v1.1.4 / chapter 3 of 5 / 01 feb 07 / greg goebel / public domain
* Chemical weapons were the first weapon of mass destruction to be invented. After World War I, however, weapons makers realized that nature herself could provide potentially even deadlier "weapons of mass destruction (WMDs)", in the form of pathogens and biotoxins that could be cultured, stockpiled, and used to kill on a massive scale. Japan, Britain, and the US all built up stocks of biological weapons during World War II.
* The use of disease as a weapon is nothing new. Centuries ago, armies would occasionally catapult the bodies of people who had died of plagues into cities under siege in hopes of spreading disease, a tactic that often proved successful. English colonists in the New World on occasion gave blankets and other items that had belonged to people who had died of smallpox to local native tribes, and the results could be devastating since the natives had little resistance to the disease.
These were purely opportunistic schemes. Methodical development of pathogens and potent biological toxins as weapons of mass destruction had to wait until the development of modern medical theory and the discovery of pathogens, in the last part of the 19th century.
Despite the fact that the knowledge to manufacture biological weapons or "bioweapons" was available in the First World War, there is no strong evidence that anyone did, although rumors of biological warfare (BW) were widespread at the time. The possibility of BW was certainly evident, and the Geneva Protocol of 1925 included clauses forbidding it. Development of bioweapons did not actually begin in earnest until the 1930s, with Japan taking the lead. The effort was directed by a single domineering figure, an Imperial Japanese Army officer and medical doctor named Shirou Ishii.
Ishii returned from a European tour in 1932, bringing with him a conviction that BW was the way of the future. Ironically, the fact that the Geneva Protocol had banned BW helped draw his attention to it, since the ban implied that people found such weapons unusually dangerous and frightening.
The Japanese invaded the Chinese province of Manchuria in 1932, and set it up as the Japanese puppet state of "Manchukuo". In 1935, Ishii managed to convince his superiors of the potential usefulness of BW, and so they set him up in a hospital in Harbin, Manchuria, to conduct small-scale experiments with dangerous pathogens. By 1937, Ishii's work had proved promising enough for the Japanese War Ministry to approve the construction of a full-scale BW research and development complex, at a small town named Pingfan, about 65 kilometers (40 miles) south of Harbin.
The Imperial Japanese Army had attacked China proper in that year. The Japanese were able to win almost every battle they fought, but they were completely outnumbered by the Chinese. The Japanese turned to BW as a potential equalizer. It is also possible that they hoped to exterminate Chinese in areas Japan intended to colonize.
The Pingfan Institute was completed in 1939. Ishii, now a general, was in charge of the research organization, which was given the cover designation "Water Purification Unit 731". The Pingfan complex covered over three square kilometers (1.16 square miles) and included an airfield, barracks, and laboratories.
Japanese recruits arriving there found it an odd place. For example, none of the vehicles carried any identifying marks. They quickly found out that it had other strange and much more unpleasant features. One Japanese veteran who was a technician at the Pingfan site recalled there were many doctors and professors there, giving it something of the air of a university medical research facility, but noted that it was in fact the opposite: "Here, they were trying to find ways to kill people."
There was a certain scientific challenge in this effort. The understanding of pathogens and their actions in causing disease and epidemics was crude, and there was, and is, still much to learn. There were also the practical problems of developing bioweapons, such as selecting the appropriate pathogen, determining the lethal dosage, and engineering the right techniques for production, storage, transport, and dispersal. Unit 731 also worked on defensive measures, primarily the large-scale production of vaccines.
Unit 731 studied almost every major known pathogen for its utility as a BW agent or "bioagent". Some of the more significant included:
Mortality is about 50% if the bacteria is ingested by eating tainted meat, though this form of anthrax is very rare. However, when inhaled, it leads to a lung infection that is over 90% lethal, killing in a few days.
The action of inhalation anthrax is dangerously deceptive, since the victim suffers an initial bout of what feels like the flu, which then seems to fade out. In fact, all that has happened is that the anthrax spores have been scavenged up by the body's lymphatic system, where they then proceed to multiply, bringing on a second and murderous bout of the disease. The bacteria actually kill by secreting a deadly toxin that results in toxic shock. The purified toxin itself can be in principle used as a deadly bioagent.
The only good thing about anthrax is that it is not contagious as such, though since a victim's corpse is full of spores, cremation is usually advisable. The lack of contagiousness is actually an advantage when using it for BW. In fact, anthrax would become the lethal bioagent of choice for future BW development programs. Its spores are very hardy and easy to store for long periods of time, and can be conveniently packed into munitions. Anthrax spores are so hardy, in fact, that they will persist in an area over which they have been spread for decades, though they are sensitive to bright sunlight.
Pneumonic plague has a lethality of 95% or more. Although bubonic plague is somewhat less lethal, its spreads more easily and is more useful for BW. However, bubonic plague still isn't all that good a bioagent, since it requires the accumulation, storage, and distribution of live fleas.
Other pathogens investigated included typhus, typhoid, cholera, tetanus, smallpox, and tuberculosis, but these agents proved difficult to "weaponize". The Japanese also experimented with exotic biotoxins, such as blowfish poison. They were traditionally familiar with this toxin, since blowfish is regarded as a delicacy in Japan but has to be prepared by a specially-qualified chef so that it may be eaten without fatal results. Incidentally, as with chemical agents and chemical weapons, a "bioagent" only refers to a pathogen or toxin itself, while a "bioweapon" is a delivery system loaded with bioagents.
* The Japanese had to produce pathogens in quantity for tests and, if they proved worthy, production. Unit 731 researchers devised a scheme using trays of meat and broth as cultures. The trays were kept in incubators and the scum of bacteria produced was skimmed off every few days. The stink of rotten meat was almost overpowering. Eventually, Pingfan was believed to have been capable of producing tonnes of pathogens every month.
Having obtained pathogens, the next step was to determine their effectiveness. There were plenty of Chinese available for use as involuntary test subjects. The Japanese would put up posters warning the Chinese that epidemics of the appropriate diseases had broken out, and then a squad of soldiers would go out and dump pathogens discreetly into the well of a village. Three or four days later, they would return to inspect the ill. The soldiers would anesthetize them, cut them open and take samples, and sew them back up again. "Then we threw the bodies down the well," as a veteran of the program recalled. The soldiers torched the village and left.
The tests were very successful. General Ishii then decided to perform more controlled tests in deep secrecy on Chinese prisoners taken to the compound at Pingfan. Many of these people were simply rounded up off the streets of Harbin to meet quotas set by Unit 731 officers. At least 3,000 were taken there, and few, if any, ever came back. Another cover story for the compound was that it was a lumberyard, and so Unit 731 personnel referred to the prisoners as "maruta (logs)". Prisoners were assigned serial numbers 1 through 200. Once that block had all been killed, the serial number count started over again through the next 200, and so on. Japanese veterans of Unit 731 recollect the place as a kind of hell on Earth, but the Imperial Japanese Army demanded unhesitating obedience. Soldiers were routinely struck by their NCOs, and insubordination of any sort was unthinkable, meriting immediate and severe punishment.
Chinese prisoners were tied to poles out in the open and forced to look into the sky as airplanes flew over and sprayed bacteria on them. The prisoners were carefully observed and their condition recorded with colored drawings as they sickened and died. Others were tied to stakes or panels and arranged around fragmentation bombs containing Clostridium perfringens bacteria. The bomb was detonated, and the test subjects were studied as they developed gas gangrene from their wounds. When test subjects died, their corpses were burned in a crematorium.
* By 1940, Unit 731 had developed a ceramic anthrax bomb and built 4,000 of them. They were also considering ways of delivering bubonic plague. Researchers at Pingfan bred plague-infested rats in quantity and then gathered the fleas from the rats. The fleas could then be distributed as a bioagent vector, using tubular baskets strapped to the bomb pylons of aircraft.
In October 1940, a Japanese aircraft flew low over the city of Ningpo, which was still held by the Nationalist Chinese, and dispersed a spray containing plague-infested fleas. The results were appalling. Roughly 500 people died and the city was panic-stricken. One survivor recalled: "There were so many people and not enough coffins. So two people would share a coffin." It is thought that more attacks may have taken place in China, but records of such activities were destroyed by the Japanese at the end of the war and nobody knows for sure.
The researchers at Unit 731 went on to even more imaginative BW studies. They decided to use Chinese prisoners not merely to test pathogens, but to actually act as production incubators to breed them. The researchers believed that pathogens that managed to overcome the body's defenses were likely more virulent. The prisoners were injected with pathogens. When the victims reached their limit, the prisoners were chloroformed and all the blood was drained from their bodies. When the blood flow from a prisoner slowed down, a soldier would jump on the man's chest to force out the last drops. One Japanese veteran recollected: "They did not leave even one drop of blood in the body!"
With such extensive handling of pathogens there were likely to be accidents, and it is believed that hundreds of Japanese staff of Unit 731 died from the pathogens they handled. Despite this problem, Ishii's BW research empire spread, establishing 18 satellite stations in China and in other locations ranging from Hokkaido to the Dutch East Indies.
The Japanese BW researchers not only investigated pathogens to attack people, they also studied chemical herbicides and pathogens to destroy crops. The most intensively studied plant pathogens were "fungal smuts" and "nematode worms" intended to attack Soviet and North American wheat fields. Smuts in particular were potentially highly effective bioagents. The head of a wheat plant infected by wheat smut turns into a blackened mass of spores that are released into the air to infect other wheat plants downwind. The Japanese developed a production facility that could yield about 90 kilograms (200 pounds) of smuts annually.
* By mid-1942, word of Japanese BW development was leaking out to the Allies, and in July 1942 Winston Churchill placed the issue on the top level of priority for discussion by Allied leadership. It was not completely a new topic to him, since the British had been thinking about BW since 1934. The prime mover was a Whitehall bureaucrat named Sir Maurice Hankey, who, like Shirou Ishii, had been inspired to investigate BW by the fact that the Geneva Protocol tried to ban it.
In the prewar period, British BW efforts were minimal, consisting of a few committees issuing reports and, as war approached, funding for limited defensive measures. When war broke out in 1939, considerations for offensive biowarfare rose in importance, and the British government established a small laboratory at Porton Down, run by a medical researcher named Paul Fildes.
Fildes began to conduct small-scale experiments to evaluate pathogens and biotoxins for use as bioagents, and in late 1941 recommended the production of millions of anthrax-laced linseed cattle cakes that would be dropped by air over Germany. The goal was to destroy German livestock, not kill German civilians, though obviously some civilians would contract anthrax by eating tainted meat. Production of the cattle cakes was approved, and a large stockpile of them was stored at Porton Down until the end of the war, when they were all incinerated.
Biotoxins had a particular appeal for clandestine operations in occupied Europe, setting a precedent for later interest by intelligence services in such agents. Porton Down is known to have produced botulism toxin under the designation "BTX". Some sources claim, though not with much support in the facts, that a BTX-laced grenade was used in 1942 to assassinate SS General Reinhard Heydrich, a senior and highly competent Nazi officer, considered a possible heir to Hitler's throne, who was then the ruler of occupied Czechoslovakia.
The intelligence information leaking out about Japanese BW experiments only increased the priority of Allied efforts to build their own BW capability. In the summer of 1942, the British conducted their first large-scale BW experiment on Gruinard Island, off the coast of Scotland. A film was made of the experiment and remained classified until 1997. Sheep were taken to an open field, secured in wooden frames, and exposed to a bomb that scattered anthrax spores. The sheep started dying three days later. They were examined and then burned. Other tests involved dropping anthrax bombs from a Vickers Wellington bomber.
Safety precautions were slipshod and it is a wonder that there were not calamities among the personnel involved or innocent bystanders. One worker in the program recalled helping a medical researcher pour a thick soup of anthrax agent into a bomb, without use of protective clothing or any other safety measures. Despite attempts to disinfect Gruinard Island, the anthrax spores left there by the experiments kept the island in quarantine for five decades.
The final report on the Gruinard Island experiments suggested that anthrax could be used to render whole cities uninhabitable "for generations". Biological weapons were potentially orders of magnitude more effective than chemical weapons.
* In the meantime, the British had been working with the Canadian government to set up a BW test range at Suffield, in the province of Alberta. The area was empty and isolated, and experiments could be performed with greater safety than any location available in the British Isles.
The entry of America into the war in late 1941 added more momentum to the Allied BW effort. The US had considered BW, and government reports had been written and distributed to detail defensive and offensive measures. With a real war on, the American Chemical Warfare Service, with British assistance, built up BW research facilities, including test stations near Dugway and near Pascagoula, Mississippi; a potential production facility at Vigo, near Terra Haute, Indiana; and the master research and development center at Camp Dietrich, Maryland.
The British work on anthrax, or "N" as it was codenamed, as a bioagent led in 1943 to the design of an "N" bomb suitable for mass production by the Americans. This munition weighed 1.8 kilograms (4 pounds). 106 of these "bomblets" were to be packed into a 225 kilogram (500 pound) cluster-bomb canister and dropped over enemy population centers.
The whole effort was protected by the highest level of secrecy, TOP SECRET:GUARD, which the Americans described jokingly as DESTROY BEFORE READING. An initial pilot batch of 5,000 N bombs was produced at Camp Dietrich in May 1944, and medium-scale production at a rate of about 50,000 bomblets a month followed. The bomblets were turned over to the British, who stockpiled them.
The plant at Vigo, Indiana, was designed for production of 500,000 anthrax bombs per month. The plant was never put into operation, partly because of extreme safety concerns. By the end of the war, it had been converted to antibiotic production, though it could have easily been converted back to bioagent manufacture if the need had arisen.
* The drastic nature of anthrax was not lost on the Americans, and so they searched for a bioagent that could incapacitate instead of kill. They found brucellosis a promising agent. The infectious dose was much smaller than that of anthrax, meaning a single bomber could attack a much larger area with the same weight of bombs, and a city that had been attacked with brucellosis would be safe to enter a week or so after the attack. Brucellosis was, on the other hand, wildly infectious, and many of the people who worked with it in the weapons development program came down with it. However, other than a few days of nasty chills, pains, fever, and headaches, it rarely did much harm. Brucellosis weapons were in an advanced state of development at the end of the war.
The Americans also investigated anti-crop bioagents, including "potato blights" and "wheat rusts"; "sclerotium rot", which can attack soybeans, sugar beets, sweet potatoes, and cotton; and "blast diseases" to attack rice. There is some suspicion that crop bioagents might have been used by the Allies. In the fall of 1944, the German potato crop was infested by a huge plague of Colorado beetles, and in 1945 the Japanese rice crop was badly afflicted by rice blast. However, in the absence of any evidence supporting such suspicions, there is no reason to believe these incidents were due to anything but natural causes.
* The Soviet BW program during World War II remains somewhat mysterious, and considering the fact that many records were destroyed later, will probably always remain so.
Ken Alibek (originally Kanatjan Alibekov), a senior official of the Soviet "Biopreparat" BW organization in the late 1980s and early 1990s, emigrated to the United States in 1992 and provided a history of the Soviet BW program. While Soviet expatriates have been known to tell exaggerated stories for self-serving reasons, Alibek's comments sound entirely plausible.
According to Alibek, the Soviet BW effort began in 1928, three years after the USSR signed the Geneva Procotols. The initial focus was to "weaponize" typhus, with the work supervised by the state security apparatus, the "GPU", which would eventually evolve into the KGB. The effort then expanded, with new facilities built in the network of GPU prison camps. The prime testing ground was at Solovetsky Island, in the Arctic, north of Leningrad in the White Sea.
Prisoners may have been used in tests of bioagents. Certainly there were many casualties among researchers and workers as well, whose lives were made even more miserable during the purges of the 1930s by the influence of Trofim Lysenko, a quack biologist who managed to get Stalin's ear. Those biologists who differed with Lysenko were sent to prison camps or worse, and Lysenko did much to hobble the Soviet BW effort.
When the Soviet Union was invaded by Hitler's forces in the summer of 1941, BW facilities in the west were relocated by train to the east, in the Ural mountains. A train carrying pathogens and other materials was passing though the city of Gorky when the Germans decided to bomb the place, panicking supervisors on the train, who ordered the train to keep on rolling through the city. The town of Kirov became the main BW facility after the move. The Soviets also found a new testing ground, at Rebirth Island in the Aral Sea.
During the summer of 1942, when the Germans were pushing through the USSR towards the Caucasus and Stalingrad, there was an outbreak of tularemia of unprecedented magnitude among both German and Soviet troops. Alibek felt certain the outbreak had been a BW attack that had gone wrong, and "old-timers" in the Biopreparat organization told him stories that reinforced his suspicions.
There was also an outbreak of "Q fever" among German troops on leave in the Crimea in 1943. Alibek never investigated the matter in detail, but believed it might very well have been a BW attack or test. Q fever was originally "Query fever" because nobody could figure out what caused it. The pathogen was eventually identified as Coxiella burnetii, a species of "rickettsiae", a type of very small and primitive bacteria that, like viruses, can only reproduce in living cells. The typhus pathogen is another member of the rickettsiae.
Q fever is a disease of sheep, goats, and cows carried by ticks. Animals can be infected by breathing dried tick feces, and humans in proximity to the animals can be infected as well. It forms hardy spores, with an effective dose as small as one spore, and so makes a fairly good bioagent. Q fever causes a sudden fever, aches, and general ill health, but it is much less dangerous than its relative typhus. Q fever only lasts a few weeks, rarely leads to complications except for pneumonia, and is rarely fatal.
Outbreaks of Q fever were unheard of in the Soviet Union before that time, and it was heavily investigated as a bioagent by Soviet researchers later. However, wars do tend to be accompanied by a breakdown in public health systems and outbreaks of diseases, sometimes unusual ones, so the evidence remains inconclusive.