warfare (2)
The Strange Case of Gruinard Island 1942
The Sverdlovsk Incident 1979
Eco-Disaster May Expose Soviet BioWar Dump: Vozrozhdeniye Island (USSR)
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© Copyright 1994 by David W. Tschanz.
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