History Of Biowarfare

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History of Biowarfare

 

 

Medieval Siege

 

In the 14th and 15th centuries, little was known about how germs

cause disease. But according to medieval medical lore, the stench of

rotting bodies was known to transmit infections. So when corpses were

used as ammunition, they were no doubt intended as biological weapons.

 

Three cases are well-documented:

 

1340

Attackers hurled dead horses and other animals by catapult at the

castle of Thun L'Eveque in Hainault, in what is now northern France.

The defenders reported that " the stink and the air were so

abominable...they could not long endure " and negotiated a truce.

 

1346

As Tartars launched a siege of Caffa, a port on the Crimean peninsula

in the Black Sea, they suffered an outbreak of plague. Before

abandoning their attack, they sent the infected bodies of their

comrades over the walls of the city. Fleeing residents carried the

disease to Italy, furthering the second major epidemic of " Black

Death " in Europe.

 

1422

At Karlstein in Bohemia, attacking forces launched the decaying

cadavers of men killed in battle over the castle walls. They also

stockpiled animal manure in the hope of spreading illness. Yet the

defense held fast, and the siege was abandoned after five months.

 

 

Gen. Jeffrey Amherst, in a letter dated 16 July 1763, approved the

plan to spread smallpox to Delaware Indians.

 

 

American Revolution

 

While the first true vaccine for smallpox was not invented until

1796, the practice of deliberately inoculating people with a mild

form of the disease was established decades earlier. The British

military likely employed such deliberate infection to spread smallpox

among forces of the Continental Army.

 

The British routinely inoculated their own troops, exposing soldiers

to the material from smallpox pustules to induce a mild case of

disease and, once they recovered, life-long immunity. But in Boston,

and perhaps also Quebec, the British may have forced smallpox on

civilians. As they fled the besieged cities these civilians, the

British hoped, would carry smallpox to rebel troops.

 

In Boston the mission seems to have failed; the infected civilians

were quarantined and thus kept from Continental soldiers. But in

Quebec, smallpox swept through the Continental Army, helping to

prompt a retreat.

 

Using smallpox as a weapon was not unprecedented for the British

military; Native Americans were the targets of attack earlier in the

century. One infamous and well-documented case occurred in 1763 at

Fort Pitt on the Pennsylvania frontier. British Gen. Jeffery Amherst

ordered that blankets and handkerchiefs be taken from smallpox

patients in the fort's infirmary and given to Delaware Indians at a

peace-making parley.

 

 

 

 

After the war, cavalries were trained to expect attacks with

 

World War I

 

By the time of The Great War, the germ theory of disease was well

established; scientists grasped how microbes such as bacteria and

viruses transmit illness. During the war, German scientists and

military officials applied this knowledge in a widespread campaign of

biological sabotage.

 

Their target was livestock—the horses, mules, sheep, and cattle being

shipped from neutral countries to the Allies. The diseases they

cultivated as weapons were glanders and anthrax, both known to ravage

populations of grazing animals in natural epidemics. By infecting

just a few animals, through needle injection and pouring bacteria

cultures on animal feed, German operatives hoped to spark devastating

epidemics.

 

Secret agents waged this campaign in Romania and the U.S. from 1915-

1916, in Argentina from roughly 1916-1918, and in Spain and Norway

(dates and details are obscure). Despite the claims of some agents,

their overall impact on the war was negligible.

 

The much more apparent horrors of chemical warfare led, in 1925, to

the Geneva Protocol. It prohibits the use of chemical and biological

agents, but not research and development of these agents.

 

The United States signed the Protocol, yet 50 years passed before the

U.S. Senate voted to ratify it. Japan also refused to ratify the

agreement in 1925.

 

 

 

The Japanese army used Chinese prisoners to test bioweapons. (These

particular men may not have been subjects.)

 

 

World War II

 

While Germany dabbled with biological weapons in World War I, the

Japanese military practiced biowarfare on a mass scale in the years

leading up to and throughout World War II. Directed against China,

the onslaught was spearheaded by a notorious division of the Imperial

Army called Unit 731.

 

In occupied Manchuria, starting around 1936, Japanese scientists used

scores of human subjects to test the lethality of various disease

agents, including anthrax, cholera, typhoid, and plague. As many as

10,000 people were killed.

 

In active military campaigns, several hundred thousand people—mostly

Chinese civilians—fell victim. In October 1940, the Japanese dropped

paper bags filled with plague-infested fleas over the cities of

Ningbo and Quzhou in Zhejiang province. Other attacks involved

contaminating wells and distributing poisoned foods. The Japanese

army never succeeded, though, in producing advanced biological

munitions, such as pathogen-laced bombs.

 

As the leaders of Unit 731 saw Japan's defeat on the horizon, they

burned their records, destroyed their facilities, and fled to Tokyo.

Later, in the hands of U.S. forces, they brokered a deal, offering

details of their work in exchange for immunity to war crimes

prosecution.

 

By the end of WWII, the Americans and Soviets were far along on their

own paths in developing biological weapons.

 

 

 

 

Weapons production at Fort Detrick, Maryland, the U.S. Army's base

for biowarfare research.

 

 

Cold War

While ignited by World War II, bioweapons programs in the Soviet

Union and the U.S. reached new heights in the anxious climate of the

Cold War. Both nations explored the use of hundreds of different

bacteria, viruses, and biological toxins. And each program devised

sophisticated ways to disperse these agents in fine-mist aerosols, to

package them in bombs, and to launch them on missiles.

 

In 1969, the U.S. military celebrated the success of a massive field

test in the Pacific. The wargame—involving a fleet of ships, caged

animals, and the release of lethal agents—provided proof of the

impact of bioweapons. Little did the U.S. team know, however, that

Soviet spies were in nearby waters, collecting samples of the agents

tested.

 

At the end of 1969, likely prompted by Vietnam War protests,

President Richard Nixon terminated the offensive biological warfare

program and ordered all stockpiled weapons destroyed. From this point

on, U.S. researchers switched their focus to defensive measures such

as developing " air-sniffing " detectors.

 

In 1972, the U.S. and more than 100 nations sign the Biological and

Toxin Weapons Convention, the world's first treaty banning an entire

class of weapons. The treaty bars possession of deadly biological

agents except for defensive research. Yet no clear mechanisms to

enforce the treaty existed. And just as it signed the treaty, the

Soviet Union fired up its offensive program.

 

 

 

Soviet " Superbugs "

 

In 1979, a rare outbreak of anthrax disease in the city of

Sverdlovsk killed nearly 70 people. The Soviet government publicly

blamed contaminated meat, but U.S. intelligence sources suspected the

outbreak was linked to secret weapons work at a nearby army lab.

 

In 1992, Russia allowed a U.S. team to visit Sverdlovsk. The team's

investigation turned up telltale evidence in the lungs of victims

that many died from inhalation anthrax, likely caused by the

accidental release of aerosolized anthrax spores from the military

base. Given the hundreds of tons of anthrax the Sverdlovsk facility

could produce, the release of just a small amount of spores was

fortunate.

 

News of the immensity of the Soviets' biological weapons program

began to reach the West in 1989, when biologist Vladimir Pasechnik

defected to Britain. The stories he told—of genetically

altered " superplague, " antibiotic-resistant anthrax, and long-range

missiles designed to spread disease—were confirmed by later defectors

like Ken Alibek and Sergei Popov.

 

The Soviet program was spread over dozens of facilities and involved

tens of thousands of specialists. In the late 1980s and 1990s, many

of these scientists became free agents—with dangerous knowledge for

sale.

 

 

 

 

During Operation Desert Storm, the U.S. military feared that Scud

missiles might contain biological agents.

 

 

Iraq's Secret Weapons

 

As the Soviet Union's program began to crumble in the 1990s, and

scientists' salaries dwindled, some bioweapons experts may have been

lured to Iraq. Iraq launched its own bioweapons program around 1985

but initially lacked the expertise to develop sophisticated arms.

 

By the time of the Gulf War cease-fire in 1991, however, Iraq had

weaponized anthrax, botulinum toxin, and aflatoxin and had several

other lethal agents in development. Inspectors from the U.N. Special

Commission (UNSCOM) spent frustrating years chasing down evidence of

the program, which Iraq repeatedly denied existed. The UNSCOM team

found that Iraq's stockpile included Scud missiles loaded to deliver

disease.

 

Iraq is known to have unleashed chemical weapons in the 1980s, both

during the Iran-Iraq war and against rebellious Kurds in northern

Iraq. But there is no evidence that the Iraqi state has ever used its

biological arsenal.

 

What is almost certain, though, is that this arsenal still exists in

2001. In fact, with the aid of former Soviet experts and UNSCOM

inspectors kept at bay, the Iraqi arsenal is likely growing in power.

 

 

 

The Aum Shinrikyo cult claimed tens of thousands of members.

 

The Cults

 

In 1984, followers of the Indian guru Bagwan Shree Rajneesh, living

on a compound in rural Oregon, sprinkled Salmonella on salad bars

throughout their county. It was a trial run for a proposed later

attack. The Rajneeshees' scheme was to sicken local citizens and thus

prevent them from voting in an upcoming election.

 

The trial attack was successful; it triggered more than 750 cases of

food poisoning, 45 of which required hospitalization. The Centers for

Disease Control and Prevention launched an investigation but

concluded that the outbreak was natural. It took a year, and an

independent police investigation, to discover the true source of the

attack.

 

While this first bioterrorist act on American soil went almost

unnoticed, a decade later the work of another cult sparked a flurry

of media coverage and government response.

 

In 1995, the apocalyptic religious sect Aum Shinrikyo released sarin

gas in a Tokyo subway, killing 12 commuters and injuring thousands.

The cult also had enlisted Ph.D. scientists to launch biological

attacks. Between 1993 and 1995, Aum Shinrikyo tried as many as 10

times to spray botulinum toxin and anthrax in downtown Tokyo.

 

Just why the attacks failed is not known, but some experts suspect

the cult did not sufficiently refine the particle size of its agents

and that it was working with an avirulent strain of anthrax.

 

 

 

 

When these letters were opened, the fine-grained anthrax within

them misted into the air.

 

Anthrax Attacks

 

For more than two decades, bioterrorism experts warned that America

may be vulnerable to attack with biological weapons. In the fall of

2001, these warnings took on a new urgency.

 

A week after the terrorist attacks of September 11th, a letter

containing anthrax spores was mailed to Tom Brokaw at NBC News in New

York. Two other letters with nearly identical handwriting, venomous

messages, and lethal spores arrived at the offices of the New York

Post and Senator Tom Daschle in Washington, D.C.

 

By the end of the year, 18 people had been infected with anthrax,

five people had died of the inhaled form of the disease, and hundreds

of millions more were struck by anxiety of the unknown.

 

As New York Times reporter Judith Miller notes in NOVA's " Bioterror, "

the anthrax-laced letters sparked " mass disruption " rather than " mass

destruction. "

 

But the story is continuing to unfold.

 

http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/bioterror/hist_nf.html