A Higher Form of Killing: The Secret History of Gas and Germ Warfare

SEVEN The Search for the Patriotic Germ

EVEN BEFORE THE Second World War was over, a small committee in London had begun to plan for future wars. Reporting to the Chiefs of Staff, and through them to the Cabinet, the committee, chaired by Sir Henry Tizard, was charged with preparing a report on ‘The Future Potentialities of Weapons of War’. The brief of the committee was so vague that any and every idea seemed worth considering. Could atom bombs be used to cause tidal waves to swamp an enemy? Could chemicals dissolve enemy concrete? Could high voltage be ‘thrown’, to electrocute an advancing fleet?

Tizard sifted through the various proposals put to him, including a number on the future uses of biological weapons. But his final report¹ concluded that, while atomic weapons would alter the nature of war for ever, biological devices would be of very limited value. He proposed a programme only of defensive research, aimed at inoculating the public against diseases likely to be used by an enemy.

Tizard’s report, intended to be a basis of future British defence planning, was presented to the Cabinet in June 1945. In August, an American B29 bomber dropped the first atomic bomb on the city of Hiroshima. The Joint Technical Warfare Committee decided at once that Tizard’s report, a cornerstone of future strategic thought, should be rewritten to incorporate the horrific evidence of the effects of atomic weapons. As the committee set about redrafting their proposals they received a series of papers and visits from the men who had led the British Biological Warfare effort during the war, dismayed that their labours and discoveries were being ignored.

At a meeting in November 1945, Dr Paul Fildes dismissed the idea that a country could defend itself against biological attack merely by a programme of research and vaccination: discovering the vaccines could take years, and a mass immunization programme would be so obvious as to invite attack with a different disease. Another submission argued that the use of diseases against crops could not be discounted in future wars. But the most forceful proposal came from Brigadier Wansbrough-Jones, who suggested that biological warfare research was younger than atomic weapons research by some twenty years, having begun only in 1940. ‘It seems legitimate to conclude’, he wrote, ‘that in ten years’ time, Biological Warfare may be 100 times more efficient… than it is now’.² Finally there came the suggestion that germ weapons might be more suitable for use in wars ‘in which it was not worth using atom bombs, or… in which they were barred’.

These forceful arguments from Britain’s germ warfare experts carried the day. The new version of the report on future wars in July 1946 coupled atomic and biological weapons together, even citing a number of advantages of the latter over the former; for example, ‘while it would be difficult rapidly to expand the production of atomic bombs at short notice, there would be relatively much less difficulty in the rapid expansion of biological weapons.’³ This crucial document, rewritten to include the latest information on the effects of nuclear war, ended up revising its opinion of, and endorsing, biological weapons. Copies of the report were made available to the Pentagon, for it was clear that the pattern which had begun during the war – of the British initiating research and the United States producing the weapons – would continue, although now in a far more pronounced manner. Independently, defence scientists in the United States had reached the same conclusions as their British counterparts – that in any future war, biological weapons were almost as likely to be employed as atomic bombs.⁴

In the same way as the Allies had come to believe during the war that, because they were investigating biological weapons, Hitler was likely to be doing the same, so now the British and Americans determined that since they had decided that biological weapons were likely to be used, even in the terrible new age which had dawned at Hiroshima, then the Russians must have reached the same conclusion. A limited amount of intelligence, supported by a great deal of alarm, appeared to endorse this view. The British and Americans, when they assessed their vulnerability, reached gloomy conclusions.

a senior US Chemical Corps officer told the Pentagon.

The British wished to concentrate purely on defence against germ attack, but felt it was ‘essential to proceed with research into the offensive aspect of biological warfare, as until sufficient research in this sphere had been carried out, the true problems of defensive measures could not be wholly assessed’.⁶ It was this attitude which led the British to begin an aggressive recruiting policy which would increase three-fold the small band of microbiologists employed in germ warfare research at the end of the Second World War. It led them to conduct a series of tests with other candidate disease weapons, and in 1947, to establish a separate microbiological research station. The new germ warfare base was to be built next to the chemical warfare station at Porton, and to include what was then the largest brick building in the United Kingdom.

It is some indication of the sensitivity with which British post-war biological warfare work was regarded that almost all of the papers relating to the subject remained classified for decades. At a meeting in 1950, the Chiefs of Staff addressed themselves to the problem of unwelcome public attention. The service chiefs were worried by the implication that in justifying the need for biological warfare research, the impression might be created that a germ attack represented a real threat (as they believed it did). In February they agreed a statement to be released ‘in the last resort in anticipation of unwelcome publicity’:

This reassuring statement was a far cry from the Chiefs of Staff’s own assessment of the perils of biological attack.

In the United States, where nearly 4,000 people had been employed at the four top-secret, germ-warfare installations by the end of the war, staff levels were initially reduced. But the man who had led American research into germ weapons during the Second World War, George W. Merck, of the Merck Pharmaceutical Company, recommended that work continue.⁸ Camp Detrick, the former National Guard airfield an hour’s drive from Washington, was chosen for the purpose. The true nature of Camp Detrick’s work during the war had been so well concealed that local people knew little or nothing about what went on there. One local rumour was that the place, with its tall chimneys, was being used for the extermination of prisoners.

Over the coming years the scientists at Camp Detrick and Porton Down would investigate almost every known fatal disease. While most would not be tested on humans, the Western researchers were nevertheless able to base much of their work upon a compendium of case studies which supposedly did not exist.

The obsession with germ warfare which developed in the postwar years soon led to disregard for legal scruples. As we have seen, the Soviet authorities did attempt to bring charges against the Japanese officers responsible for the hideous human experiments conducted at field stations in occupied China. It might have been expected that similar charges would be laid against Japanese military biologists captured by the Americans. But in an extraordinary decision which was to remain secret for thirty years, the Americans offered immunity from prosecution, if, in exchange, the Japanese would hand over details of their experiments on prisoners of war.

Initially the Americans had been sceptical of reports that the Japanese had tested their biological weapons on human beings. Early reports from Far East Headquarters suggested that they were too unreliable to be taken seriously. When members of MacArthur’s staff questioned General Ishii Shiro, the founder of the notorious Unit 731 and the leader of the Japanese germ warfare programme, he produced the standard answer of military biologists the world over: research had indeed been conducted, but purely as a means of defence against possible enemy attack. Since Ishii’s staff had destroyed their biological warfare plants and murdered surviving human ‘guinea pigs’ in the days immediately preceding the Soviet occupation of Manchuria, American investigators could not lay their hands on firm evidence to disprove the claim.

But from the evidence they uncovered during their advance into Manchuria, the Russians concluded that Ishii was lying. They requested permission from the Americans to interview him and other military bacteriologists being held by the United States. Legal advisers in Washington took the view that the Russians had no legal basis for their request, but that it might be considered a friendly gesture to allow them to do so. Beforehand, however, the Japanese were to be interrogated again by American biological warfare specialists. This time the investigation yielded results.

In May 1947 Ishii – frightened by the possibility of being handed over to the Russians – dramatically changed his story and admitted to his interrogators that the Japanese had conducted ‘field trials’ with anthrax weapons against the Chinese. Nevertheless the majority of the allegations against Ishii and his former colleagues remained no more than hearsay and rumour. In the opinion of several of the legal advisers, they did not constitute the basis for war crimes charges. Clearly, the question of whether the charges could be made to stand up in court influenced Washington’s decision on whether or not to prosecute the Japanese. But by the time this was being considered, the investigation itself was operating in a hazy area in which the demands of justice were being balanced against possible propaganda and intelligence gains. In particular, the Pentagon wished to consider a proposal General Ishii made during interrogation. According to a Top Secret memorandum transmitted to Washington by cable on 6 May 1947, ‘Ishii states that if guaranteed immunity from “war crimes” in documentary form for himself, superiors and subordinates, he can describe (the germ warfare) program in detail’.

To assess the value of Ishii’s information the Pentagon sent two senior biologists from Camp Detrick to Japan. Dr Edwin V. Hill and Dr Joseph Victor arrived in Tokyo on 28 October, and began their investigations with vigour. On 12 December 1947 they reported that they had interviewed no less than nineteen Japanese biological warfare specialists. They had discovered that the Japanese had investigated an enormous array of diseases, including anthrax, plague, tuberculosis, smallpox, typhoid and cholera. A number of Japanese admitted that they had tested potential germ weapons on human beings.

The American biologists were clearly stunned by the information. The scale of the research far exceeded any tests conducted by the Allies during the war, not only in the range of diseases, but also in the accounts of how particular ailments affected their victims. The Japanese had not only deliberately infected prisoners with disease, but had ‘sacrificed’ selected cases during their experiments in order to discover the effects of the diseases at different stages.

The experiments were as horrific as any conducted by the Nazis, yet the Camp Detrick specialists dispassionately concluded in their summary of the report of B W Investigations of 12 December 1947 that the potential benefits of the research for the Western biological warfare programme far outweighed the demands of justice. If the Japanese were to be questioned by the Russians, then they rather than the Americans would obtain the benefits of wartime research. Their concluding recommendation read as follows:

This concern to spare the Japanese doctors possible ‘embarrassment’ found a ready response in Washington where, in order to maintain a lead over Soviet plans for germ warfare, the full extent of American knowledge of Japanese wartime plans was kept secret for thirty years.

The particularly insidious aspect of germ warfare – the opportunity it gives for carrying out an attack without an enemy realizing that he is a victim until it is too late for him to be able to defend himself – particularly appalled the American Chemical Corps. They began to investigate how easily bacteriological weapons might be used in clandestine guerilla operations against large government buildings housing thousands of vital government workers. They decided to mount a dummy attack on the largest office building in the world, the Pentagon, headquarters of the United States armed forces. Men from the newly established Special Operations Division at Camp Detrick simply walked into the massive building, and dropped a pint and a half of harmless bacteria into the air conditioning system. They reported later that it had been enough to prove that a biological warfare agent could be spread throughout the building. Other possibilities they considered were the contamination of food, paper, or, particularly, water supplies. ‘Saboteurs,’ they decided, ‘equipped with small quantities of botulinus toxin, cholera, dysentery or typhoid organisms could introduce effective quantities into the water system of a city by pumping the agent into a fawcet located near a principal water main’.⁹

But there was the possibility of an even larger attack. Diseases might be sprayed into the air from a ship or aircraft, and allowed to drift across the country. To discover whether such attacks, feasible in theory, were practical propositions, the British, Canadians and Americans collaborated in a succession of experiments. After preliminary meteorological research to discover how clouds of bacteria might behave at altitude, they began a series of mock attacks.

The details of some of the experiments, which affected the lives of millions of people, are still classified. It is known, however, that in 1948 the British War Office conducted an exercise known as Operation Pandora, to determine the vulnerability of the United Kingdom to ‘weapons of mass destruction’ the now accepted form of words for atomic and biological weapons. In the winter of the same year ships of the Royal Navy, carrying British, Canadian and American microbiologists, were sent to the Caribbean for Operation Harness. Over thirty years later, the results of Operation Harness were held to contain ‘information, the disclosure of which is presumed to cause identifiable damage to national security’.¹⁰ Operation Harness is commonly thought to have been an exercise in which harmless bacteria were released to simulate a germ attack. In fact real germ weapons were used. Nor was Operation Harness unique. There were at least two other exercises in the Caribbean in which real diseases were tested. They were code-named Operations Ozone and Negation and took place in the winters of 1953 and 1954. Several thousand animals were brought from Porton Down and tethered to rafts at sea some miles off the Bahamas, which was then a British colony. The microbiologists watched through binoculars, as from upwind clouds of bacteria were released to drift over the animals. The diseases tested are thought to have included anthrax, brucellosis and tularemia. The corpses of the infected animals were burned at sea.

While these tests showed the relative virulence of the diseases under examination, they did not solve the central problem of how easy it would be to attack a large city or military base. Experiments with harmless bacteria soon after the war had shown how easy it was for germs to penetrate the interior of a sealed ship, but now attacks were needed against civilian targets. Over the next two decades there would be over 200 experiments in the United States alone in which military and civilian targets, including whole cities, would be attacked with imitation biological weapons. The tests were conducted in total secrecy. If inquisitive officials asked questions they were told the army was conducting experiments with smokescreens to protect the city from radar detection. The targets of the attacks ranged from isolated rural communities to entire cities, including New York and San Francisco.

One of the earliest experiments took place in San Francisco in 1950. The Pentagon believed it might be possible for a Soviet submarine to slip into an American harbour, release a cloud of bacteria, and disappear before the victims of the attack had even begun reporting to hospital. San Francisco, the headquarters of the Sixth Army and much of the Pacific fleet, seemed a likely target for such an attack. Between 20 and 26 September 1950, the theory was tested by two US Navy minesweepers steaming up and down outside the Golden Gate Bridge. On board the naval vessels crewmen released clouds of a spray contaminated with Bacillus globigii and Serratia marcescens, two supposedly harmless bacteria. The Serratia marcescens strain, code-named ‘8 UK’ had been developed at Porton Down during the Second World War because when incubated it turned red, making it very easily identifiable when used in biological warfare experiments.

There were six mock attacks on the city. In their report later the scientists concluded that 117 square miles of the San Francisco area had been contaminated, and that almost everyone in the city had inhaled the bacteria. ‘In other words’, they wrote, ‘nearly every one of the 800,000 people in San Francisco exposed to the cloud at normal breathing rate… inhaled 5000 or more particles. Any other area having a steady wind and a degree of atmospheric stability comparable to San Francisco is vulnerable to a similar type of attack, and there are many such areas in the US and elsewhere’.¹¹ The point had been proved.

But the San Francisco test was only one of many. In 1951, American Navy personnel deliberately contaminated ten wooden boxes with Serratia marcescens, Bacillus globigii and Aspergillus fumigatus before they were shipped from a supply depot in Pennsylvania to the navy base in Norfolk, Virginia. The tests were designed to establish how easily disease might be spread among the people employed to handle the boxes at the supply depot. Of the three infectious bacteria, Aspergillus fumigatis had been specifically chosen because black workers at the base were thought to be particularly susceptible to it.

In 1953, after further tests spraying supposedly harmless chemicals and bacteria off the United States coast, the Chemical Corps travelled north to spray the Canadian city of Winnipeg. City officials were told that ‘an invisible smokescreen’ was being laid over the city. (A similar excuse had been used in tests in Minneapolis, where councillors were told that a smokescreen was being laid to protect the city from radar detection.) There were further tests at Stony Mountain, Manitoba, where the experimenters ran into unexpected problems. According to their report, ‘cattle in the area levelled many of the sampler stakes, and considerable time was lost in relocating them… (and) there was no adequate defence against the hordes of mosquitoes present in this rural area’.¹² How the scientists survived this biological attack is not recorded.

The British contribution to an understanding of how germ attacks might be carried out was considerable, although Porton Down carried out far fewer such tests. Much of the early American work on how clouds might drift over a city was based on the results of experiments conducted by Porton scientists in which they released smoke clouds in built up areas of Salisbury, Wiltshire, just down the road from the Microbiological Research Establishment, and at Southampton in Hampshire.

The extreme secrecy which characterizes British defence matters makes it impossible at this stage to build up a full picture of British tests, since many are still classified. However, it is known that in 1952 ships of the Royal Navy released clouds of bacteria off the west coast of Scotland. A Ministry of Defence press release, issued in 1954 and still representing the most that can be officially stated about the tests, mentions only that ‘in recent years trials have been carried out off the coast of Scotland to obtain the technical data on which… precautions should be based’.¹³ But these tests were not as innocuous as the bland Ministry of Defence statement claimed. During the summer of 1952, and again during 1953, the Ben Lomond, a Royal Navy tank transport vessel based in the port of Stornaway on the Isle of Lewis, regularly set off for a point some six miles off the coast.

But unlike the San Francisco experiment in which supposedly harmless bacteria were used, the Ben Lomond carried canisters of disease. The pattern of the Scottish tests, code-named Operations Cauldron and Hesperus, was similar to those carried out in the Bahamas. About ten miles off the Scottish coast rafts were lowered over the side, and cages of animals placed aboard. The Ben Lomond then moved upwind of the rafts, and Porton scientists released clouds of germs. Several thousand guinea-pigs, mice, rabbits, and about one hundred monkeys were killed during these tests, which continued for weeks at a time. At the end of the experiments each day the animals would be brought ashore, where their carcasses would be examined before being carted off to an improvised incinerator.¹⁴

Details of these experiments are still not publicly available, and so nothing is known of the particular diseases under investigation. The reason for the tests being conducted at sea was obvious enough, however, the wartime experience at Gruinard having shown how long-term could be the consequences of contaminating land. Although Porton would have preferred to continue the tests off the Scottish coast, the weather during the summer of 1953, the second year of the experiments, was considered too unpredictable for further work. The following year the scientists returned to the Bahamas for their research. In the warmer conditions of the Caribbean the tests continued for at least two more years.

The experiments off the Scottish coast and in the Bahamas represent the high point of British post-war biological warfare research. In addition to the tests with germ weapons at sea, the British conducted a series of experiments with harmless chemicals over the United Kingdom. Beginning in the spring of 1957 RAF aircraft were regularly dispatched on missions around the British coast. From specifically constructed tanks slung below the planes they poured out zinc cadmium sulphide, a chemical easily detected, even in minute quantities, in the atmosphere. Monitoring stations were established across the British Isles, where Porton scientists assessed the quantity of the chemical in the air. By the autumn of 1959, when the experiments were completed, almost the whole country had been sprayed with the chemical. Further experiments continued sporadically (as, for example in 1961, when imitation disease clouds were discharged from a chimney at Harwell, Britain’s atomic energy headquarters), but the zinc cadmium sulphide experiments had proved to Porton Down that Britain was virtually defenceless against a clandestine germ attack.

In the United States similar experiments continued throughout the sixties. Perhaps the most spectacular simulated attack took place in 1966 when the Chemical Corps Special Operations Division decided to mount a biological assault on New York City. The attack was carried out in strictest secrecy, the experimenters carrying false letters certifying that they represented an industrial research organization. The plan was to discover how easy it would be to poison a city by releasing germs into the underground railway tunnels. Army agents positioned themselves on the pavement above the gratings in the roofs of the New York Subway and sprayed ‘harmless bacteria’ into the stations. Occasionally the clouds would fall onto passengers waiting for trains, but ‘when the cloud engulfed people, they brushed their clothing, looked up at the grating, and walked on’, one of the agents recalled.¹⁵

The army agents concentrated on the Seventh Avenue and Eighth Avenue subway lines, while other team members were sent with sampling devices to the extremities of the underground railway network. Within minutes the turbulence caused by the trains would carry the bacteria throughout the tunnel system. Another technique used by the Special Operations men was to travel on subway trains carrying an apparently normal light bulb which was in fact filled with bacteria. When no-one was looking, the light bulb would be dropped onto the tracks in the middle of a darkened tunnel. They reported later that this was ‘an easy and effective method for covert contamination of a segment of a subway line’.¹⁶ The research team concluded that if anyone chose to carry out such an attack on New York, or any of the cities of the Soviet Union, Europe or South America with an underground railway network, thousands, possibly millions, would run the risk of infection. Even in an advanced Western country like the United States, a serious illness affecting 30 per cent of the population of a major city would swamp the hospitals and bring the health service to a standstill.

By now the biological warfare scientists in all three countries had proved that an attack with disease was possible, indeed, terrifyingly simple. The last tests took place in November 1969. During their entire twenty year duration, little or nothing had been admitted about their true purpose. Apologists for the Chemical Corps in the United States justified the experiments by explaining that they began in a period of deep international uncertainty, compounded by ‘our fear of world domination by the Communist countries, primarily the Soviet Union’.¹⁷

Even before many of these tests had taken place the Chemical Corps had concluded that the United States was ‘highly vulnerable’ to germ warfare attack. They pointed out that since the end of the war very little new work had been done to produce a biological bomb. It would, they believed, take ‘approximately one year of intensive effort’ before America could wage biological warfare.¹⁸ True, there was no hard evidence that any potential enemy had developed a biological weapon, but could the United States afford to take the risk of not having her own, should one later be developed elsewhere?

The argument was persuasive. In October 1950 the Secretary for Defense accepted a proposal to build a factory to manufacture disease. Congress secretly voted ninety million dollars, to be spent renovating a Second World War Arsenal near the small cotton town of Pine Bluff, in the mid-west state of Arkansas. The new biological warfare plant had ten storeys, three of them built underground. It was equipped with ten fermentors for the mass production of bacteria at short notice, although the plant was never used to capacity. Local people in the town of Pine Bluff had some idea of the purpose of the new army factory being built down the road, but in general there was, as the Pentagon put it later ‘a reluctance to publicize the program’.¹⁹

The first biological weapons were ready the following year, although they were designed to attack not humans but plants. In 1950 Camp Detrick scientists had submitted a Top Secret report to the Joint Chiefs of Staff on work they had carried out on a ‘pigeon bomb’. In an attempt to discover a technique of destroying an enemy’s food supplies, the scientists had dusted the feathers of homing pigeons with cereal rust spores, a disease which attacks crops. The researchers discovered that even after a one hundred mile flight, enough spores remained on the birds’ feathers to infect oats left in their cages. Then they had experimented in dropping pigeons out of aircraft over the Virgin Islands. Finally, they dispensed with live birds altogether and simply filled a ‘cluster bomb’ with contaminated turkey feathers. In each of these bizarre tests the men from Camp Detrick concluded that enough of the disease survived the journey to infect the target crop. In 1951 the first anti-crop bombs were placed in production for the US Air Force.

The United States had established the first peace-time biological weapon production line.

But the main objective was the development of a weapon to kill people. The ideal biological agent had changed little from the days of Allied research during the Second World War.

It should be a disease against which there is no natural immunity. It should be highly infectious, and yet the enemy should not be able to produce a vaccine against it or be able to cure the disease with the medical facilities available to him. And from a military point of view, it should be a disease which was easy to reproduce, yet hardy enough to survive and reproduce itself outside the laboratory.

Four diseases looked the most suitable as weapons:

• Anthrax The wartime tests carried out by the British and Americans had shown anthrax to be an extremely hardy agent: the island of Gruinard was likely to be contaminated for the rest of the century. Although not necessarily fatal, there was still no effective immunization available. Originally coded ‘N’.

• Brucellosis Otherwise known as Undulant Fever, by the end of the war, Brucellosis had been in advanced stages of development. Since it was rarely fatal, it was now considered as a possible ‘humane’ biological weapon. Originally coded ‘US’.

• Tularemia Like Brucellosis, which primarily affects cattle, tularemia (also known as ‘rabbit fever’) is not normally fatal to humans. It was considered, however, that the chills, fever and general weakness the disease produced would disable an enemy for two to three weeks. Originally coded ‘UL’.

• Psittacosis Sometimes known as ‘parrot fever’, this disease was considered the most powerful of the ‘incapacitant’ weapons, since it would produce a high fever, rather like typhoid fever, which could later develop into pneumonia. Death could be expected in about 20 per cent of those afflicted. Originally coded ‘SI’.²⁰

Later many other diseases would be developed for use as weapons, including plague, Rocky Mountain spotted fever, Rift Valley fever, Q fever and various forms of encephalomyelitis. But in 1950 these four looked the most promising potential germ weapons. During the next two decades over seven hundred million dollars would be spent on the development of such weapons in the United States, and hundreds of millions more in research and testing projects in America, Britain and Canada.

As to how these diseases were to be used in a future war, the Chemical Corps had a list of targets for the Strategic Air Force. The first priority should be major cities. ‘The morale of the people in these targets is an all important factor, and will certainly affect a nation’s will to fight. Attack on these targets should be directed toward achieving maximum anti-personnel effect with the least amount of destruction.²¹ The attacks should be carried out on a massive scale, to saturate enemy medical facilities. The element of surprise would be enhanced, the Chemical Corps had decided, by the ‘insidious nature of the attack as regards detection, and the period of incubation before symptoms appear’.

These disturbing plans looked as though they might become fact with United States intervention against the communist forces striking down through Korea. There were huge increases in defence spending throughout the American services, and biological warfare was no exception. The Pentagon suspected that the North Korean and Chinese communists under General Lin Piao might unleash bacteriological attacks upon them. The Americans determined to produce a weapon for use in retaliation. Ten million dollars were immediately set aside for new laboratories at Camp Detrick, and research into protection against germ warfare attacks was doubled.

In the event it was not the communists but the Americans who were most successfully accused of using germ weapons. In February 1952 the North Koreans and Chinese claimed that captured American Air Force officers had confessed to dropping ‘germ bombs’ on North Korea. The Chinese supported their claims by publishing photographs of what they identified as ‘American biological bombs’. The United States described the allegations as nonsense; the pilots had, they said, been brainwashed. The Chinese returned to the offensive by setting up an ‘International Scientific Commission’ including scientists from the Soviet Union, Italy, France, Sweden, Brazil and the United Kingdom. The British representative was Dr Joseph Needham, an expert in Oriental medicine who later became Master of Gonville and Caius College, Cambridge.

The international scientists who investigated the Korean allegations produced a weighty 700 page report in October 1952, which concluded that ‘the peoples of Korea and China did actually serve as targets for bacteriological weapons’.²² It listed the various techniques used, which ranged from fountain pens filled with infected ink, to anthrax-laden feathers, and fleas, lice and mosquitoes carrying plague and yellow fever. In propaganda terms, the ‘International Scientific commission’ was a master stroke, although the United States again denied the allegations. An American request that the United Nations conduct its own investigation was effectively vetoed by the Chinese and Koreans who refused to co-operate.

Dr Needham remained convinced that the United States did indeed wage biological warfare in Korea. ‘Mostly it was experimental work, as far as we could see,’ he said in Cambridge nearly thirty years later.²³ Needham believed that Korea had been used for experiments with ‘vectors’, insects like the yellow fever-carrying mosquito, capable of transmitting disease from one body to another. ‘The experiments didn’t seem to be very successful’, he said, ‘but we were unanimous in our conclusions.’

Years later the American government admitted that at the time of the Korean War they had had the means to conduct biological attacks, but claimed that their ‘bacteriological warfare capability was based upon resources available and retained only within the continental United States’.²⁴ Whether the allegations had been true or not, their very publication had cost the United States a great deal of good will. In the end there remained only ‘an unverifiable report and its unverifiable denial’.²⁵

If anything, rather than discouraging the Chemical Corps, the Korean allegations spurred them on faster into a bacteriological arms race. In the autumn of 1953 they established a separate germ warfare division. By spring the following year their production plant was turning out supplies of Brucella suis, one of the bacteria causing brucellosis. A year later the plant at Pine Bluff, Arkansas, was manufacturing tularemia germs. The supposedly temporary ‘Camp’ Detrick was renamed Fort Detrick – an indication of its permanent status. There was so much research conducted that, although yet more laboratories were built there, work had to be contracted out to scientists at Ohio State University, who were charged with attempting to produce vaccines against the diseases the Fort Detrick scientists were refining.

As the amounts of money spent on germ warfare spiralled, the Department of Defense began to rethink its policy. In 1943 Roosevelt had stated that the United States would never use these ‘outlawed’ weapons, ‘unless they are first used by our enemies’.²⁶ This perfectly unambiguous statement of policy placed the United States, which had not ratified the Geneva Protocol, in the same position as many countries which had. But it was now judged inadequate. In 1956, the United States secretly changed her policy.

The following heavily censored transcript of Congressional testimony is the closest to a public admission of the change to be found in the records of the time. A discussion took place between the commander of the Chemical Corps, Major General William M. Creasy and Representative (later to become President) Gerald Ford.

Since national policy had been publicly expressed by Roosevelt in 1943, the necessity to go ‘off the record’ was a clear (albeit unwitting) indication of a major change.

In fact the United States had abandoned the principle of using biological and chemical weapons in retaliation only. US Army manuals which had previously stated that ‘gas and bacteriological warfare are employed by the United States against enemy personnel only in retaliation’²⁸ were rewritten. In future they said ‘the decision for US forces to use chemical and biological weapons rests with the President of the United States’.²⁹ In achieving the repudiation of a ‘retaliation only’ policy, the American military had finally overcome their greatest inhibition.

But while the United States now had a policy which entitled her to use bacteriological and chemical weapons as and when the President saw fit, and the means to produce large quantities of germs, problems still remained. The most pressing difficulty was the question of how to control the spread of a disease.

The secret spraying carried out in the United States, Britain and Canada had provided critical information about how thick a cloud of bacteria needed to be to spread disease successfully. Experiments at Fort Detrick and Porton Down had shown how long micro-organisms would live while floating in the air. Tests on animals had provided invaluable information about how large the individual particles needed to be to break through the body’s natural defences. Armed with this information, Chemical Corps generals began to imagine astonishing campaigns.

The man who dreamed up this ‘deterrent’, Brigadier General J. H. Rothschild, had served as head of the Chemical Corps Research and Development Command, and as Chemical Officer of the US Far East Command. His plan was simply enough, indeed the most basic form of modern biological warfare, for it depended only upon the weather. It had the disadvantage, however, of being uncontrollable: strategic decisions about exactly who was killed by anthrax were, literally, thrown to the winds. Rothschild chose to ignore the results of a theoretical exercise conducted by his own army at the very time he was suggesting his attack upon China.

The situation posed was thus. A large Chinese army had penetrated far into Vietnam, and was advancing on the Cambodian capital Phnom Penh. American troops based in Thailand were unable to break through to intercept the Chinese advance. The President ordered a biological strike. At the end of their analysis of this theoretical attack, the Chemical Corps specialists concluded that while some three quarters of the enemy army would have been killed or disabled, so too would six hundred thousand supposedly friendly or neutral civilians.

This problem – how to spread disease in a controlled manner – preoccupied the Americans and Russians throughout the fifties and sixties. The fact that at no time did a viable solution seem in prospect was no deterrent to further offensive research. The Chemical Corps went about their work with gusto, regardless of this apparently enormous obstacle.

There was a great deal of interest in ‘vectors’, or the transmission of disease by insects. Mosquitoes were an attractive proposition, since many species carry disease, and all pass the disease on by injecting their victim. A soldier in a gas mask has no protection. Of particular interest was the species Aedes aegypti, known as the ‘yellow fever mosquito’. In 1801 it destroyed an entire army sent by Napoleon to Haiti. In 1878 a small outbreak of the disease in Memphis, Tennessee, drove 25,000 to flee the city, infected another 18,000, and killed 5,000: the city went bankrupt and lost its charter.

If there was a particular irony about the research into yellow fever as a potential weapon it was that for fifty years American physicians had led the campaign to rid North and South America of the disease. Indeed in 1947 the United States had heartily endorsed a new public health initiative to banish yellow fever from the Americas forever, by eradicating the disease-bearing mosquito. Now the military scientists began to consider it a potential weapon.

Fort Detrick scientists discovered a Trinidadian who had been infected with yellow fever in 1954 and had later recovered. They took serum from the Trinidadian and injected it into monkeys. From the monkeys they removed infected plasma, into which they dropped mosquito larvae. The infected mosquitoes were then encouraged to bite laboratory mice and pass on the disease. This ingenious technique of public health research in reverse worked. The mice duly contracted yellow fever.

Laboratories were built at Fort Detrick where colonies of the Aedes aegypti mosquitoes were fed on a diet of syrup and blood. They laid their eggs on moist paper towels. The eggs would later turn into larvae, and eventually into a new generation of mosquitoes. The Fort Detrick laboratories could produce half a million mosquitoes a month, and by the late fifties a plan had been drawn up for a plant to produce one hundred and thirty million mosquitoes a month. Once the mosquitoes had been infected with yellow fever, the Chemical Corps planned to fire them at an enemy from ‘cluster bombs’ dropped from aircraft and from the warhead of the ‘Sergeant’ missile.

To test the feasibility of this extraordinary weapon, the army needed to know whether the mosquitoes could be relied upon to bite people. During 1956 they carried out a series of tests in which uninfected female mosquitoes were released first into a residential area of Savannah, Georgia, and then dropped from an aircraft over a Florida bombing range. ‘Within a day’, according to a secret Chemical Corps report, ‘the mosquitoes had spread a distance of between one and two miles, and bitten many people’.³¹ The effects of releasing infected mosquitoes can only be guessed at. Yellow fever, as the Chemical Corps noted, is ‘a highly dangerous disease’, at the very least causing high temperatures, headache, and vomiting. In about a third of the recorded cases at that time, yellow fever had proved fatal.

Nor were mosquitoes the only insects conscripted into the service of the army. In 1956 the army began investigating the feasibility of breeding fifty million fleas a week, presumably to spread plague.³² By the end of the fifties the Fort Detrick laboratories were said to contain mosquitoes infected with yellow fever, malaria and dengue (an acute viral disease also known as Breakbone Fever for which there is no cure); fleas infected with plague; ticks contaminated with tularemia; and flies infected with cholera, anthrax and dysentery.

They had tested the diseases on laboratory animals, but soon the scientists needed to discover whether what killed a mouse or a monkey would also kill a human. Many of them believed that the Russians might already be testing their biological weapons on people and the Chemical Corps were keen to do likewise.

During the Vietnam War, the Fort Detrick researchers found a ready source of human subjects for their experiments in Seventh Day Adventists, who, because of their conscientious objections, served in the United States army as non-combatants. In one series of tests Seventh Day Adventist soldiers were exposed to airborne tularemia. According to one report, ‘all control subjects developed acute tularemia between two to seven days after exposure’, although all were said to have recovered later.³³ This experiment was unusual in that it was written up for public consumption. But the willingness of some at least of the Seventh Day Adventists to take part in such tests was beyond doubt. ‘We like to think of ourselves as conscientious co-operators, not conscientious objectors’, as one of their ministers explained in 1967.³⁴ Numerous other experiments took place with volunteers, and although little is known about their nature, it seems fair to assume that many were more concerned with developing effective vaccines than with testing the power of the bacteriological weapons themselves.

Evidence as to the use of human volunteers in experiments at Porton Down is harder to come by. Service volunteers were regularly requested during the fifties and sixties, but they are said to have been used only for the testing of defensive precautions like vaccines.

However, between 1960 and 1966 scientists from the Porton Down Microbiological Research Establishment took part in a series of tests in which terminal cancer patients were treated with two rare viruses, at least one of which was then being considered as a possible biological weapon.

The experiments took place at St Thomas’s Hospital, one of London’s leading medical schools. According to a report which later appeared in the British Medical Journal,³⁵ terminal cancer patients were infected with Langat Virus and Kyasanur Forest Disease Virus by two doctors from St Thomas’s Hospital and two scientists from Porton Down. Their interest appears to have been in developing a potential vaccine against other diseases transmitted by ticks. The scientists reported that all thirty-three patients died, two of them after contracting encephalitis, an infection causing inflammation and swelling of the brain. ‘Transient therapeutic benefit was observed in only four patients’,³⁶ they reported.

Most British biological warfare research since the Second World War appears to have concentrated on purely defensive aspects – the production of vaccines and methods of detecting bacteriological attack. Offensive research in Britain and Canada was unnecessary, since neither could compete with the huge American biological weapons programme. Research at Porton was conducted on a smaller, more discriminating scale. Nonetheless, between 1952 and 1970 the Microbiological Research Establishment consumed in experiments over one thousand monkeys, nearly two hundred thousand guinea pigs, and one and three quarter million mice.³⁷

The rate at which the germ warfare laboratories consumed animals presented them with one of their greatest public relations problems. The establishments counter-attacked in a number of ways. Fort Detrick, which by 1960 was the biggest user of guinea pigs in the world, sponsored a lavishly equipped boy scout pack, supplied the local paper with a weekly gossip column, and made a succession of speakers available for local discussion groups.³⁸ The biological warfare base at Porton Down was always more reserved. Occasionally they boasted that the huge facilities for producing micro-organisms had been used for public health purposes. During the Asian ‘flu epidemic of 1957, Porton Down produced over 600,000 doses of ‘flu vaccine, a socially valuable exercise which the establishment was keen to publicise. Observers pointed out that an establishment which would produce 600,000 doses of vaccine could equally well produce the same number of doses of biological warfare agent.³⁹

In fact, by the 1960s, Porton Down was concentrating almost exclusively on defensive work. There were a few unfortunate accidents, as when in 1962 Geoffrey Bacon, a well liked and normally efficient Porton microbiologist, became infected with pneumonic plague and died. Bacon had been searching for a vaccine which could be used against plague. But largely it was, as they recognized, a futile quest. Vaccines might be developed, but they could give minimal protection if anyone should choose to mount a germ warfare attack on Britain.

The tests with harmless bacteria during the fifties had shown that if Britain were to be the victim of biological attack, little or nothing would be done to protect the country. A steady wind would blow the germs released from a ship off the British coast across the entire country in ten hours. For even rudimentary protection every member of the population would need to be issued with a gas mask, something the Home Office had already decided was impractical. Even if sufficient funds could be made available to issue gas masks to everyone, there remained another, apparently insuperable, problem. Bacteria live longer in the dark, so any biological attack would be likely to come at night. Even if such an attack could be detected, and even if everyone had a gas mask, how could you warn fifty million people at three in the morning?⁴⁰

But in the United States, the biological warfare work continued unabated. To many military scientists there the very arguments which made the idea of protecting the population impossible made bacteria increasingly attractive weapons for use against an enemy.

At the start of the so-called ‘Camelot’ era of the presidency of John F. Kennedy, a thorough-going review of 150 areas of American defence was ordered. Project 112 arrived in the offices of the Joint Chiefs of Staff in May 1961, requesting an assessment of American preparations for biological and chemical warfare.⁴¹ The Joint Chiefs of Staff asked the Chemical Corps, the very people with the strongest vested interest in ensuring an expansion of the programme, to conduct the review for them. Not surprisingly their report found that American preparations were inadequate, but that with the expenditure of four thousand million dollars, they could be improved. The plea did not fall on deaf ears.

An initial twenty million dollars was immediately set aside for expanding the biological weapons plant in Arkansas. A new testing centre was established.⁴² Money was spent developing new weapons to attack plants. And two new debilitating diseases, Q-fever and tularemia, entered the inventory of American biological weapons. By the time that these weapons were in full production, the United States was treading further and further into the quagmire of Vietnam.

The Vietnam War might have represented the perfect field laboratory for men like General Rothschild to test their theories about seeding clouds with anthrax. But there was by now sufficient evidence of the way in which American and South Vietnamese troops would also be affected to rule it out. Instead, the germ warfare laboratories concentrated their efforts on the development of incapacitating diseases which would bring an enemy down with sickness for days or weeks. For some years the Fort Detrick laboratories had been working on enterotoxins causing food poisoning, on the military theory, as one proponent put it, that ‘a guy shitting away his stomach can’t aim a rifle at you’.⁴³ By 1964, they believed a weapon based on the theory was feasible. But by now, another disabling disease looked a better candidate.

Venezuelan equine encephalomyelitis is a highly infectious disease producing nausea, vomiting, chills, headaches, and muscle and bone pains which may last up to eight days. Clearly an enemy crippled by a disease of this kind would be unable to fight. Arguments were made that this was a ‘humane’ weapon: in taking away the Viet Cong’s will to fight it would actually prevent battles, and so save lives. Hypothetical exercises were carried out in Vietnam with this and similar diseases, but still there was the familiar problem. There was no way of ensuring that only the enemy caught the disease. Reluctantly the idea was put to one side.

And yet the research continued. It seems highly paradoxical that germ weapons projects should have survived the realization that there was little hope of restricting their effects to an enemy army. There could obviously be no excuse of ‘defensive’ research. But the army biologists lived in hope of discovering a disease which would attack only enemy forces, and leave allied soldiers unharmed: it was during the Vietnam war that the concept of an ‘ethnic weapon’ was first mooted. It must have seemed a vain hope, yet, the germ warfare protagonists argued, without biological weapons themselves, the Americans were powerless to deter the use of such devices by an enemy.

The results of the continuing research could be seen in the maps of Dugway Proving Ground in Utah, part of which were marked ‘permanent bio-contaminated area’, after anthrax experiments in the mid-sixties. In the Pacific, more tests were carried out with ‘hot’ agents – the jargon for real biological weapons – on a number of deserted islands. The results of the tests remained classified on the grounds that they revealed weaknesses in American defences. By March 1967 Fort Detrick had developed a bacteriological warhead for the Sergeant missile, capable of delivering disease up to 100 miles behind enemy lines.

The Defense Department had justified the accelerating rush into biological weapons in the early sixties by saying that there was no prospect of any treaty being arrived at which would be acceptable to the United States.⁴⁴ Since any argument to ban biological weapons was unlikely, they argued, the United States was bound to continue with research work.

They were wrong. In 1968 the subject of chemical and biological warfare came up for discussion at the standing Eighteen Nation Disarmament Committee in Geneva. Previous attempts to get agreement on an international treaty to ban the weapons had foundered because of an insistence that both chemical and biological weapons be included in the same treaty. Since gas weapons had already been used in war, been proved effective, and were stockpiled on a large scale, they would be much more difficult to outlaw than germ weapons, which as far as could be satisfactorily proved had never been used in war. The British proposed that the two subjects be separated, and introduced a draft Biological Weapons Convention which would commit all signatory states to renouncing the weapons for all time.

There was heavy initial opposition from the Russians and their Eastern European allies, and little overt enthusiasm from Washington. The British and Canadians, who had shared their germ warfare expertise with the Americans, nevertheless argued to President Nixon that an international treaty was now a real possibility. What was needed, they said, was a gesture of goodwill.

Nixon was already under pressure on the subject of chemical and biological weapons, and facing mounting domestic opposition (see Chapter 10). On 25 November 1969 he issued a statement. ‘Mankind’, he said, ‘already carries in its own hands too many of the seeds of its own destruction.’ The United States was taking a step in the cause of world peace. ‘The United States’, he went on, ‘shall renounce the use of lethal biological agents and weapons, and all other methods of biological warfare.’⁴⁹ It was a brave gesture, which proved the spur for which the British had been hoping.

The laborious negotiations in the Palais des Nations, Geneva, received a considerable boost with Nixon’s announcement. Within two years the Soviet Union had abandoned its public opposition to a germ warfare convention. On 4 April 1972 representatives of the two countries signed an undertaking that they would ‘never in any circumstances develop, produce, stockpile, or otherwise acquire or retain’ any biological weapons. Over eighty other countries followed suit. The Biological Weapons Convention was a triumph, because unlike many other arms control agreements which merely restricted the development and deployment of new weapons, it promised to remove one category of armaments from the world arsenals altogether.

By the time agreement was finally signed, the research which had begun with a small group of biologists pondering their contribution to the war against Hitler had produced a host of diseases capable of spreading sickness throughout the world. In addition to infections which would destroy wheat and rice, anthrax, yellow fever, tularemia, brucellosis, Q fever and Venezuelan equine encephalomyelitis had all been ‘standardized’ for use against man.⁴⁶ Plans had been laid for their use behind enemy lines in the event of another war in Europe.

At Pine Bluff Arsenal in Arkansas the machinery which for twenty years had been mass-producing disease was used to turn the germs into a harmless sludge, which was spread upon the ground as an army public relations officer explained what a good fertilizer it would make. And, on a small, bleak island off the Scottish coast the warning signs were due to be repainted.