Essay
Free Access
Biological weapons and secrecy
#WakeUp
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First published: 01 November 2005
During the twentieth century most major military powers established secret biological warfare programs driven by visions of an extraordinary weapon that could penetrate behind enemy lines and kill civilians. These state efforts were institutionally cloistered from public judgment and subject to few restrictions, in contrast to active debates about chemical and nuclear weapons programs. Throughout the last century, intelligence about biological weapons was misleading or simply lacking, allowing political leaders to freely interpret threats. In this century, intelligence information seems no better and government secrecy remains a liability. The difference now is that the fright value of biological weapons—the anxiety that the mere idea of them generates—is a driving force in US policy.
France in the 1920s was the first nation to embark on an antipersonnel biological program. Its suspicion was that German rearmament would include airborne germ weapons attacks. In the interwar years, the German military did achieve superior air power but, due to Adolf Hitler's aversion to biological weapons, it shunned their development. The French program ended with the German invasion in 1940. In 1924, the Soviet military started a fledgling biological program that was abandoned with the 1937 Stalinist purge of physicians, including those in the military. The dominant programs began in the war years, with the UK and Canada starting theirs in 1940 and the United States joining them in 1942. The US program, the largest in its time, involved dozens of universities and medical centers, as well as joint projects with its allies, and it lasted 25 years.
Another early program was established in 1934 by the Japanese Imperial Army in remote Manchuria. The Japanese were the only military to use concerted biological weapons in war, in attacks on Chinese cities and towns with plague‐infected fleas and other crude means of spreading disease. In the West, Chinese accounts of Japanese biological attack were dismissed as propaganda, even after the war when the US obtained detailed evidence of the Japanese program. In 1947, US Army Intelligence and American military biologists brokered a secret deal with former Japanese program scientists, protecting them from war crimes prosecution in exchange for information. Simultaneous with this agreement, the US Army intensified the secrecy around its own revived Cold War program and protected itself from public review and controversy. The UK, Canada, and France also refit their programs to Cold War politics, speculating with the Americans that biological weapons might rival nuclear ones in their large‐scale impact.
The secrecy surrounding the biological weapons programs was in part based on how quickly a surprise, first‐use advantage could be lost. The right vaccines, antibiotics, sera and other protections could render a germ attack ineffective. Secrecy might also have been a function of the experimental nature of the programs. Many projects failed to demonstrate that biological weapons were competitive with conventional arms. Germ weapons were difficult to target and their results could not be reliably predicted. No state military ever incorporated germ weapons into its battle plans. How then did five major programs and at least three in smaller nations (Iraq, South Africa, and Israel) come into being?
Four factors proved necessary for the secret creation and maintenance of biological weapons programs. First, the biological warfare programs of the last century were initiated when dire threats to national survival centralized government decision making and innovative weapons in general looked advantageous. The French in the 1920s and 1930s rightly feared German rearmament. World War II propelled the UK, Canada, and the US into their biological programs, in “the fog of war.” In Japan, as its government became militarized, the dire threat became construed in economic terms. Japan's survival, politicians argued, depended on aggressively securing the natural resources of China, hence the military take‐over of Manchuria and the ensuing China War. During the Cold War years, the US and then the USSR invested in biological weapons as part of their strategic arsenals for a potentially annihilating conflict.
As a second factor, every program had one or two key microbiologists who successfully advocated the exploitation of microbiology as a way of countering threats to national security. In addition to persuading high officials in government of the military potential of germ weapons, these scientists and physicians drew on their connections at research institutes and medical schools to recruit younger talent to the program.
Third, each state had a substantial military‐industrial complex that gave the innovative program its secret niche. Except in Japan, the major programs were added to existing chemical weapons programs and borrowed expertise and munitions technology from them. Within these complex bureaucracies, the programs were given research and development laboratories, facilities for the production of pathogens on an industrial scale, sites for the outdoor testing of bomb and spray attacks, and the means to train military personnel in the deployment and use of these unusual weapons. In wartime and in garrison states such as Japan and the Soviet Union, the secret biological programs became military fixtures. In peacetime democracies, they endured as long as there were political advocates who still believed in their competitive strategic potential. All the programs, including the Japanese one, incorporated civilian research institutes and personnel into their secret projects.
Finally, every biological weapons program of the last century relied on the “total war” doctrine of the interwar years. This doctrine promulgated large‐scale, behind‐the‐lines air attacks to destroy an adversary's cities and industries. It justified taking civilian lives by what Karl Marx and other theorists described as the “massification” of industrial labor. In World War II, just as total war doctrine justified the Allies’ “carpet” bombing of Europe and Tokyo and led to the 1945 US atomic bomb attacks on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, it also prompted Prime Minister Winston Churchill in 1944 to order 500,000 US‐produced anthrax bombs for the UK to use on Germany, an order left unfilled due to the war's end.
After the war, this same doctrine justified the production of biological weapons, including anthrax bombs, for potential US attacks on Soviet cities. As the US became involved in conflict in Asia and in particular in guerrilla warfare in Vietnam, rehearsals began for indiscriminate germ attacks there. By the late1960s, the US program was testing the dispersal of lethal disease agents by jet planes over hundreds of square miles of terrain. As Congress gradually became aware in the late 1960s, all this activity had escaped oversight.
In November 1969, after reviewing the biological weapons program, President Richard Nixon terminated it on behalf of the United States. This extraordinary gesture was made while the US use of chemicals (tear gas and herbicides) in Vietnam was being sharply criticized and public attention was shifting to the American biological program. Not long after, more than a hundred‐and‐fifty nations signed the 1972 Biological Weapons Convention (BWC), which bans offensive biological programs. Then, in 1975, after a 50 year delay, the US, along with Japan, ratified the1925 Geneva Protocol, which forbids the use of chemical and biological weapons. Unfortunately, at that historic juncture, in direct violation of the Convention, the Soviet Union initiated a massive program that secretly combined the pursuit of biological warfare capability with an intense effort to update its flagging institutes for biological sciences. In 1992, after the demise of the Soviet Union, the new Russia affirmed its compliance with the BWC and the process of opening its former biological facilities to the West began.
Even before President Nixon's 1969 renunciation of biological weapons, the UK and France had decided that nuclear weapons, coupled with advanced conventional arms, were a sufficient deterrence against aggression. Nixon, who was no dove, agreed. He was also convinced that the US should stop pioneering strategic weapons that were inexpensive enough to be acquired by a host of lesser enemies. With the end of the Cold War, as the US and Russia moved toward nuclear and chemical disarmament, that same concern about the diffusion of biological weapons took hold. Revelations in the 1990s about the defunct Iraqi and South African programs pointed to the possibility of other small states seeking a military advantage in biological weapons capability. The Soviets had trained hundreds of experts in biological weapons research. Might they be for hire by developing nations with secret military agendas?
As the Cold War ended, the opportunity was at hand to strengthen the Biological Weapons Convention with an organization, professional staff, and strong compliance measures, such as routine on‐site inspections of declared facilities. The 1993 Chemical Weapons Convention, which bans chemical program activities, already had a base in The Hague and an expert staff to promote compliance and supervise the destruction of US and old Soviet chemical stockpiles. In a world of unstoppable diffusion of biotechnology and chronic political tensions, why not a parallel organization for the BWC? Led by the UK, the process for a Protocol to update the BWC began.
But the opportunity slipped away. Influenced by a Republican congress whose leaders were still focused on the Cold War, the US opted for a civil defense approach to biological weapons and funded 120 of its largest cities to devise “domestic preparedness” plans to counter potential terrorist attacks with radiological, chemical, biological or large‐scale explosives. Biological weapons were soon singled out as a major threat, embodied in the new word “bioterrorism.”
If 9/11 focused the US as never before on foreign terrorism, the 2001 anthrax letter attacks guaranteed that the pharmaceutical defense of the American public against bioterrorism would become a centerpiece of the Bush administration's national security agenda. For the first time since the US offensive biological weapons program, the federal government resolved to engage a broad spectrum of microbiologists in major medical centers in classified research on dozens of select agents for diseases such as anthrax, smallpox, plague, tularemia, and a range of hemorrhagic fevers. This large‐scale venture entails serious risks, for example, from accidents and inexperience that need to be balanced against the value of protection against rare diseases or the long shot of discovering new antivirals or other interventions of wider applicability.
Laboratory‐related risks tend to be ignored by researchers and even by the public. At the CDC in Atlanta, experiments exposing large primates to smallpox aerosols have for several years been carried out in close proximity to the Emory University campus and a residential neighborhood, without any local protest. Except for Massachusetts, no state with a biodefense research site has created oversight legislation to reduce the risks to local populations of accidental release, contagion, or sabotage. Secondary, broad‐based risks—that biodefense deflects support from basic research, that foreign students and scientists are excluded as “suspect persons,” that the US is perceived as secretly pioneering new biological weapons, that far too many select agent experts are being created—could have serious destabilizing repercussions for American science and society.
The most troubling aspect of this heavy emphasis on national security and civil defense is that secrecy around biological weapons issues has grown. The Bush administration rejection of the BWC Protocol in 2001 increased the latitude for military secrecy here and abroad. Secrecy pervades the new Department of Homeland Security and the many federal departments and agencies that support counter‐bioterrorism projects and programs. Worst of all, secrecy has increased in the Department of Health and Human Services and, within it, at the Centers for Disease Control (CDC). This change is in conflict with the accurate, timely, and full information—otherwise known as transparency—that is a mainstay in public health protection, the stated goal of biodefense. Without openness, the public cannot judge risks, make informed protective decisions, or trust its providers’ advice. Without trust from the federal to the local level, even the most advanced pharmaceuticals are useless.
The dangerous impact of secrecy has been recently evident in three striking incidents. One occurred in the aftermath of the 2001 anthrax letters, when the US Postal Service (USPS) and the CDC, knowing the Brentwood postal facility in Washington, DC, was contaminated, waited four days before closing the facility and giving antibiotics to workers. By that time, one worker had already died of inhalational anthrax, another was hours from death, and two more were gravely ill. In another telling incident, for six weeks the government of China denied its 2003 SARS epidemic, causing international alarm and a preventable spread of the disease.
The third event was underreported but no less serious. In November 2002, in the lead‐up to the invasion of Iraq, President George W. Bush authorized a nation‐wide smallpox vaccination campaign, a follow‐through from administration assertions that Saddam Hussein's biological weapons posed an imminent threat of bioterrorism. Rather than being based on credible intelligence, the idea of smallpox‐infected Iraqis invading America came from a Washington think tank's overblown table‐top exercise. After three civilian first responders died and others became ill from the vaccination, the smallpox campaign faltered. By December 2003, with the invasion over and still no biological weapons found in Iraq, the campaign, which had disrupted public health services across the nation, ended far short of its goal.
United States biodefense policies are still evolving. No bioterrorist attacks on American communities have occurred, despite various predictions for more than a decade that they would. With time, American resources might be turned to the pressing problem of protecting populations suddenly beset by a range of dangerous infectious diseases, whether anthrax, plague, AIDS, malaria, SARS or H5N1. The future points to increasing international cooperation, as in the widespread response to the SARS outbreak and the current vigilant tracking of avian influenza, which involves microbiologists at Vektor, a former Soviet biological weapons facility in Siberia.
The major persistent jeopardy remains government secrecy, in the US and overseas, that leaves the public in ignorance and allows narrow political agendas to undermine humane, universal health care goals.
