Germ warfare

Numerous apocryphal stories of the origin of HIV have circulated since the beginning of the AIDS epidemic HIV was the result of germ warfare research by the CIA HIV was a laboratory accident in recombinant DNA research HIV resulted from sexual relations between humans and monkeys. 

The use of Cipro to treat anthrax infection emanated from research carried out in 1990 at Fort Detrick, Maryland (see later). The army was concerned that Saddam Hussein could introduce germ warfare in the Gulf War in the form of anthrax. Sixty monkeys were infected with a strain of Bacillus anthracis by aerosol and were divided into six groups. One group received a vaccine alone another received the vaccine and antibiotics and three groups were treated for 30 days with one of three different classes of antibiotics—penicillin, doxycycline, or Cipro. A control group received saline injections. 

During World War II, the Japanese dropped fleas infected with plague (Yersinia pestis) on Chinese cities, killing hundreds and possibly thousands. Thousands of documents captured from the Japanese following the war further attest to the Japanese use of anthrax, typhoid, and plague on Manchurian towns and cities. This information proved to be a stimulus for the United States to seriously begin to study the area of germ warfare. 

By the early 1950s the U.S. government had established its own germ warfare laboratory at an army base located at Fort Detrick, Maryland. Over time, the scientists identified approximately 50 different viruses and rickettsiae that were good candidates for germ warfare, a number that was nearly three times the number of suitable bacteria. Viruses were considered to be particularly ideal agents since they were basically unaffected by antibiotics and they could be selected to primarily debilitate, rather than kill, the victim. Incapacitation ties up more resources of the enemy and is more humane. President Eisenhower was briefed at a National Security Council meeting on February 18, 1960, to the effect that controlled incapacitation promised to open up a new dimension of warfare. ... 

America s participation in germ warfare research took an abrupt turn when, on November 25, 1965, President Richard Nixon proclaimed that the U.S. shall renounce the use of lethal biological agents and weapons, and all other methods of biological warfare. The U.S. will confine its biological research to defensive measures. In 1972, the United States, the Soviet Union, and more than 100 nations... 

Cole, L.A.. 1988. Clouds of Secrecy The Army s Germ Warfare Tests over Populated Areas, Bowman and Littlefield, Totowa, NJ. 

In 1942 US President Roosevelt started a biological weapon program, which, at least officially was shut down by Nixon in 1969. We stiU do not know for sure if some (or all) the countries, which signed in 1972 the Treaty to ban germ warfare agents, really did so agents were not specified, controls were non existent, ineffective and questionable (see Iraq s first Gulf war). 

Harris, R. and Paxman, J., A Higher Form of Killing The Secret Story of Gas and Germ Warfare, Chatto Windus, London, 1982. 

On January 2, 1960, the St. Paul Pioneer Press published on its editorial page an article, quoted in part below, which was based on a North American Newspaper Alliance story entitled Small Powers Reported Building Clandestine Germ Warfare Units, released December 11,1959, out of Ottawa. 

K. Minton, Immune evasion. Germ warfare, Nature Reviews Immunology, 3, 2003, 442. 

It is the best, up-to-date account of gas and germ warfare available for the lay reader. —George Bunn, The Washington Post... 

Ever since the first gas attack during the First World War, man has attempted to come to terms with the impulse which led him to develop these weapons. And, largely, he has failed. Despite the efforts of the diplomats and the disarmers gas and germ warfare continues to exert a grim hold on the world s armies. Why this should be so, and why the attempts to rid the world of these weapons have failed, is one of the recurrent themes of this book. 

When the war ended and the Americans began to piece together the scale of the Japanese germ warfare project, Ishii topped the list of scientists they wished to interrogate. It took U.S. Intelligence almost... 

The development of X and its use in Operation Anthropoid was little more than an adventurous interlude in the routine of Fildes s work. The centre of the British germ warfare programme was still anthrax, and how best it could be turned into a weapon of mass-destruction. Tests continued at Porton throughout the spring of 1942, and it was in that summer that Fildes and his team first went up to Gruinard Island in northern Scotland to test the prototype anthrax bomb. 

On the 29th, Churchill — who is said also to have received strong representations from Eisenhower against unleashing gas and germ warfare - acknowledged defeat. 

There seems little doubt that the Soviet Union did conduct extensive research into germ warfare in the late 1930s and early 1940s. It was felt legitimate to conclude that such research was unlikely to have stopped at some arbitrary point after the Second World War. But firm intelligence to suggest the nature of the work was notably lacking. 

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. 

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