History of biological warfare
Before the 20th century, the use of biological agents took three major forms:
- Deliberate contamination of food and water with poisonous or contagious material
- Use of biological toxins, animals, or plants (living or dead) in a weapon system
- Use of biologically inoculated fabrics and persons
In the 20th century, sophisticated bacteriological and virological techniques allowed the production of significant stockpiles of weaponized
- Bacterial agents: Anthrax, Brucella, Tularemia, etc.
- Viral agents: Smallpox, Viral hemorrhagic fevers, etc.
- Toxins: Botulinum, Ricin, etc.
Antiquity
The earliest documented incident of the intention to use biological weapons is possibly recorded in Hittite texts of 1500–1200 BC, in which victims of tularemia were driven into enemy lands, causing an epidemic.[1] Although the Assyrians knew of ergot, a parasitic fungus of rye which produces ergotism when ingested, there is no evidence that they poisoned enemy wells with the fungus, as has been claimed.
According to
In a naval battle against
The use of
There are numerous other instances of the use of plant toxins, venoms, and other poisonous substances to create biological weapons in antiquity.[10]
Post-classical ages
The
Biologicals were extensively used in many parts of Africa from the sixteenth century AD, most of the time in the form of poisoned arrows, or powder spread on the war front as well as poisoning of horses and water supply of the enemy forces.[11][12] In Borgu, there were specific mixtures to kill, hypnotize, make the enemy bold, and to act as an antidote against the poison of the enemy as well. The creation of biologicals was reserved for a specific and professional class of medicine-men.[12] In South Sudan, the people of the Koalit Hills kept their country free of Arab invasions by using tsetse flies as a weapon of war.[13] Several accounts can give an idea of the efficiency of the biologicals. For example, Mockley-Ferryman in 1892 commented on the Dahomean invasion of Borgu, stating that "their (Borgawa) poisoned arrows enabled them to hold their own with the forces of Dahomey notwithstanding the latter's muskets."[12] The same scenario happened to Portuguese raiders in Senegambia when they were defeated by Mali's Gambian forces, and to John Hawkins in Sierra Leone where he lost a number of his men to poisoned arrows.[14]
During the
At the siege of Thun-l'Évêque in 1340, during the Hundred Years' War, the attackers catapulted decomposing animals into the besieged area.[18]
In 1422, during the
English Longbowmen usually did not draw their arrows from a quiver; rather, they stuck their arrows into the ground in front of them. This allowed them to nock the arrows faster and the dirt and soil was likely to stick to the arrowheads, thus making the wounds much more likely to become infected. [citation needed]
17th and 18th century
Europe
The last known incident of using plague corpses for biological warfare may have occurred in 1710, when
North America
During Pontiac's Rebellion, in June 1763 a group of Native Americans laid siege to British-held Fort Pitt.[23][24] During a parley in the middle of the siege on June 24, Captain Simeon Ecuyer gave representatives of the besieging Delawares, including Turtleheart, two blankets and a handkerchief enclosed in small metal boxes that had been exposed to smallpox, in an attempt to spread the disease to the besieging Native warriors in order to end the siege.[25] William Trent, the trader turned militia commander who had come up with the plan, sent an invoice to the British colonial authorities in North America indicating that the purpose of giving the blankets was "to Convey the Smallpox to the Indians." The invoice was approved by General Thomas Gage, then serving as Commander-in-Chief, North America.[26] A reported outbreak that began the spring before left as many as one hundred Native Americans dead in Ohio Country from 1763 to 1764. It is not clear whether the smallpox was a result of the Fort Pitt incident or the virus was already present among the Delaware people as outbreaks happened on their own every dozen or so years[27] and the delegates were met again later and seemingly had not contracted smallpox.[28][29][30] Trade and combat also provided ample opportunity for transmission of the disease.[31]
A month later, Colonel
New South Wales
Many Aboriginal Australians have claimed that smallpox outbreaks in Australia were a deliberate result of European colonisation,[34] though this possibility has only been raised by historians from the 1980s onwards, when Noel Butlin suggested "there are some possibilities that... disease could have been used deliberately as an exterminating agent."[35]
In 1997, scholar David Day claimed there "remains considerable circumstantial evidence to suggest that officers other than Phillip, or perhaps convicts or soldiers... deliberately spread smallpox among aborigines",[36] and in 2000, John Lambert argued that "strong circumstantial evidence suggests the smallpox epidemic which ravaged Aborigines in 1789, may have resulted from deliberate infection."[37]
Judy Campbell argued in 2002 that it is highly improbable that the
These claims are controversial as it is argued that any smallpox virus brought to New South Wales probably would have been sterilised by heat and humidity encountered during the voyage of the First Fleet from England and incapable of biological warfare. However, in 2007, Christopher Warren demonstrated that any smallpox which might have been carried onboard the First Fleet may have been still viable upon landing in Australia.[39] Since them, some scholars have argued that smallpox in Australia was deliberately spread by the inhabitants of the British penal colony at Port Jackson in 1789.[40][41]
In 2013, Warren reviewed the issue and argued that smallpox did not spread across Australia before 1824 and showed that there was no smallpox at Macassar that could have caused the outbreak at Sydney. Warren, however, did not address the issue of persons who joined the Macassan fleet from other islands and from parts of Sulawesi other than the port of Macassar. Warren concluded that the British were "the most likely candidates to have released smallpox" near Sydney Cove in 1789. Warren proposed that the British had no choice as they were confronted with dire circumstances when, among other factors, they ran out of ammunition for their muskets; he also used Aboriginal oral tradition and archaeological records from indigenous gravesites to analyse the cause and effect of the spread of smallpox in 1789.[42]
Prior to the publication of Warren's article (2013), a professor of physiology John Carmody argued that the epidemic was an outbreak of chickenpox which took a drastic toll on an Aboriginal population without immunological resistance.[43] With regard to how smallpox might have reached the Sydney region, Carmody said: "There is absolutely no evidence to support any of the theories and some of them are fanciful and far-fetched."[44][45] Warren argued against the chickenpox theory at endnote 3 of Smallpox at Sydney Cove – Who, When, Why?.[46] However, in a 2014 joint paper on historic Aboriginal demography, Carmody and the Australian National University's Boyd Hunter argued that the recorded behavior of the epidemic ruled out smallpox and indicated chickenpox.[47]
20th century
By the turn of the 20th century, advances in
First World War
During the
The Geneva Protocol of 1925 prohibited the use of chemical weapons and biological weapons among signatory states in international armed conflicts, but said nothing about experimentation, production, storage, or transfer; later treaties did cover these aspects. Twentieth-century advances in microbiology enabled the first pure-culture biological agents to be developed by World War II.
Interwar period and WWII
In the interwar period, little research was done in biological warfare in both Britain and the United States at first. In the United Kingdom the preoccupation was mainly in withstanding the anticipated conventional bombing attacks that would be unleashed in the event of war with Germany. As tensions increased, Sir Frederick Banting began lobbying the British government to establish a research program into the research and development of biological weapons to effectively deter the Germans from launching a biological attack. Banting proposed a number of innovative schemes for the dissemination of pathogens, including aerial-spray attacks and germs distributed through the mail system.
With the onset of hostilities, the
When the United States entered the war, mounting British pressure for the creation of a similar research program for an Allied pooling of resources led to the creation of a large industrial complex at
However, the most notorious program of the period was run by the secret
Many of these operations were ineffective due to inefficient delivery systems, using disease-bearing insects rather than dispersing the agent as a bioaerosol cloud.[55]
Ban Shigeo, a technician at the
During the final months of World War II, Japan planned to utilize plague as a biological weapon against U.S. civilians in
When the war ended, the US Army quietly enlisted certain members of Noborito in its efforts against the communist camp in the early years of the Cold War.
Some of the Unit 731 personnel were imprisoned by the Soviets[citation needed], and may have been a potential source of information on Japanese weaponization.
Postwar period
Considerable research into BW was undertaken throughout the Cold War era by the US, UK and USSR, and probably other major nations as well, although it is generally believed that such weapons were never used.
In Britain, the 1950s saw the weaponization of
The United States initiated its weaponization efforts with disease vectors in 1953, focused on Plague-fleas, EEE-mosquitoes, and yellow fever – mosquitoes (OJ-AP).[citation needed] However, US medical scientists in occupied Japan undertook extensive research on insect vectors, with the assistance of former Unit 731 staff, as early as 1946.[65]
The United States Army Chemical Corps then initiated a crash program to weaponize anthrax (N) in the E61 1/2-lb hour-glass bomblet. Though the program was successful in meeting its development goals, the lack of validation on the infectivity of anthrax stalled standardization.[citation needed] The United States Air Force was also unsatisfied with the operational qualities of the M114/US bursting bomblet and labeled it an interim item until the Chemical Corps could deliver a superior weapon.[citation needed]
Around 1950 the Chemical Corps also initiated a program to weaponize tularemia (UL). Shortly after the E61/N failed to make standardization, tularemia was standardized in the 3.4"
In addition to the use of bursting bomblets for creating biological aerosols, the Chemical Corps started investigating aerosol-generating bomblets in the 1950s. The E99 was the first workable design, but was too complex to be manufactured. By the late 1950s the 4.5" E120 spraying spherical bomblet was developed; a B-47 bomber with a SUU-24/A dispenser could infect 50% or more of the population of a 16-square-mile (41 km2) area with tularemia with the E120.[70] The E120 was later superseded by dry-type agents.
Dry-type biologicals resemble
From January 1962, Rocky Mountain Arsenal "grew, purified and biodemilitarized" plant pathogen Wheat Stem Rust (Agent TX), Puccinia graminis, var. tritici, for the Air Force biological anti-crop program. TX-treated grain was grown at the Arsenal from 1962–1968 in Sections 23–26. Unprocessed TX was also transported from Beale AFB for purification, storage, and disposal.[72] Trichothecenes Mycotoxin is a toxin that can be extracted from Wheat Stem Rust and Rice Blast and can kill or incapacitate depending on the concentration used. The "red mold disease" of wheat and barley in Japan is prevalent in the region that faces the Pacific Ocean. Toxic trichothecenes, including nivalenol, deoxynivalenol, and monoace tylnivalenol (fusarenon- X) from Fusarium nivale, can be isolated from moldy grains. In the suburbs of Tokyo, an illness similar to "red mold disease" was described in an outbreak of a food borne disease, as a result of the consumption of Fusarium- infected rice. Ingestion of moldy grains that are contaminated with trichothecenes has been associated with mycotoxicosis.[73]
Although there is no evidence that biological weapons were used by the United States, China and North Korea accused the US of large-scale field testing of BW against them during the Korean War (1950–1953). At the time of the Korean War the United States had only weaponized one agent, brucellosis ("Agent US"), which is caused by Brucella suis. The original weaponized form used the M114 bursting bomblet in M33 cluster bombs. While the specific form of the biological bomb was classified until some years after the Korean War, in the various exhibits of biological weapons that Korea alleged were dropped on their country nothing resembled an M114 bomblet. There were ceramic containers that had some similarity to Japanese weapons used against the Chinese in World War II, developed by Unit 731.[55][74]
Cuba also accused the United States of spreading human and animal disease on their island nation.[75][76]
During the 1948
Biological and Toxin Weapons Convention
In mid-1969, the UK and the Warsaw Pact, separately, introduced proposals to the UN to ban biological weapons, which would lead to the signing of the
Special munitions for the United States Special Forces and the CIA and the Big Five Weapons for the military were destroyed in accordance with Nixon's executive order to end the offensive program. The CIA maintained its collection of biologicals well into 1975 when it became the subject of the senate Church Committee.
The
The
During the closing stages of the
After the 1991 Persian Gulf War, Iraq admitted to the United Nations inspection team to having produced 19,000 liters of concentrated botulinum toxin, of which approximately 10,000 L were loaded into military weapons; the 19,000 liters have never been fully accounted for. This is approximately three times the amount needed to kill the entire current human population by inhalation,[83] although in practice it would be impossible to distribute it so efficiently, and, unless it is protected from oxygen, it deteriorates in storage.[84]
According to the
21st century
On September 18, 2001, and for a few days thereafter, several letters were received by members of the
Suspicions of an ongoing Iraqi biological warfare program were not substantiated in the wake of the March 2003
List of historical biological weapons programs by country
- United States biological weapons program
- United Kingdom and weapons of mass destruction § Biological weapons
- Soviet biological weapons program
- Japanese Unit 731
- Iraqi biological weapons program (see also Iraq and weapons of mass destruction)
- South Africa and weapons of mass destruction § Biological and chemical weapons
- Rhodesia and weapons of mass destruction
See also
References
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Further reading
- Glenn Cross, Dirty War: Rhodesia and Chemical Biological Warfare, 1975–1980, Helion & Company, 2017