by Eric Zuesse for The Saker Blog
As Jeffrey A. Lockwood recounted in his 2008 book Six-Legged Soldiers: Using Insects as Weapons of War, the first four nations that pioneered biological warfare were during the 1930s — Hitler’s Germany, Hirohito’s Japan, and Churchill’s England and Canada. However, under U.S. President Franklin Delano Roosevelt in the 1940s, a biowarfare R&D program, “Operation Capricious,” was created in 1943 so secretly that though it operated under William J. “Wild Bill” Donovan, who headed the OSS predecessor to the CIA, it was hidden even from Donovan himself. The way it was hidden is that it was being described to higher-ups as purely defensive, R&D against insect pests that enemy nations might use against America by bombing America with germ-infected insects. It was placed under the direction of George W. Merck, the hereditary President of the pharmaceutical giant, Merck & Co. This newly formed U.S. biological warfare program, that he headed, produced and stockpiled bacillus anthracis (anthrax), clostridium botulinum (botulism), and other deadly bacteria. However, starting under U.S. President Harry S. Truman, the actually aggressive program was finally approved and operationalized by the U.S. military in 1952 against North Korea and parts of China, but it was crude and unsuccessful, like all prior biowarfare efforts had been.
No biological warfare program has ever been strategically successful, because the really effective pathogens, such as viruses or the plague, simply cannot be successfully targeted — they are too contagious — and no weapon that can’t be targeted can be of use either tactically or strategically. However, the United States today has a vast network of biological-warfare laboratories, by far the world’s largest, many of them located in foreign countries.
As Major Leon A. Fox, who was the chief of the Medical Section for the U.S. Army’s Chemical Warfare Service, was the first to point out, in 1932, which then became published in the journal The Military Surgeon, v. 72, #3, in 1933, and republished in the Veterinary Bulletin, v. 28, pages 79-100:
Bacterial warfare is one of the recent scare-heads that are being served by the pseudo-scientists. …
How are these agents to be introduced into the bodies of the enemy to produce casualties? … Certainly at the present time we know of no disease-producing micro-organisms that will respect uniform or insignia. … The use of bubonic plague today against a field force, when the forces are actually in combat, is unthinkable for the simple reason that the epidemic could not be controlled. …
Many are now associating chemical warfare and bacterial warfare, with the result that in the resolution of adjournment, voted by the General Commission of the Disarmament Conference on July 23, 1932, at Geneva, we find chemical, bacteriological, and incendiary warfare grouped for consideration. …
Certainly at the present time, practically insurmountable difficulties prevent the use of biologic agents as effective weapons.
So, although the U.S. Government, ever since at least 1952, has tried to use bacteria and viruses as weapons, the result has always been failure, for two reasons:
1: Such ‘weapons’ didn’t behave as they had been hoped to behave — they’re uncontrollable (just as Dr. Fox had predicted), and no uncontrollable thing can be effectively used as a weapon.
2: Even if they were to have behaved as they had been hoped to, they cannot be effectively targeted (which again is what Fox had predicted): they would have endangered not only the targeted country but the entire world, even if they worked, since all of us are humans, and since biological ‘weapons’ work only if they’re extremely contagious and thus pose an extreme danger to the entire human species.
Consequently: all of that public expenditure (maybe in the trillions of dollars) is sheer waste, in terms of national defense. But it’s even worse than waste, because it poses extreme danger to ANY nation, including to the one that develops the given ‘weapon’.
And Fox was likewise correct that grouping “chemical and biological weapons” together is plain stupid. Perhaps it works as propaganda, but it certainly is false as science, and as military strategy and tactics. This fact, too, is hidden from the public, instead of published to the public.
The U.S. Arms Control Association, which is secretive but was founded by major figures in America’s military-industrial complex and is charitably funded by U.S. billionaires, has squibs on 16 countries as currently having real or alleged “Chemical and Biological Weapons”, and this ‘charitable’ Association groups together those two types of ‘weapons’, so as to hide the obvious fact that ‘biological weapons’ cannot really exist, as a practical matter, since we all are humans (not only a given targeted country are), and therefore those fake ‘weapons’ are certainly not rationally to be discussed in the same category along with chemical weapons, which — like nuclear weapons — can be targeted, and therefore can and do actually exist as weapons, so that “nuclear weapons and chemical weapons” might be rationally discussed together, but “chemical and biological weapons” cannot (since there are no actual ‘biological weapons’). The ONLY reason why “chemical and biological weapons” are discussed together is that this enables the U.S. military contractors, who derive profits from selling to the United States Government, to continue their “socialism-for-the-rich” gravy train, by treating germs and viruses (which are contagious) as if they were merely chemicals (which are not contagious). For example: On 24 January 2008, Barton J. Bernstein’s article in the Journal of Strategic Studies, “America’s biological warfare program in the Second World War” described U.S. President Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s unsuccessful attempt, on 14 July 1943, to find out “Why is it so confidential to destroy insect pests?” And it’s why that Deep State program was headed by George Merck, who “led the War Research Service, which initiated the U.S. biological weapons program with Frank Olson.”
Nonetheless, as Whitney Webb well documented in her 30 January 2020 “Bats, Gene Editing and Bioweapons: Recent DARPA Experiments Raise Concerns Amid Coronavirus Outbreak”, the Pentagon currently has an extensive program of R&D into even just specifically bat-based biological ‘weapons’, and China has cooperated with the Pentagon in that research. Why would China be cooperating with America in order to develop unnaturally deadly — human-created — human pathogens? Whereas America’s funding of this ‘research’ is open, publicly acknowledged (even though the ‘weapons’ that might result from it would be international war-crimes to use), China’s Government claims to have no biological-warfare program. Who, then was funding such useless ‘research’ at the Wuhan lab?
The basic question here, however, is “Why does the public tolerate its biological warfare?” and one possible reason why they tolerate it might be that they are propagandized by the media of the billionaires who benefit from bioweapons R&D — profit from it — and who (like the Arms Control Association, and like the also billionaires-owned-and-
Who profits from biowarfare R&D? Who are the people that have been behind this?
The laboratories, that do it, receive some, but not all, of their funding from the governments (the taxpayers) in all nations that perform this research — mainly the U.S., but also including China, Canada, and perhaps a few others.
Here are the top 100 U.S. corporations that profit from warfare — invading and militarily occupying and subduing foreign countries (since all actual dangers to U.S. national security that haven’t been “false-flag” events such as 9/11, ended when World War II ended, and were produced in order to increase U.S. military expenditures, not actually in order to protect Americans or anyone else). Other than some universities, such as (in 2015) #56 Johns Hopkins, and #82 Johns Hopkins Health Sys Corp., and drugmakers, like #89 GlaxoSmithKline, few of them seem even possibly to be receiving federal money for the development of biological ‘weapons’. However, if some of them are owned or controlled by the same people who own or control Merck or other drug companies that might be profiting from this, then control of the military contractors could be boosting those drug companies’ stock values. And the ownership and control of virtually all major corporations is hidden by many devices, both legal and illegal. What exists in such a situation is secret government, not even possibly a democratic government.
Regarding specifically China: Are some Chinese profiting from this research; and, if so, which ones? And why isn’t the Chinese Government publicly exposing them, legally trying them in entirely public proceedings, and executing them if clear evidence is presented to the public that they had been doing this illegal research for private profit? Because, if the Chinese Government won’t do that, then it’s not really illegal in China.
All the while, the nation that has by far the largest biological-warfare program, the U.S., continues to expand it, instead of bans it — as international law would require, if the U.S. Government even paid attention to international law, which it doesn’t. (This U.S. flouting of international law is endorsed by both of America’s political Parties; it is bipartisan in the U.S.)
If the public will no longer tolerate its funding biological warfare, then when will the massive public demonstrations be organized throughout the world condemning the U.S., China, and other governments, that either participate in this R&D or else tolerate instead of clearly outlawing it — punish everyone in the given nation who participates in it?
Why haven’t these massive public demonstrations, against this R&D, already occurred?
If this won’t happen, then there is no public demand for accountability, and then this purely destructive R&D will continue, and it will continue to be publicly funded, though it benefits only some stockholders and corporate executives, and causes massive global harm — perhaps including the coronavirus-19 pandemic.
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Investigative historian Eric Zuesse is the author, most recently, of They’re Not Even Close: The Democratic vs. Republican Economic Records, 1910-2010, and of CHRIST’S VENTRILOQUISTS: The Event that Created Christianity.
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