Death Factories : A History of Germ
Warfare Source: New York Times January 23, 2000
A history of germ warfare and America's involvement in
it.
* THE BIOLOGY OF DOOM The impure salts that turned Dr. Henry Jekyll into Mr.
Edward Hyde did not prescribe themselves. In Robert Louis Stevenson's
famous story, it is the scientist and not science that is the villain.
''Man is not truly one,'' the doomed Jekyll lamented, ''but truly
two.'' Real-life Dr. Jekylls lurk in the
background of Ed Regis' ''Biology of Doom: The History of America's
Secret Germ Warfare Project.'' The science behind biological warfare
is the evil flip side of the search for vaccines and cures. Military
use of pathogens is as old as human conflict. But it is in the 20th
century that biological warfare became an industry.
For once the Nazis are not primarily to blame. It was
imperial Japan that inspired the modern biological arms race. In 1938,
Japanese scientists began moving into Ping Fan, a walled city 20 miles
south of Harbin in occupied China. Within two years, the Anti-Epidemic
Water Supply and Purification Bureau, or Unit 731, employed 3,000
people at scores of laboratories. At Ping Fan, Japanese scientists
pioneered the mass production of pathogens and worked on delivery
mechanisms. By October 1940, Japanese planes dropped a mixture of
grains and fleas over Chinese towns, causing two major outbreaks of
bubonic plague south of Shanghai.
The British, concerned that whatever Tokyo could do
Berlin could do better, were the first to try to set up a biological
warfare program of their own. In December 1941 they acquired Gruinard
Island in the Scottish highlands and over the next few years dropped
bombs filled with anthrax spores over
the heads of oblivious sheep, who then died as expected. As in many
other areas of modern national defense -- intelligence gathering,
commando operations -- the Americans started behind the British,
learned from them and because of huge national resources ultimately
surpassed them. But it was the cold war,
and fears of Soviet biological weapons, not World War II, that gave
rise to an American biological arsenal. And once again the Japanese
played a significant role. There were rumors that the scientists at
Ping Fan had experimented on human beings, and in 1947 the Soviets
exerted pressure on the United States to put them on trial. Maj. Gen.
Shiro Ishii, whom American intelligence had found living under an
assumed name in Japan, finally
admitted his crimes.
In all, Unit 731 killed about 850 ''patients.'' ''The
human subjects,'' one American study later concluded ''were used in
exactly the same manner as other experimental animals.'' The Japanese
discovered, for instance,
that if you put 10 people in a room infested with 20 plague-bearing
fleas per square meter, 4 would die of plague. Anthrax had a better
mortality rate (80 percent to 90 percent, Ishii said) but the plague
diffused better. The most frightening agent the Japanese tested was
Songo fever, like Ebola, the star of ''The Hot Zone,'' a hemorrhagic
fever.
''The Biology of Doom'' is thought-provoking in spite of
itself. Regis' goal seems to be to disprove Soviet and Chinese claims
that the United States used biological weapons in the Korean War. In
this he succeeds. As this institutional history shows, the United
States acquired an operational
biological weapons capacity only after the end of the Korean War. The
United States Air Force included a biological warfare annex to its
plans for general war as early as 1950; but until 1954, it did not
have the refrigeration capability, let alone enough of any kind of
bug, to perform this feat anywhere. The Army, meanwhile, completed its
first biological production plant only in December 1953. Nor has any
researcher yet found tactical plans for biological warfare in the Far
East in the 1950's. In
fact, Regis says, there is no evidence of any American military use of
biological weapons in the cold war; work to perfect them continued
until late 1969, when President Richard Nixon ordered a halt.
Regis, the author of four previous books, including
''Who Got Einstein's Office?,'' understands the critical difference
between plans and operations. But in focusing on what the United
States did not do in battle, he
misses the larger implications of his story. Shiro Ishii and his
associates received immunity from prosecution in return for giving the
United States Army 15,000 slides of specimens from more than 500 human
cases of diseases caused by biological agents, and in the 1950's and
60's, the government sponsored covert tests, using the apparently
harmless microbes Serratia
marcescens (SM) and Bacillus globigii (BG), to simulate the spread of
deadly anthrax over large populations. In April 1950, two Navy
ships -- without, it seems, the knowledge of Congress -- sprayed the
residents of the Virginia coastal communities of Norfolk, Hampton and
Newport News with BG. Later that year, 800,000 people around San
Francisco Bay were exposed to clouds
of these microbes. Regis found evidence of 200 similar tests all over
the country. In the most bizarre, in June 1966, soldiers in plain
clothes dropped light bulbs filled with BG on New York City subway
tracks, and the trains pulled the cloud of biological agents
throughout the subway system. Then men with suitcase samplers strolled
among unsuspecting New York subway
riders to test the amount of spread.
Arguably, these were defensive operations to determine
the vulnerability of American cities to attack. Regis also describes
how human beings were also used to test offensive agents. Between 1955
and 1969, 2,200 Seventh-day Adventists in the American military
volunteered to be infected with scores
of diseases from equine encephalitis to Rocky Mountain spotted fever.
''The type of voluntary service which is being offered to our boys,''
the Army sponsors wrote, ''offers an excellent opportunity for these
young men to render a service which will be of value not only to
military medicine but to public health generally.''
It is customary to blame governments for these
industries of death. But one also has to wonder about the individual
scientists. A compelling book, for which Regis did the research, would
have examined the morality and motivations of the men behind
biological weapons. Henry Jekyll blamed self-indulgence for the
shipwreck of his life. What prompted these
American scientists to feed the Hydes of their souls?
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Timothy Naftali is director of the Presidential
Recordings Project at the University of Virginia's Miller Center of
Public Affairs. He is working on a history of American
counterespionage during World War II and the cold war
by Timothy Naftali
http://www10.nytimes.com/books/00/01/23/reviews/000123.23naftalt.html
The History of America's Secret Germ Warfare Project.
By Ed Regis - 259 pp.
New York:Henry Holt & Company. $25.