Parachuting Beaver Science Educator

The father of the Japanese biological weapons program was Shiro Ishii.  He started his research in 1930 at the Tokyo Army Medical School.   At its height, the program employed more than 5,000 people, and killed as many as 600 prisoners a year in human experiments in just one of its 26 centers. The Japanese tested at least 25 different disease-causing agents on prisoners and unsuspecting civilians. During the Sino Japanese war, the Japanese army poisoned more than 1,000 water wells in Chinese villages to study cholera and typhus outbreaks.  Japanese planes dropped plague-infested fleas over Chinese cities or distributed them by means of saboteurs in rice fields and along roads.  Some of the epidemics they caused persisted for years and continued to kill more than 30,000 people in 1947. 

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The US Biowarfare research continued into the 1970's.  As US opposition to the Vietnam War grew so did public pressure to end the biowarfare programs in the US.  A growing realization that biological weapons could become the poor man's nuclear bomb, lead President Nixon decided to abandon offensive biological weapons research and to signed the Biological and Toxin Weapons Convention (BTWC) in 1972. This treaty disallowed only the use and research of chemical and biological weapons.   The Soviet Union also signed BTWC but they had already established Biopreparat, a gigantic biowarfare project that, at its height, employed more than 50,000 people in various research and production centers.  This Soviet program produced and stockpiled tons of anthrax bacilli and smallpox virus, some for use in intercontinental ballistic missiles, and engineered multidrug-resistant bacteria, including plague. They worked on hemorrhagic fever viruses, some of the deadliest pathogens that humankind has encountered. When virologist Nikolai Ustinov died after injecting himself with the deadly Marburg virus, his colleagues, with the mad logic and enthusiasm of bioweapon developers, re-isolated the virus from his body and found that it had mutated into a more virulent form than the one that Ustinov had used.  In 1979, the Soviet secret police orchestrated a large cover-up to explain an outbreak of anthrax in Sverdlovsk, now Ekaterinburg, Russia, with poisoned meat from anthrax-contaminated animals sold on the black market. It was eventually revealed to have been due to an accident in a bioweapons factory, where a clogged air filter was removed but not replaced between shifts.  The most striking feature of the Soviet program was that it remained secret for such a long time. With the collapse of the Soviet Union, most of these programs were halted and the research centers abandoned or converted to civilian use.  But the breakup of the Soviet Union was not a smooth process and western security experts fear that some stocks of biological weapons might not have been destroyed and have instead fallen into other hands . According to US intelligence, South Africa, Israel, Iraq and several other countries have developed or still are developing biological weapons.  

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Apart from state-sponsored biowarfare programs, individuals and non-governmental groups have also gained access to potentially dangerous microorganisms, and some have used them. For examples there have been intentional releases of  hepatitis and parasitic infections. The latter occurred when a religious sect tried to poison a whole community by spreading Salmonella in salad bars to interfere with a local election.  The religious sect, which ran a hospital on its grounds, obtained the bacterial strain from a commercial supplier. In another instance, a right-wing laboratory technician tried to get hold of the plague bacterium from the American Tissue Culture Collection, and was only discovered after he complained that the procedure took too long. These examples clearly indicate that organized groups or individuals with sufficient determination can obtain dangerous biological agents.  

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Another religious cult, in Japan, proved both the ease and the difficulties of using biological weapons. In 1995, the Aum Shinrikyo cult used Sarin gas in the Tokyo subway, killing 12 train passengers and injuring more than 5,000.  After the subway attach it was discovered that the sect had also tried, on several occasions, to distribute anthrax within the city with no success.  It was obviously easy for the sect members to produce the anthrax spores, but luckily, hard to disseminate them.  In the US, in 2001, the still unidentified anthrax attackers were more successful.  He/She/They sent contaminated letters that eventually killed five people and, potentially even more seriously, caused an upsurge in the demand for antibiotics.  This ultimately resulted in the over-use of the antibiotics directly contributing to drug resistant bacteria strands evolving. 

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One interesting aspect of biological warfare is the accusations made by the parties involved, either as excuses for their actions or to justify their political  goals. Many of these allegations, although later shown to be wrong, have been exploited either as propaganda or as a pretext for war, as recently seen in the case of Iraq. It is clearly essential to draw the line between fiction and reality, particularly if, on the basis of such evidence, politicians call for a 'pre-emptive' war or allocate billions of dollars to research projects. Examples of such incorrect allegations include a British report before the Second World War that German secret agents were experimenting with bacteria in the Paris and London subways, using harmless species to test their dissemination through the transport system.   Although this claim was never substantiated, it had a role in promoting British research on anthrax in Porton Down and on Gruinard Island. During the Korean War, the Chinese, North Koreans and Soviets accused the USA of deploying biological weapons of various kinds. This is now known to be wartime propaganda, but the secret deal between the USA and Japanese bioweapons researchers did not help to diffuse these allegations.  Later, the USA accused the Vietnamese of dropping fungal toxins on the American Hmong allies in Laos. However, it was found that the yellow rain associated with the reported variety of syndromes was simply bee feces.  As we know from modern American politics, the problem with such allegations is that they develop a life of their own, no matter how unbelievable they are.

 

As history tells us, virtually no nation with the ability to develop weapons of mass destruction has abstained from doing so, and that international treaties are ineffective at keeping countries from engaging in biowarfare research.  Part of the reason for this is that the same knowledge that is needed to develop drugs and vaccines against pathogens has the potential to be abused for the development of biological weapons.  Because of the possibility that legitimate research can be abused some researchers are self censoring there publications.  For example a recent report on anti-crop agents was self-censored before publication.  

 

The current debate about biological weapons is certainly important in raising awareness and increasing our preparedness to counter a potential attack. It could also prevent an overreaction such as that caused in response to the anthrax letters mailed in the USA. However, contrasting the speculative nature of biological attacks with the grim reality of the millions of people who still die each year from preventable infections, we might ask ourselves just how many resources we can afford to allocate in preparation for a hypothetical human-inflicted disaster when we have real ones like small pox, malaria, typhus and COVID.