Category Archives: Germ Warfare

A protest in New York City demanding the government do more to stop the spread of monkeypox. Credit: Jeenah Moon / Getty Images.

In 1997, the bestselling author of a nonfiction page-turner that included the tale of an Ebola outbreak at a Virginia research center, had a new book out. This time hed written a novela story about a madman who engineers a virus called brainpox before unleashing it on New York City.

By some accounts, the author, Richard Preston, had awkwardly tacked a thriller onto a scaffold of explanatory exposition about bioweapons. His book even had a glossary. One reviewer said The Cobra Event was full of molecule deep characters. Sermons, The New York Times wrote, are for Sundays. For all the critical reception, however, at least one high-profile reader was a fan: Bill Clinton.

At a retreat in Hilton Head, South Carolina, where the then-president was gathering with other high-fliers to ring in 1998, Clinton asked the tech entrepreneur J. Craig Venter a question: Could a terrorists engineer a worse version of the smallpox virus? Yes, Venter said, according to Clintons memoir. The flamboyant businessman recommended Prestons thriller to the president. Clinton was impressed. The [a]cknowledgements included more than 100 scientists, military, and intelligence experts and officials in my own administration, Clinton wrote in My Life. I urged several cabinet members and [US House] Speaker Gingrich to read it.

Clinton and his staff went on to hold a tabletop exercise involving a smallpox attack and to meet about the bioweapons threat. Everything I heard confirmed that we were not prepared for bio-attacks, Clinton wrote. He announced a revival of an idea that had long-since fallen out of favor in the US government: a civilian medical stockpile that would contain antidotes and vaccines that authorities could distribute after an attack with weapons of mass destruction. Congress set aside $51 million in 1998 to make such a stockpile happen. Prestons book may have been fiction, but the events it helped set in motion were not.

More than two decades after Clinton created it, the threats the stockpile was originally designed to address havent really materialized. By 2020, there hadnt been a fatal bioterrorist attack in the United States since a government scientist allegedly sent letters tainted with anthrax to political and media figures in 2001, according to a terrorism tracking database. What there have been plenty of are outbreaks and epidemics of emerging diseases, like SARS, the coronavirus outbreak that began in China in 2002. Despite this historical record, observers widely consider the stockpile to have failed in the first crucial months of the COVID pandemic. Health authorities couldnt get what they needed from a resource loaded with anthrax and smallpox countermeasures but few N95 masks. Earlier this summer, as experts worried that monkeypox was gaining a toehold in the United States, the stockpile again had little to offer. Although it held doses of a vaccine that works safely against both smallpox and monkeypox, the government had far too little of it and instead maintained a glut of a more dangerous, older smallpox jab.

The stockpile has weathered its share of criticism in the past few years, and its managers pledge that it will change, but there are questions about whether the necessary supplies will really be available for the next pandemic.

Empirically most of what the stockpile managers have been spending their funds on is still a bioterrorist attack, Andrew Lakoff, a professor at the University of Southern California who has written about the stockpile, said.

Bioweapons fears. As the Cold War wound down with the dissolution of the Soviet Union, threats other than nuclear annihilation became more salient. In 1992, Boris Yeltsin, the first president of the Russian Federation, acknowledged that the former Soviet Union had maintained a massive germ warfare program. US officials began to fear that out-of-work bioweaponeers were at risk of selling their know-how to rogue states or groups. Adding to these fears in the 1990s were a series of shocking terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center, the Oklahoma City federal building, the Tokyo subway system, and US embassies in Africa.

In 1998, Clinton began to ramp-up of government efforts to confront weapons of mass destruction, in part by re-creating a medical stockpile, an idea the US government had previously employed to deal with the aftermath of a nuclear attack. The threat of bioweapons, he told an interviewer, kept him awake at night, and from its inception, the stockpile was geared toward addressing such an attack.

Following Clintons lead, George W. Bush accelerated spending on biodefense priorities. In 2001, letters tainted with anthrax spores were mailed to senators and media figures, a bioattack that killed five and sickened 17 others. The so-called Amerithrax attacks raised the level of official anxiety over bioterrorism, and in fiscal year 2005, the Bush administration requested $7.6 billion for civilian biodefense, 18 times more than was spent in 2001.

Clinton once said he hoped that biological and chemical weapons would be the dog that didnt bark. But preparation was necessary, he argued. In the decade-and-a-half after the anthrax letters, the public health threats that the country faced did not involve bioweapons, but natural disease outbreaks: SARS, highly pathogenic avian influenza in 2005, and swine flu in 2009, to name a few. Another dog, as it turned out, was barking, but the officials in charge of the stockpile never seemed to listen, at least for more than a moment.

An effort to align the countrys biodefense efforts to focus on natural threats as well as deliberate attacks never fully trickled down to the stockpile. Masks were put in after the avian flu scare in 2005, but the government distributed 85 million N95s during the H1N1 pandemic in 2009 and didnt replenish them in time for COVID.

The stockpile benefited from the focus on bioterrorism, with the government funding it to the tune of about $500 million per year beginning in 2004, much of that dedicated to bioweapons countermeasures. Between 2010 and 2018, The New York Times found, 40 percent of the stockpile budget was spent on anthrax vaccine alone.

The government continued to splurge on these countermeasures even during the Obama administration, which watchers viewed as representing a shift in thinking toward the idea of biosecurity, a mindset that meant preparing for both naturally occurring disease outbreaks as well as deliberate attacks. Then, under the Trump administration, the tendency to emphasize bioterror over emerging diseases grew even stronger. The head of the stockpile, a bioweapons expert, had a reputation for being most concerned with the threat of deliberate attacks.

Robert Kadlec made buying bioweapons countermeasures a priority over preparing for a natural pandemic, according to a Washington Post investigation about his ties to biodefense contractors. In his role as assistant secretary of preparedness and response for Trump, Kadlec cut an Obama-era imitative to manufacture N95 masks, for instance, while instead agreeing to pay billions for smallpox vaccines, even though smallpox was declared eradicated as a naturally occurring disease in 1980.

The bio preparedness world tended to be focused on bioterrorism, Lakoff said. Even though you can certainly make the case, and many public health people and scientists made the case, that a much more serious threat was coming from zoonotic disease emergence than from some possible terrorist group that had gotten hold of anthrax.

COVID and monkeypox. When the COVID pandemic began, there were 35 million N95 masks in the stockpilea seemingly large amount that was entirely insufficient in the face of a national public health emergency. Supply chains shut down, and states, local governments, and hospitals desperately triedand in the pandemics early months, often failedto source these goods on their own. The stockpile had been set up to provide what the market couldntthere arent many buyers, or for that matter, suppliers, of the bioweapons antidotes the stockpile specializes inbut during the early days of the pandemic, the private market ground to a halt, and the stockpile was of little help. Media reports and expert analyses about the shortcomings were abundant.

We were always kind of talking about terrorism type events. And when youre thinking about a terrorism type event, youre probably not thinking a national event, Dan Gerstein, a former official in the Department of Homeland Security and a disaster response scholar, said. One of the things to happen is that, right away, your stockpile isnt scaled to meet a national event; its scaled to meet maybe a series of localized events.

When monkeypox began spreading rapidly in countries outside of Africa this spring, the stockpile did have something to offer. Although smallpox, a deadly cousin of monkeypox, had been eradicated by the time Clinton created the stockpile, officials still feared its potential as a bioweapon. The Soviet Unions massive bioweapons program, after all, had included smallpox as a major component. The disease even gets specific mention in the legislation authorizing the stockpile. But a smallpox attack has yet to happen. Seems unlikely, at this point, Lakoff said. Interestingly, and totally strangely, and contingently, we have all the smallpox vaccine, and it sort of works for monkeypox. Eighty-five percent efficacy.

Most of the governments vaccine, however, is of an older variety. ACAM2000, which contains live replicating vaccina, a mild relative of the smallpox virus, isnt suitable for people with HIV or other immune-system problems because it can cause infections, which can also spread to others. Since the September 11 attacks, the government has stockpiled more than 100 million doses of ACAM2000. To compensate for this, authorities also funneled hundreds of millions of dollars into a newer vaccine now called Jynneos.

At one point, the government had some 20 million doses of Jynneos, which doesnt contain replicating virus, making it much safer for immunocompromised patients. But when the monkeypox outbreak began in the United States, the government had fewer than 3,000 Jynneos vaccine doses on hand, according toThe New York Times. It had let millions of doses expire as officials waited for a new freeze-dried version of the product.

Few officials seemed to feel a sense of urgency as those Jynneos doses expired. Monkeypox, afterall, wasnt a priority threat for the stockpile, smallpox was. In fairness, Im not sure anybody in their right mind would have thought we needed more smallpox vaccine, Nicole Lurie, who directed the stockpile under former President Barack Obama, told the newspaper.

The government has since acquired more Jynneos vaccine, but shortfalls continued throughout the summer. Many experts began to fear the country had lost its chance to contain monkeypox and were allowing it to become yet another endemic virus that sickens large numbers of people and strains the health care system.

Can the stockpile change? Officials say the future medical stockpile will be much more suited to dealing with a pandemic than the one on hand in early 2020. A Biden administration vision statement on the public health supply chain calls for a larger, broader, and smarter Strategic National Stockpile so that the US is prepared for intentional, natural, and emerging pandemic threats. Historically, the document says, the stockpile, geared toward weapons threats, has been underfunded for pandemic response and needs clear, long-term, stockpiling goals for pandemic preparedness aligned with annual appropriations to successfully prepare for the next pandemic.

Whether the stockpile will be prepared for another pandemic like COVID, or monkeypox, remains to be seen. The government is still on the hook for big orders of bioterror antidotes going forward. In 2019, Emergent Biosolutions, a contractor with ties to Kadlec, the Trump-era stockpile chief, won a $2 billion contract for 10 years to supplyits old smallpox vaccine, the kind likely too risky for use against monkeypox. Two years later, under the Biden administration, the company won a $400 million contract modification to supply anthrax vaccine until 2023.

Similarly, there are signs that the country is losing some of the gains it made in bolstering domestic manufacturing of pandemic supplies, supplies which could feed the stockpile. US mask makers, propped up when foreign supplies dwindled, have, once again, been shutting down their operations. Health care providers have gone right back to the Chinese masks, because theres so much less expensive than the American-produced domestic masks, Rob Handfield, a supply chain expert at North Carolina State University, said, We didnt learn anything from that situation.

After World War II, the government began storing penicillin doses, blood transfusion kits, and radiation monitors, mainly in the event of a nuclear war. But as the Cold War dragged on, and its weapons became ever more powerful, the prospect of surviving a thermonuclear exchange began to seem unlikely. After letting supplies decay for years, the government shuttered the stockpile in 1974. After all, what would be the point, Americans figured, of a stockpile in a city hit by a Tsar Bombathe Soviet weapon more than 3,000 times as powerful as the bomb dropped on Hiroshima?

The federal governments task today is to make sure that when another pandemic crops up, when transit and trade are shut down and the whole world is scrambling for medical supplies, that the stockpile has what people will likely need. Officials have talked and written about doing better, in congressional hearings, strategy papers, and even obscure intra-governmental budget communiques. A document meant for congressional funders refers to the challenges at the beginning of the COVID-19 response, and modernization efforts that will ensure the [stockpile has the] breadth and depth to meet any future pandemic or public health emergency. Another pandemic may put these pledges to the test in the coming years. We may soon find out whether officials have turned lessons learned into actionwhether their pledges reflect genuine change, or whether, in fact, theyre just pleasant stories.

The rest is here:

The Strategic National Stockpile failed during COVID and monkeypox. Will it come through next time? - Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists

Picture of bacterial bombs modified from U.S. psychological warfare leaflet bombs, from the September 1952 Report of International Scientific Commission for the Investigation of the Facts Concerning Bacterial Warfare in Korea and China, pg. 357 (For history of this report, click here.)

The General was irritated. It was mid-January 1952, and from accounts subsequently released by China, North Korea, and international investigators, a campaign of aerial bombardment with biological weapons (BW) was taking place over both China and North Korea.

The germ weapons attacks allegedly were aimed at both military personnel and civilians, and included the dissemination of plant diseases. Now, suddenly, the bureaucrats in the Pentagon were turning off the secret money spigot for some of the most classified projects of the war!

What happened?

This essay is the first historical account of the secret funding used for the research into and production of chemical and biological weapons during the Korean War. It is based largely on declassified documents available in the U.S. National Archives, many of which are available at the Weapons of Mass Destruction collection at brillonline.com.

Besides clandestine forms of funding their secret weapons, this article will also look at other ways in which the BW program was kept secret, including the use of unwritten orders, the false labeling of weapons during shipment, and extraordinary security procedures taken during the movement of such materials.

The Korean War-era BW allegations have remained controversial for decades. A few years ago, this author postedonline a few dozen declassified CIA communications intelligence (COMINT) reports documenting the fact that various Communist military units were indeed reporting, in encrypted dispatches with authorities and other military units, U.S. attacks by biological weapons in the early months of 1952.

Units from Chinas Peoples Volunteer Army and the DPRK Korean Peoples Army continued making such internal reports at least through the end of the year, and existing evidence argues these reports continued until nearly the armistice agreement in July 1953.

Despite such clear evidence of BW attack by U.S. forces, Western historians and commentators have ignored the CIA COMINT reports, relying on dubious documentation from experts. At the same time, historians have been unable to ignore the fact that the U.S. military, with assistance from the CIA, vastly accelerated its BW research program during the Korean War. Even as hundreds of anti-crop biological bombs were forward positioned in England and North Africa against the USSR as early as 1951 (as will be described below), Western scholars today insist that the U.S. did not implement actual offensive BW operations during this period.

In December 1958, as part of the sedition trial of John and Sylvia Powell, who reported on U.S. use of germ warfare in China and Korea, Ft. Detrick official John L. Schwab, stated under oath in an affidavit to the federal court that from the period 1 January 1949 through 27 July 1953, the U.S. Army had a capability to wage both chemical and biological warfare, offensively and defensively. Schwab had been at one point Chief of Ft. Detricks Special Operations Division, which worked closely with CIA on concocting BW and chemical weapons for use in sabotage and assassination operations.

View of the main entrance to Fort Detrick in 1956, west of current main gate on West 7th Street. Prior to 1956, the site was known as Camp Detrick (Source: Ch. 3, Cutting Edge: The History of Ft. Detrick, Public Domain)

Schwab then added that during the aforesaid period, the biological warfare capability was based upon resources available and retrained only within the continental limits of the United States.

As we shall see, biological munitions were indeed sent overseas as early as 1951. Declassified documents from the Department of Defense show that Schwab apparently committed perjury on this point.

Screenshot from the Pentagons 15 July 1952 Weapons System Evaluation Group report, An Evaluation of Offensive Biological Warfare Weapons Systems Employing Manned Aircraft, Enclosure E: Characteristics of Anti-crop Agents, Munitions, and Weapons Systems, p. E-59 The two overseas installations were in England and Libya, as discussed elsewhere in this article. ZI is the Interior Zone of the U.S., aka the continental United States.

In any case, if there were any covert BW campaign one that operated on a strict need-to-know basis we would expect its funding would also be highly classified, and directions regarding its operations deliberately muddled or unrecorded. That is exactly what we do find, as attempts were made to keep such evidence as secret as possible.

Verbal instructions only

A declassified Summary History of the U.S. Chemical Corps, dated 30 October 1951, and covering the period 25 June 1950 through 8 September 1951, revealed that under the pressures of intense warfare and U.S./UN military setbacks on the Korean peninsula, the Chemical Corps gave a terrific push to the development and creation of new biological and chemical agents. The relevant secret orders were delivered orally. There was no mistaking the urgency behind these orders.

Screenshot from pg. 11, Summary History of the U.S. Chemical Corps, 25 June 1950 through 8 September 1951

According to this previously top secret internal history, the Chief Chemical Officer of the Chemical Corps at the time, Major General Anthony C. McAuliffe, issued verbal instructions that, regardless of previous plans, both chemical weapons (CW) and a BW interim weapon were to be rushed to completion.

The use of verbal instuctions implied that aspects of this program were too secret or sensitive to be written down. The operations of portions of the BW program were covert, subject to deniability by the President and other top U.S. officials. Indeed, President Truman always maintained that he never ordered their use, or a change from a supposed policy of using such weapons in retaliation only.

The use of verbal orders to maintain secrecy is hardly unknown. According to OSS documents dating from the close of World War II, verbal instructions were used to authorize field commanders to use anti-crop biological weapons. Turning to a different era, the Vietnam War, Congressional investigations documented that the orders and instructions for the U.S. Air Force to secretly bomb Cambodia were delivered orally.

Similarly, Canadian scholars Stephen Endicott and Edward Hagerman documented in their 1998 book, The U.S. and Biological Warfare (University of Indiana Press, p. 11), that in 1949, preparations for ready implementation of biological warfare plans were in the hands of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, bypassing the National Security Council. These plans were so secret that they were presented orally to Secretary of Defense James V. Forrestal and Secretary of State George Marshall. When such plans were discussed again in 1952, it was decided that only the secretary of defense and not the secretary of state would be notified. (1)

Whatever the level of secrecy involved, war plans costs money. Secret operations must leave some kind of trail. Newbie journalists are advised in their investigations to follow the money. And so we shall.

So lets return to our irritated general. He was Major General Egbert G. Bullene, who left his post as head of Edgewood Arsenal to succeed McAuliffe as Chief Chemical Officer of the Chemical Corps in mid-1951. In January 1952, he and the Chemical Corps were in the very sensitive first operational stages of implementing their stop-gap, interim biological warfare plans against North Korea and China.

The plans utilized a combination of BW weapons, many apparently based upon designs from Japans old biowar Unit 731, which heavily relied on traditional forms of sabotage, as well as the unique use of insect vectors to deliver bacterial agents such as bubonic plague. Other BW munitions designed by Ft. Detrick and/or the U.S. Air Force, such as experimental use of aerosol dissemination of pathogens, may also have been in the mix. But suddenly the spigot of secret funding had been cut off! (2)

Normal military channels were by-passed

17 January 1952 secret memorandum (click to download) from Gen. Bullene to Secretary of the Army Frank Pace, Jr., source Brill Online/National Archives

In a 17 January 1952 secret memorandum from Gen. Bullene to Secretary of the Army Frank Pace, Jr., the Chemical Corps chief complained about the sudden lower priority assigned by the Joint Chiefs of Staff to development of both Sarin nerve gas (codename GB) and to biological weaponry. The unexpected reduction in funding priority was retarding development of the Chemical Corps new agent production facilities for GB and BW, codenamed Projects Gibbet and Noodle, respectively.

Priority and urgency must go hand in hand, the general said.

You will recall more than a year ago, Bullene wrote to Pace (via Michael E. Kalette, special assistant for Construction at the Munitions Board, working in the office of the Undersecretary of Army for Research and Materiel), a directive was issued to the Chief Chemical Officer to initiate design and construction of certain highly classified projects in the field of GB and BW.

Bullene continued:

These projects were initiated with vigorous action under a scope of highest priority and unusual administrative procedures. Normal military channels were by-passed in the interests of urgency and for other peculiar reasons known to the Secretarys office.

Did the other peculiar reasons too secret to be detailed in a merely secret memorandum concern the use of interim Unit 731-style BW projects, which were utilized until the Chemical Corps more mainstream projects, such as the anti-personnel Brucella suis and anthrax bombs were ready for full-scale use?

The September 1952 report of the International Scientific Commission, headed by respected British scientist Joseph Needham documented the kinds of Unit 731 BW attacks that allegedly occurred throughout the first nine months of 1952. Looking at the use of insect vector attacks and other types of infected materials, such as chicken feathers, UK scientist Joseph Needham, and other scientists investigating the BW allegations in summer of 1952, wondered whether the American Far Eastern Command was engaged in making use of methods essentially Japanese questions which could hardly have been absent from the minds of members of the Commission (pg. 12).

A sketch of an Uji Bomb, an improved porcelain experimental bomb for bacterial liquid drawn from sketch submitted by Lt. Gen. Shiro Ishii, was included, along with other Japanese bomb designs, in Chemical Corps officer Lt. Col. Arvo Thompsons May 1946 report to Ft. Detrick on Japanese BW activities

Needham and company could hardly have known that Fort Detrick already had sketches of biological bombs drawn from information personally obtained from Unit 731s Shiro Ishii.

Nor could the ISC have known that U.S. Army Chemical Corps researchers believed at the time that Insects and other arthropods act as vectors and reservoirs of some of the most promising and highest priority BW agents affecting man and animals. The 1953 fiscal year annual report for the Chemical Corps Biological Laboratoriesfurther enthused, Arthropods provide a tactical concept of BW agent dissemination, as they can efficiently carry agents to specific targets. (See pg. 77 of the report, which while dated 1 July 1953, covered the period from 1 July 1952 to 30 June 1953.)

Imperial Japans Unit 731 and the U.S. Armys Chemical Corps Intelligence Branch

The October 1951 Summary History of the Chemical Corps, quoted earlier above, described in its section on Intelligence how the activities of its Intelligence Branch which operated under the Plans, Training, and Intelligence division of the Chemical Corps were greatly increased with the advent of the conflict in Korea. The branch received a vast amount of military and technical intelligence from the Far East. Consequently it was confronted with the job of reorganizing to meet this influx and of acquiring the qualified personnel to fill new positions. At the present time these problems are not entirely solved, and temporary expedients have been adopted to meet the emergency. [pg. 32, bold emphases added.]

Unfortunately, we still dont know too much about how the Chemical Corps incorporated this vast amount of military and technical intelligence, which can only have been the data and studies provided by Japans Unit 731 personnelunder the terms of an amnesty for war crimes secretly granted by the U.S. Most likely much of that information was destroyed, or still remains carefully guarded in the vaults where especially sensitive information remains sealed.

A portion of these materials ended up in the U.S. National Archives. In 1960, the U.S. government declassified three key documents from the Unit 731 materials. Titled The Report of A (anthrax), The Report of G (glanders), and The Report of Q (bubonic plague), the reports are hundreds of pages long. They are available to the public at the U.S. Library of Congress.

The 744-page Unit 731-Ft. Detrick report on Q (bubonic plague) rested for some years in the Technical Library at the Chemical Corps Dugway Proving Ground.

Much of what we do know about the postwar activities of Unit 731 and the work at Ft. Detrick during the Korean War comes from the investigations and reports of Chinese and North Korean military and scientific personnel, the limited release of certain COMINT documents by the CIA, a handful of contemporary newspaper reports, and the work of investigators from the International Association of Democratic Jurists and the International Scientific Commission.

Of much significance in this regard is a 26 June 1947 memorandum to the State, War, Navy Coordinating Committee for the Far East from two Defense Department officials, Edward Wetter with the Research and Development Board (RDB) and Dr. Henry I. Stubblefield from Ft. Detrick.

The Wetter-Stubblefield memo explained that the U.S. agreement not to prosecute Ishii or other Unit 731 criminals was based on the promise that information given by them on the Japanese BW program will be retained in intelligence channels.

Evidently the materials became the property initially of the Intelligence Branch of the Chemical Corps, and probably the CIA, and were held closely on a need to know basis.

As an important side note, as I pointed out in an earlier article, by Spring 1950, Wetter was serving as Deputy Executive Director of RDBs Biological Warfare Committee. He was the contact person for all the panels within the Committee that were working on biological warfare, including panels on Man, Animals, Crops, and Intelligence. The Army representative to the RDBs BW Committee Panel on Crops, i.e., for anti-crop biological warfare, was Wetters old colleague, Dr. Henry I. Stubblefield.

Code Name SKELP

Meanwhile, in January 1952, Gen. Bullene, in charge at the Chemical Corps, had his own fish to fry. In his memo to Pace, he described the special procurement procedures unique to both the Sarin and BW crash development programs:

An expediting group for priority procurement was established within the Munitions Board, and direct access to the National Production Authority was exercised. These projects were pursued under a code name of SKELP and MPA directives issued for these projects were known as SKELP directives. These measures insured special and positive actions regarding procurement.

Hence, according to Bullenes account, it appears that the funds for building the secret productions facilities to produce Sarin gas and agents of biological warfare were hidden in the guise of special Army military personnel directives (MPAs).

But now Bullene was flustered. Even though the scope of priority and procedure for procurement had continued without hesitation or question for over a year, suddenly in December 1951, the Munitions Board was throwing bureaucratic obstacles in the way of the Chemical Corps top secret projects.

Bullene described how that December the Munitions Board suddenly was requiring a statement of priority from the Office of the Under Secretary of the Army before proceeding with the special procurement procedures, since the impact of other priority programs was being felt and the situation needed clarification. When the Munitions Board did not receive such a statement of priority or urgency, it discontinued the SKELP priority procedures. For Bullene, the situation could not have come at a more critical time.

What other priority programs could suddenly have arisen to necessitate some kind of clarification at the Munitions Board (or in the office of the Under Secretary of the Army for Research and Materiel)? And why was December 1951-January 1952 such a critical time? Among other things, this was the period of the onset of large-scale bombing raids that allegedly used biological weapons. But there were other projects as well.

The subject line for Bullenes memo specified that two classified programs were at stake here: the construction of a plant to develop Sarin gas (Project Gibbet) and one to produce biological weapons material, in particular, anti-crop agents (Project Noodle).

Author and researcher Nicholson Baker wrote about Project Noodle in his recent book, Baseless: My Search for Secrets in the Ruins of the Freedom of Information Act (page 112):

A factory for vegetative agents, code-named NOODLE, was being built in Pine Bluff Arsenal in Arkansas, according to a Department of Defense progress report prepared in December 1951 by Earl Stevenson of Arthur D. Little and CIA chemist Willis Gibbons. The anti-crop program is aimed at the bread basket of the Soviet Union, the report said. Unfilled bombs for these agents have been produced and delivered to overseas bases. This year, increasingly significant quantities of anti-wheat and anti-rye agents have been harvested.

According to Baker, the Gibbet (or GIBBETT) Sarin plant was built in Muscle Shoals, Alabama. The Noodle plant to produce vegetative agents, such as wheat stem rust, was part of an anti-crop program of biological warfare whose main target was the Soviet Union.

A little over a month after Bullene sent his complaint to the Department of the Army, the Joint Chiefs of Staff prepared a draft memorandum to the Chairman of the Munitions Board. Dated 25 February 1952, the draft memo, Priority for Chemical and Biological Warfare Facilities, proposed that both Projects Noodle and Gibbet be transferred to the urgent S category for funding purposes. This policy had the backing of the Armys Chief of Staff, who noted that previously, both Noodle and Gibbet were given the highest authority under the name of SKELP. (According to a 2012 Department of Defense history on DoD acquisition, [pg. 108], S category represented the highest priority of military urgency for munitions production, reserved for programs to be selected by the Joint Chiefs of Staff.)

The February 1952 JCS memo was the only other mention of SKELP directives that I have ever found in any of the extant documentation declassified to date.

Somebodys pet enthusiasm

Screenshot, from pg. 4, 29 October 1951 memo to Air Force General Howard Bunker from William A. M. Burden, Source: Brillonline/National Archives

A final, suggestive explanation as to why SKELP funding of BW programs was suddenly curtailed in late 1951 appears in a 29 October 1951 memo to Air Force General Howard Bunker from William A. M. Burden, special assistant for research and development to Secretary of the Air Force Thomas Finletter, and also an heir to the Vanderbilt fortune, (N. Baker, Baseless, p. 173).

Burden, who had conducted his own brief review of the present BW program, visiting Camp Detrick (later Ft. Detrick) and Edgewood Arsenal, while also conferring with the BW Committee at the Pentagons Research and Development Board (RDB), was critical of the program on a number of points. His criticisms were aimed at creating a robust BW capability in the least amount of time.

Burden pointed out that some unnamed technical consultants at the RDB BW Committee were critical about the selection of BW agents then under development. Burden didnt say which agents these might be, but indicated the RDB consultants claimed the choice of BW agents had been made because a) they were easy to produce, or b) or they were somebodys pet enthusiasm, rather than because they were the most effective agent against the type of targets on which they would actually be used.

Could the easy to produce agents, the product of somebodys pet enthusiasm have been a reference to the mass of infected feathers, spiders, flies, fleas and voles that in late 1951 were being planned for BW drops on North Korean and Chinese troops and villages? Whether that turns out to be the case or not, we can see that even at high organizational levels of the BW effort there was conflict over which programs and munitions were best to pursue.

Project STEELYARD and the Transport of BW Agents Overseas

The anti-crop program aimed at the Soviets was code-named STEELYARD. By December 1951, 800 biological cluster bombs were positioned outside the continental United States, meant for use against the Russians. Four hundred had been sent to RAF Lakenheath, England, and the other 400 were positioned at Wheelus Air Force Base near Tripoli, Libya. Baker noted (p. 113) that Wheelus was temporary home of the CIAs 580th Air Resupply and Communications Wing.

The Air Resupply and Communications Service (ARCS) had been created by the Air Force Psychological Warfare Division, in the Pentagons Directorate of Plans, and was initially connected to the Military Air Transport Service (MATS). (3) My own research shows the 582nd ARCS was stationed for a while at RAF Molesworth, only 55 miles from Lakenheath.

Whether or not ARCS was involved in the biological warfare program, the anti-crop munitions sent abroad were modified versions of the Air Force M16 leaflet bomb, a staple of the Air Force Psychological Warfare Division. But these bombs were modified to carry infected feathers tens of thousands of them meant to spread disease to the wheat and rye crops of the Soviet Union. The CIA had supplied a detailed report to the Pentagon in early 1952 describing the vulnerabilities of each targeted area.

Ft. Detricks Special Operations and Crops divisions had earlier produced a top-secret report, Feathers as Carriers of Biological Warfare Agents. The report explained that by December 1950 the Chemical Corps had determined that feathers dusted with 10 per cent by weight of cereal rust spores and released from a modified [leaflet bomb] M16A1 cluster adapter at 1200 to 1800 feet above ground level will carry sufficient numbers of spores to initiate a cereal rust epidemic. (Thanks to intrepid researcher Alice Atlas for providing this document.)

In general, anti-crop biological weapons, as well as the use of chemical defoliants against crops, was more advanced at the time of the Korean War than the rest of the U.S. biowarfare program. Despite the budgetary cutbacks that had hit the military after World War II, according to historian Simon Whitby, Between 1943 and 1950 some 12,000 chemical agents had been screened for their potential as anti-crop chemical agents. [Whitby, S.. Biological Warfare Against Crops (Global Issues) (p. 129). Kindle Edition.] The U.S. program also benefitted from close collaboration with both British and Canadian anti-crop BW programs.

According to a declassified portion of the Joint Chiefs Weapons System Evaluation Groups (WSEG) July 1952 examination of Offensive Biological Warfare Weapons Systems Employing Manned Aircraft, the Air Force biological bombs used for Operation Steelyard were also intended to be sent to a base in French-held Morocco, as well as a base in Cairo, Egypt. Whether they ever were sent there or not is unknown. See pg. E-68 in document embedded below.(4)

WSEG Report 8, Enclosure E, Characteristics of Anti-crop Agents, Munitions, & Weapons Systems (Source: National Archives) Click here to download declassified report

In early March 1952, Air Force Mission Support Services (AFMSS) sent a Top Secret, Operational Immediate memoto the Commanding General of Air Materiel Command at Wright-Patterson, and a number of other very high-ranking military officials, including the Commander in Chief of U.S. Air Force (European Command) in Wiesbaden, Germany; MATS command at Andrews Air Force Base, Maryland; the Commanding General at the Air Force Air Research and Development Command in Baltimore; Gen. Egbert Bullene at the Chemical Corps; Commanding General Third Air Force, headquartered in South Ruslip, England; the Commanding Officer at Wheelus AFB, Tripoli; and the commanding general, Strategic Air Command at Offutt AFB outside Omaha, Nebraska. The subject was Operation Steelyard.

The memo reiterated the positioning of 400 biological bombs each at Lakenheath and Wheelus, and stated the need for modifications to the bombs necessary for deployment. The memo further described the plans for airlift and delivery of agent fill for the bombs (5), including time bomb fuzes and arming wire. The fill and the fuzes were to be shipped from Edgewood Arsenal. The MATS commander was ordered to prepare for the airlift.

The memo concluded, The time period for use of these munitions is from the present thru 30 May 52. Accordingly all planning and action required must be completed as soon as possible. Implementation of delivery and airlift for (TS) Steelyard will require specific directive this hq (parentheses in original).

Disguising the Shipment of Biological Bombs

The secrecy wasnt just in the procurement details. As early as 19 September 1951, a memo from AFMSS at USAF headquarters in Washington, D.C., to the Commanding General at Air Materiel Command at Wright-Patterson airbase described the necessity of camoflaging the biological bombs to be transported overseas. The memo was copied to the Commanding General, Strategic Air Command at Offutt AFB in Omaha; Commanding General, Army Chemical Center at Edgewood Arsenal, Maryland; and the Chief of the Army Chemical Corps in D.C.

Screenshot from 19 September 1952 memo from USAF Mission Support Services to Commanding General, Air Materiel Command at Wright-Patterson AFB, re shipping instructions for Biological Warfare munitions

As written by Mr. Williams at AFMSS, the memo described the special shipping instructions for the bombs delivery to Lakenheath, England:

Each adapter must be inclosed in a box, and designation on each box and all shipping instructions, such as bills of lading will be marked Hardware There will be no markings or other indication on boxes or bombs to indicate purpose.

Delivery to the U.S. Air Force Commanding Officer at Lakenheath was requested as soon after 1 October 1951 as possible.

Whether or not the anti-crop weapons sent to England and Libya for possible use against the Soviet Union were ever sent further onward to Korea is a matter of speculation. There is no evidence as yet they ever were. But as with the extraordinary SKELP directives, they point to the type of procedures the military may have used when sending non-nuclear weapons of mass destruction, such as biological weapons, to the Far East.

The idea of a transfer of BW munitions outside the European theater is not out of the question. A top secret 11 June 1951 U.S. Air Force Staff Study on the BW-CW Program in USAF aimed at fulfilling an earlier directive (JCS 1837/18) from the Joint Chiefs of Staff. Dated 21 February 1951 during a period when the U.S. Army was in pell-mell retreat before Chinese forces in North Korea the Joint Chiefs had called for a BW-CW combat capability at the earliest possible date.

Screenshot from USAF Staff Study on the BW-CW Program in USAF, 11 June 1951, National Archives/Public Domain (Link)

BW and CW offer a tremendous military potentiality against the overwhelming manpower superiority of the Soviet Union, the Staff Study stated. The report continued, without explanation, It may be necessary to use BW against the Chinese suddenly.

Further pursuit of Pentagon and CIA documents may yet reveal the full parameters of the U.S. biological warfare activities during the Korean War. Its clear that the claims of various scholars that biological weapons from Ft. Detrick never made it to the Korean War theater, including Japan, Guam, etc., are specious in that almost all of these analyses have failed to mention the implementation of operational offensive action with anti-crop bioweapons. To my knowledge, there has also been no mention of the secret funding that enabled important aspects of the BW program. Nor do any of these analyses persue the hints about stop-gap interim BW weapons in Korea, or the similarity between the kinds of BW reported by China and North Korea and the weapons developed by Unit 731, whose designs (at the very least) were handed over to the U.S. Chemical Corps.

BW and Strategic Air Command

One example of outstanding documentary evidence regarding the shipment of classified materials to the Far East in this period comes from a top secret 17 December 1952 memo from Commanding General Curtis LeMay, at Strategic Air Command, Offutt AFB to the Commanding General, 15th Air Force at March AFB. Other addressees included the Commanding General of Air Materiel Command (AMC), Wright-Patterson, and Commanding Officer, 3rd Aviation Field Depot Squadron (3AFDS), Andersen Air Force Base, Guam.

3AFDS had been assigned to 15th Air Force in mid-May 1951. A history of the Air Force Special Weapons Project(AFSWP) lists the 3rd AFDS as one of the components of the US Air Forces Special Weapons Units, and trained by AFSWP.

USAF, Cable, CGSAC to CGAF 15th Air Force, et al., December 17, 1952, Top Secret, NARA

The memo, marked Top Secret [-] Security Information [-] Operational Immediate, was copied to the Air Force Chief of Staff in Washington, D.C., the Commanding General of the Air Division at Travis AFB, and the commanding officers at two units at Kelly AFB in Texas. It described an airlift of highly classified material from Kelly to Travis AFB on 19 December 1952. From Travis, the classified materiel departed the U.S. mainland (ZI departure point) for Anderson AFB, Guam, and an unspecified place of arrival in Japan.

The AMC C-124 cargo plane was to be closely monitored on the trip. SACs commanding general advised that Travis be ready for the shipment with salvage and security teams, as well as standby aircraft and crew. Travis was to pay special attention to perimeter security for the cargo planes arrival.

It seems most likely the secret shipment concerned nuclear materials or munition components, given the memos origination from Strategic Air Command. But many people are unaware that SAC was drawn into BW plans at various points. Some of that history, as well as other relevant aspects of the BW story touched on in this article, can be found in Nicholson Bakers excellent book, Baseless: My Search for Secrets in the Ruins of the Freedom of Information Act (see in particular discussion beginning pg. 165).

The BW-SAC connection can be seen directly in a 17 June 1952 letter from Gen. LeMay to Lt. General Thomas D. White, Deputy Chief of Staff, Operations, at the Pentagon. LeMay explained, As you know, Strategic Air Command has been directed to achieve a one-wing CW-BW operational capability by 1 December 1952.

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The SKELP Directives: U.S. Secret Financing of Germ Warfare during the ...

SAN ANTONIO--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Xenex Disinfection Services, the world leader in UV disinfection technology for healthcare facilities, today announced the 5-year renewal of its U.S. General Services Administration (GSA) contract, which enables federal agencies (including Veterans Affairs and U.S. Department of Defense healthcare facilities) to easily deploy Xenexs powerful LightStrike room disinfection technology. In addition to federal agencies, the GSA contract supports the procurement needs of eligible state, local, territorial, and tribal governments (including schools). The GSA Schedule program is the premier acquisition vehicle for the U.S. government, providing an easy and efficient way for government buyers to connect with commercial companies.

LightStrike Germ-Zapping Robots, which first became available via GSA contract in 2012, provide a fast and effective way to disinfect healthcare facilities. More than 130 government healthcare facilities including VA, Army, Navy, Air Force, and Marine Corps hospitals use Xenex LightStrike robots for daily room disinfection. In 2012, the W. G. (Bill) Hefner VA Medical Center in Salisbury, NC was the first VA hospital to deploy four LightStrike robots and today, utilizes its 11 LightStrike robots to disinfect ORs, ICUs, patient rooms, the Emergency Department, catheterization lab, oncology, dialysis, public restrooms and much more.

Why is disinfection necessary?

Studies show that less than half the surfaces in a patient room are disinfected when its being cleaned and prepared for the next patient. Pathogens such as Clostridium difficile (C.diff), methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus (MRSA), Acinetobacter, and Candida auris that may be left behind on high touch surfaces can transmit from patient to patient or patient to healthcare worker. Some deadly superbugs are showing resistance to cleaning chemicals, making the pathogens even more difficult to remove.

The LightStrike robot utilizes intense bursts of pulsed xenon ultraviolet (UV) light to quickly deactivate viruses, bacteria and spores on surfaces and is effective against even the most dangerous superbugs and multi-drug resistant organisms, including MRSA, C.diff, and SARS-CoV-2 (the virus that causes COVID-19). Additionally, the LightStrike robot has been proven effective against both the Ebola virus and Anthrax and can easily be incorporated into a facilitys biodefense strategy.

Theres never been a more important time to have a disinfected environment. Viruses and bacteria are becoming resistant to chemicals, antibiotics and even some hand sanitizers. We are honored to be part of the disinfection strategy for the VA and DOD hospitals using LightStrike robots for room disinfection. Protecting the environment for those who protect us every day is an honor and we are committed to helping our government customers every step of the way, said Joe Monroe, vice president of U.S. sales for Xenex.

Scientifically-validated

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Environmental Protection for Government Facilities

Xenex robots are designed and manufactured in the U.S. and use pulsed xenon lamps (not mercury bulbs) to generate broad spectrum UV light. The robots dont require warm-up or cool-down time, and dont harm surfaces or expensive hospital equipment like mercury lamp UV products. In 2009, the U.S. Department of Energy issued an Executive Order for federal agencies to become more protective of the environment in practices including the use of non-toxic or less toxic alternatives when possible where these products meet the performance requirements of the agency.

LightStrike robots are also available via Geo-Med, LLC, a Service-Disabled Veteran-Owned Small Business (SDVOSB). GeoMed provides a broad range of medical and surgical products to Veterans Health Administration medical centers and DOD military treatment facilities via its GSA Contract and ECAT Capital Equipment Contract.

About Xenex Disinfection Services

Xenex is a world leader in innovative UV technology-based disinfection strategies and solutions. Frost & Sullivan named Xenex the 2020 Global Company of the Year for its patented technology and being at the vanguard of the fight against SARS-CoV-2. Xenex's mission is to save lives and reduce suffering by destroying the deadly microorganisms that can cause infections. Xenex is backed by well-known investors that include EW Healthcare Partners, Piper Sandler, Malin Corporation, Battery Ventures, Targeted Technology Fund II, Tectonic Ventures and RK Ventures. For more information, visit xenex.com.

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Germ Warfare: GSA Supports Rapid Deployment of Xenex LightStrike Germ ...

In 1966, the U.S Army simulated a germ warfare attack on New York City. From June 6 to 10, Army agents released aerosol clouds of harmless agents that engulfed passengers in clouds of gas. Nobody paid much attention. Neither the state nor the city of New York knew about the trial run, and when a single police officer asked what they were doing, they produced false papers that satisfied any questions. The experiment was only publically detailed decades later.

In the meantime, Boris Sagals 1971 movie The Omega Man explored what those high casualties would look like while also analyzing a society coming out of the tremendous social shifts of the 1960s. Its just too bad that The Omega Man is leaving HBO Max on July 31, 2022.

Following the initial 1966 experiment, the Army concluded that germ warfare would be easy to accomplish with potentially devastating results. Under the right conditions, the subway could expose a large number of people to infection and cause high casualties among the population working in the area.

That proved totally true in The Omega Man.

Based on Richard Mathesons I Am Legend (like the Will Smith movie of the same name), The Omega Man remains one of the most fascinating sci-fi movies to come out of its era, raising provocative societal questions while never losing track of its action.

In 1977, Robert Neville (Charlton Heston) is the last man in Los Angeles. The movie starts with a long shot on Neville driving in his cherry-red 1970 Ford XL convertible with an automatic weapon, occasionally shooting at mysterious figures in hoods. Theres no traffic, no people, nobody out during the sunny day, just the detritus of a world without its denizens.

How does he keep the car so clean?Warner Bros.

Lacking anything better to do, Neville takes in a movie. He can set up the projector himself, but cant change the movie: the 1970 Woodstock documentary. Neville is an older, stoic, trigger-happy sort of fellow who doesnt seem like the type to take in the documentary about three days of peace and music. But in his isolation, Neville has come to memorize every word of the film, repeating a gleeful hippies words to himself about the need to create a better world.

Such a world seems very out of reach. Neville used to be a military scientist, but when America got caught in the midst of a war between the USSR and China, germ warfare was introduced, accidents happened, and the United States was devastated. By the time martial law was instituted, most of the populace was already dead or dying. Then the military failed, including the pilot who was supposed to take Nevilles experimental vaccine into production.

Neville has taken it himself, and it works, but what good is one person vaccinated?

While Neville essentially runs Los Angeles by himself during the day, at night he is on the defensive. The hooded figures that are part of a group known as The Family emerge. Instead of killing them, the germs mutated these people. Now they are a ghastly pale white, right down to their pupils. Their leader, Matthias (Anthony Zerbe), was a news anchor reporting on the last days of humanity. Now, he preaches against everything humanity once stood for, especially modern technology. Every night, they hold joyous book-burning sessions.

Things are not looking good for Neville here, folks.Warner Bros.

Nevilles life of solitude in his apartment seems to mock everything The Family stands for, hence the war between the two factions. While The Family clearly has the numbers, Matthias insists that Neville not be captured using the ways of man that is to say, guns.

The Family isnt zombies they dont eat people and are clearly intelligent and theyre not vampires either, although they hate any form of light. They more closely resemble the trend of communal cults that were taking hold at the time of the movies release, and Matthias leads them with an iron fist.

Eventually, The Family overpowers Neville, puts him in a dunce cap, and takes him to Dodger Stadium to make him pay for his crime by burning him alive. Matthias points out, correctly, that he has been murdering their members, although they are trying to murder him as well for the manly sin of science.

Lisa is no hallucination.Warner Bros.

Neville is rescued by Lisa (Rosalind Cash), a woman he saw earlier roaming the stores of Los Angeles but dismissed as a hallucination. But shes very real and doesnt have time for Nevilles crap. The two escape on a motorcycle and Neville is introduced to other non-cult survivors who have been looking for some hope. He just might be able to provide them some if he can get a cure from his blood.

The Omega Man was a huge hit at the time, although critics panned it as a shameless blockbuster. While its third act leaves some of its questions unresolved, it dares to ask big questions. Its visuals take care to make the viewer feel Nevilles isolation, and the challenges that The Family raises to Nevilles various plots dont have a clear resolution.

If its a summer movie, all summer movies should be more like this.

LEARN SOMETHING NEW EVERY DAY.

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You need to watch the most underrated apocalypse movie before it leaves HBO Max this week - Inverse

Allegations of US biological warfare

Allegations that the United States military used biological weapons in the Korean War (June 1950 July 1953) were raised by the governments of People's Republic of China, the Soviet Union, and North Korea. The claims were first raised in 1951. The story was covered by the worldwide press and led to a highly publicized international investigation in 1952. Secretary of State Dean Acheson and other American and allied government officials denounced the allegations as a hoax. Subsequent scholars are split about the truth of the claims.

Until the end of World War II, Japan operated a covert biological and chemical warfare research and development unit called Unit 731 in Harbin (now China). The unit's activities, including human experimentation, were documented by the Khabarovsk War Crime Trials conducted by the Soviet Union in December 1949. However, at that time, the US government described the Khabarovsk trials as "vicious and unfounded propaganda".[1] It was later revealed that the accusations made against the Japanese military were correct. The US government had taken over the research at the end of the war and had then covered up the program.[2] Leaders of Unit 731 were exempted from war crimes prosecution by the United States and then placed on the payroll of the US.[3]

On 30 June 1950, soon after the outbreak of the Korean War, the US Defense Secretary George Marshall received the Report of the Committee on Chemical, Biological and Radiological Warfare and Recommendations, which advocated urgent development of a biological weapons program.[4] The biological weapons research facility at Fort Detrick, Maryland was expanded, and a new one in Pine Bluff, Arkansas, was developed.[5]

During 1951, as the war turned against the United States, the Chinese and North Koreans made vague allegations of biological warfare, but these were not pursued.[6][7][8] General Matthew Ridgway, United Nations Commander in Korea, denounced the initial charges as early as May 1951. He accused the communists of spreading "deliberate lies". A few days later, Vice Admiral Charles Turner Joy repeated the denials.[8]

On 28 January 1952, the Chinese People's Volunteer Army headquarters received a report of a smallpox outbreak southeast of Incheon. From February to March 1952, more bulletins reported disease outbreaks in the area of Chorwon, Pyongyang, Kimhwa and even Manchuria.[9] The Chinese soon became concerned when 13 Korean and 16 Chinese soldiers contracted cholera and the plague, while another 44 recently deceased were tested positive for meningitis.[10] Although the Chinese and the North Koreans did not know exactly how the soldiers contracted the diseases, the suspicions soon fell on the Americans.[9]

On 22 February 1952, the North Korean Foreign Minister, Bak Hon Yon, made a formal allegation that American planes had been dropping infected insects onto North Korea. He added that the Americans were "openly collaborating with the Japanese bacteriological war criminals, the former jackals of the Japanese militarists whose crimes are attested to by irrefutable evidence. Among the Japanese war criminals sent to Korea were Shiro Ishii, Jiro Wakamatsu and Masajo Kitano."[11][unreliable source] Bak's accusations were immediately denied by the US government. The accusation was supported by eye-witness accounts by the Australian reporter Wilfred Burchett and others.[12][13]

In June 1952 the United States proposed to the United Nations Security Council that the Council request the International Red Cross investigate the allegations. The Soviet Union vetoed the American resolution due to extensive US influence inside the Red Cross, and, along with its allies, continued to insist on the veracity of the biological warfare accusations.[8]

In February 1953, China and North Korea produced two captured US Marine Corps pilots to support the allegations. Colonel Frank Schwable was reported to have stated that: "The basic objective was at that time to get under field conditions various elements of bacteriological warfare and possibly expand field tests at a later date into an element of regular combat operations."[8] Schwable's statement said that B-29s flew biological warfare missions to Korea from airfields in American-occupied Okinawa starting in November 1951.[14] Schwable's statement was obtained following months of torture and abuse at the hands of his captors, according to the US military.[15] Other captured Americans such as Colonel Walker "Bud" Mahurin made similar statements.[8][15]

Upon release the prisoners of war repudiated their confessions which they said had been extracted by torture.[16] However, the retractions happened in front of military cameras after the United States government threatened to charge the POWs with treason for cooperating with their captors.[citation needed] When Kenneth Enoch, one of the former POWs who retracted his confession, was tracked down in 2010 by Al Jazeera reporters he denied being ill-treated or indoctrinated by the North Korean or Chinese guards.[17]

When the International Red Cross and the World Health Organization ruled out biological warfare, the Chinese government denounced them as being biased by the influence of US, and arranged an investigation by the Soviet-affiliated World Peace Council.[18] The World Peace Council set up the "International Scientific Commission for the Facts Concerning Bacterial Warfare in China and Korea" (ISC). This commission had several distinguished scientists and doctors from France, Italy, Sweden, Brazil and Soviet Union, including renowned British biochemist and sinologist Joseph Needham. The commission's findings included dozens of eyewitnesses, testimonies from doctors, medical samples from the deceased, bomb casings as well as four American Korean War prisoners who confirmed the US use of biological warfare.[19][20][18] On 15 September 1952, the final report was signed, stating that the US was experimenting with biological weapons in Korea.[19][21]

The report suggested a link to the World War II Japanese germ warfare Unit 731.[19][22] Former Unit 731 members Shir Ishii, Masaji Kitano, and Ryoichi Naito, and other Japanese biological warfare experts were often named in the allegations.[8] Former members of Unit 731 were linked initially, by a Communist news agency, to a freighter that allegedly carried them and all equipment necessary to mount a biological warfare campaign to Korea in 1951.[8] The commission placed credence on allegations that Ishii made two visits to South Korea in early 1952, and another one in March 1953.[8] The official consensus in China was that biological weapons created from an American-Japanese collaboration were used in the Korean episode.[23][8] Citing the claims Ishii had visited South Korea, the report stated: "Whether occupation authorities in Japan had fostered his activities, and whether the American Far Eastern Command was engaged in making use of methods essentially Japanese, were questions which could hardly have been absent from the minds of members of the Commission."[24]

The International Association of Democratic Lawyers (IADL) publicized these claims in its 1952 "Report on U.S. Crimes in Korea",[25] as did US journalist John W. Powell.[26]

The Communists also alleged that US Brigadier General Crawford Sams had carried out a secret mission behind their lines at Wonsan in March 1951, testing biological weapons.[27] The US government said that he had actually been investigating a reported outbreak of bubonic plague in North Korea, but had determined it was hemorrhagic smallpox. Sams' mission had been launched from the US Navy's LCI(L)-1091, which had been converted to a laboratory ship in 1951.[28] During its time in Korea, the ship was assigned as an epidemiological control ship[29] for Fleet Epidemic Disease Control Unit No. 1, a part of the US effort to combat malaria in Korea.[30] After covert missions in North Korea, from October to September 1951, LSIL-1091 was at Koje-do testing residents and refugees for malaria.[31]

Some authors have emphasized Sams' relationship with biological warfare actors, which both China and North Korea found suspicious. According to Japanese historian, Takemae Eiji, Sams had a relationship with the former members of Imperial Japan's biological warfare department, Unit 731. Appointed by General MacArthur as the head of the post-war Occupation government's Public Health & Welfare Section, Sams was instrumental in founding Japan's National Institute of Health, whose first deputy director, Kojima Sabur, was an Ishii associate. Sabur then recruited other former former Unit 731 personnel for the new Institute. According to Eiji, "Sams and others in PH&W not only knew of these men's sordid pasts but actively solicited their cooperation to further PH&W goals.... Sams and his staff became, in effect, co-conspirators after the fact in those wartime crimes".[32]

The US and its allies responded by describing the allegations as a hoax.[12] The US government declared the IADL to be a Communist front organization since 1950, and charged Powell with sedition.[26][33][34] In a highly publicized 1959 trial, Powell was indicted on 13 counts of sedition for reporting on the allegations, while two of his editors were indicted on one count of sedition each. All charges were dropped after the trial ended in mistrial after five years. However, Powell was then blacklisted and thereafter unable to secure work as a journalist for the rest of his life.[26]

According to news reports during the trial, the U.S. Attorney in the case, James B. Schnake, submitted an affidavit in which he stated the U.S. government was prepared to stipulate "that during the period Jan. 1, 1949, through July 27, 1953, the United States Army had a capability to wage both chemical and biological warfare offensively and defensively.... Responsible officials in the Department of Defense have determined the revelations of detailed records on this subject would be highly detrimental to the national security."[35]

American authorities long denied the charges of postwar Japanese-United States cooperation in biological warfare developments, despite later incontrovertible proof that the US pardoned Unit 731 in exchange for their research, according to Sheldon H. Harris.[8] But in December 1998, in a letter from Department of Justice official Eli Rosenbaum to Rabbi Abraham Cooper of the Simon Wiesenthal Center, a U.S. government official admitted that the U.S. had made an amnesty agreement with Shiro Ishii and personnel from Unit 731, despite known crimes committed by Ishii and associates concerning illegal human experimentation. The letter wasn't made public until published by Jeffrey Kaye in May 2017.[36][unreliable source]

Australian journalist, Denis Warner, suggested that the story was concocted by Wilfred Burchett as part of his alleged role as a KGB agent of influence. Warner pointed out the similarity of the allegations to a science fiction story by Jack London, a favorite author of Burchett's.[37] However, the notion that Burchett originated the "hoax" has been decisively refuted by one of his most trenchant critics, Tibor Mray.[38] Mray worked as a correspondent for the Hungarian People's Republic during the war but fled the country after the abortive Hungarian Revolution of 1956. Now a staunch anti-Communist, he has confirmed that he saw clusters of flies crawling on ice.[39] Mray has argued the evidence was the result of an elaborate conspiracy: "Now somehow or other these flies must have been brought there... the work must have been carried out by a large network covering the whole of North Korea."[40]

Recent research has indicated that, regardless of the accuracy of the allegations, the Chinese acted as if they were true.[9] After learning of the outbreaks, Mao Zedong immediately requested Soviet assistance on disease preventions, while the Chinese People's Liberation Army General Logistics Department was mobilized for anti-bacteriological warfare.[41] On the Korean battlefield, four anti-bacteriological warfare research centers were soon set up, while about 5.8 million doses of vaccine and 200,000 gas masks were delivered to the front.[42] Within China, 66 quarantine stations were also set up along the Chinese borders, while about 5 million Chinese in Manchuria were inoculated.[41] The Chinese government also initiated the "Patriotic Health and Epidemic Prevention Campaign" and directed every citizen to kill flies, mosquitoes and fleas.[41] These disease prevention measures soon resulted in an improvement of health for Communist soldiers on the Korean battlefield.[42] Tibor Mray provided eyewitness account of North Korea conducting an "unprecedented campaign of public health" during the allegation.[43]

Some historians have offered other explanations to the disease outbreaks during the spring of 1952. For example, it has been noted that spring time is usually a period of epidemics within China and North Korea,[41] and years of warfare had also caused a breakdown in the Korean health care system. US military historians have argued that under these circumstances, diseases could easily spread throughout the entire military and civilian populations within Korea.[44][45]

In 1986, Australian historian Gavan McCormack argued that the claim of US biological warfare use was "far from inherently implausible", pointing out that one of the POWs who confessed, Walker Mahurin, was in fact associated with Fort Detrick.[46] He also pointed out that, as the deployment of nuclear and chemical weapons was considered, there is no reason to believe that ethical principles would have overruled the resort to biological warfare.[47] He also suggested that the outbreak in 1951 of viral haemorrhagic fever, which had previously been unknown in Korea, was linked to biological warfare.[48] However, by 2004, McCormack had changed his mind. In a book about North Korea, he wrote that the alleged Soviet archival documents published by Kathryn Weathersby and Milton Leitenberg in 1998 (see discussion in section on "Endicott and Hagerman" below) had provided a fragmentary, but persuasive, explanation of what had actually happened in relation to the germ warfare charges. According to McCormack, Analysis of these documents makes it seem almost certain that there was a vigorous, complex, contrived, and fraudulent international campaign on the part of the North Koreans, the Chinese, and the Russians a gigantic fraud.[49]

In a 1988 book Korea: The Unknown War, historians Jon Halliday and Bruce Cumings also suggested the claims might be true.[50][51] They questioned whether the North Koreans and the Chinese could have "mounted a spectacular piece of fraudulent theater, involving the mobilization of thousands", getting scores of Chinese doctors, scientists, and senior officials "to fake evidence, lie and invent medical fraud", allocating much of their already stretched logistical resource to defend against biological warfare, all for a propaganda campaign against US.[51]

In 1989, a British study of Unit 731 strongly supported the theory of United StatesJapanese biological warfare culpability in Korea.[8]

In 1995, using available Chinese documents, historian Shu Guang Zhang of the University of Maryland[52] stated that there is little, if any information that currently exists on the Chinese side which explains how the Chinese scientists came up with the conclusion of US biological warfare during the disease outbreak in the spring of 1952. Zhang further theorized that the allegation was caused by unfounded rumors and scientific investigations on the allegation was purposely ignored on the Chinese side for the sake of domestic and international propaganda.[53]

Published in Japan in 2001, the book Rikugun Noborito Kenkyujo no shinjitsu or The Truth About the Army Noborito Institute stated that members of Japan's Unit 731 also worked for the "chemical section" of a US clandestine unit hidden within Yokosuka Naval Base during the Korean War as well as on projects inside the United States from 1955 to 1959.[54]

According to Jeffrey Kaye's interpretation of a "Memorandum of Conversation" from the Psychological Strategy Board (PSB) dated 6 July 1953 (and declassified and released by the CIA in 2006),[55] the US protestations at the United Nations did not mean the US was serious about conducting any investigation into biological warfare charges, despite what the government said publicly. The reason the US didn't want any investigation was because an "actual investigation" would reveal military operations, "which, if revealed, could do us psychological as well as military damage". The memorandum, which had been sent to CIA director Allen Dulles, specifically stated as an example of what could be revealed "Eighth Army preparations or operations (e.g. chemical warfare)."[56][unreliable source?]

Investigative journalist Simon Winchester concluded in 2008 that Soviet intelligence was sceptical of the allegation, but that North Korea leader Kim Il Sung believed it.[57] Winchester said the question "has still not been satisfactorily answered".[58]

Entomologist Jeffrey A. Lockwood wrote in 2009 that the biological warfare program at Ft. Detrick began to research the use of insects as disease vectors going back to World War II and also employed German and Japanese scientists after the war who had experimented on human subjects among POWs and concentration camp inmates. Scientists used or attempted to use a wide variety of insects in their biowar plans, including fleas, ticks, ants, lice and mosquitoes especially mosquitoes that carried the yellow fever virus. They also tested these in the United States. Lockwood thinks that it is very likely that the US did use insects dropped from aircraft during the Korean War to spread diseases, and that the Chinese and North Koreans were not simply engaged in a propaganda campaign when they made these allegations, since the Joint Chiefs of Staff and Secretary of Defense had approved their use in the fall of 1950 at the "earliest practicable time". At that time, it had five biowarfare agents ready for use, three of which were spread by insect vectors.[59]

In March 2010, the allegations were investigated by the Al Jazeera English news program People & Power.[60] In this program, Professor Mori Masataka investigated historical artifacts in the form of bomb casings from US biological weapons, contemporary documentary evidence and eyewitness testimonies. The program also uncovered a crucial document in the US National Archives which showed that in September 1951, the US Joint Chiefs of Staff issued orders to start "large scale field tests ... to determine the effectiveness of specific BW [bacteriological warfare] agents under operational conditions".[60] Masataka concluded that: "Use of germ weapons in war is in breach of the Geneva Convention. I think that's why the Americans are refusing to admit the allegations. But I have no doubt. I'm absolutely sure that this happened.[60] The program concluded by noting that no conclusive evidence of the US's innocence or culpability has ever been presented.[60]

Yanhuang Chunqiu, a liberal monthly journal in China, published an account in 2013 allegedly from Wu Zhili, the former surgeon general of Chinese People's Voluntary Army Logistic Department, which said that the bio warfare allegation was a false alarm, and that he had been forced to fabricate evidence.[61][62][63] This account was published after the author's death in 2008. Its authenticity subsequently has been called into question by the Chinese Memorial of the War to Resist US Aggression and Aid Korea as unverifiable, because every single figure involved in the alleged private conversations and insider events from the account who could testify otherwise, had died before the date of publication.[64] The museum also refuted the account's claim that "not one casualty resulted from events associated with biological warfare" as there are many clear records of such casualties, and claimed that it's implausible for a meager medical officer back then to have the technical knowledge to fool dozens of international medical experts signing the ISC report.[64]

In 2019, the Pyongyang Times repeated the allegation, and said that the US government was continuing to develop biological warfare capabilities to use against North Korea.[65]

In 1998, Canadian researchers and historians Stephen L. Endicott and Edward Hagerman of York University made the case that the accusations were true in their book, The United States and Biological Warfare: Secrets from the Early Cold War and Korea.[66] Shanghai-born Endicott, a Communist sympathizer, was the son of clergyman James Gareth Endicott, a prominent member of the Soviet-affiliated World Peace Council.

The book received mostly positive reviews, but with some negative criticism, with a US Military Academy professor calling the book an example of "bad history"[67] and with another review in The New York Times calling the book's lack of direct evidence "appalling",[68] although neither of these two negative reviews considers either the admissions that the US deployed chemical and biological weapons by Colonels Schwable and Mahurin, or the US chemical and biological weapons caches at locations such as Camp Detrick.

Many other reviews praised the research, with the director of East Asian studies at University of Pennsylvania saying "Endicott and Hagerman is far and away the most authoritative work on the subject", a review in Korean Quarterly calling it "a fascinating work of serious scholarship...presenting a compelling argument that the United States did, in fact, secretly experiment with biological weapons during the Korean War", and a review in The Nation calling it "the most impressive, expertly researched and, as far as the official files allow, the best-documented case for the prosecution yet made".[67] A staff writer at state-owned China Daily noted that their book was the only one to have combined research across United States, Japan, Canada, Europe and China, as they were "the first foreigners to be given access to classified documents in the Chinese Central Archives".[67]

In response, Kathryn Weathersby and Milton Leitenberg of the Cold War International History Project at the Woodrow Wilson Center released a cache of Soviet and Chinese documents in 1998 that they said revealed the allegations to have been an elaborate disinformation campaign.[69] The handcopied documents are purportedly from Russian Presidential Archive, discovered by a Japanese reporter Yasuo Naito of Sankei Shimbun, a major conservative anti-communist Japanese national newspaper. Weathersby admitted that due to the way the documents are collected, there is no way to confirm their authenticity as seals, stamps or signature are missing, but due to their complexity and interwoven content, they are "extremely difficult to forge" and thus credible sources.[69] They said that North Korea's health minister traveled in 1952 to the remote Manchurian city of Mukden where he procured a culture of plague bacilli which was used to infect condemned criminals as part of an elaborate disinformation scheme. Tissue samples were then used to fool the international investigators. The papers included telegrams and reports of meetings among Soviet and Chinese leaders, including Mao Zedong. A report to Lavrenti Beria, head of Soviet intelligence, for example, stated: "False plague regions were created, burials... were organized, measures were taken to receive the plague and cholera bacillus." These documents revealed that only after Stalin's death the following year did the Soviet Union halt the disinformation campaign.[70] Weathersby and Leitenberg consider their evidence to be conclusivethat the allegations were disinformation and no biological warfare use occurred.[71][72][73] In 2001, anti-communist writer Herbert Romerstein supported Weathersby and Leitenberg's position while criticizing Endicott's research on the basis that it is based on accounts provided by the Chinese government.[74]

In turn, Endicott and Hagerman responded to Weathersby and Leitenberg, noting that the documents are in fact handwritten copies and "the original source is not disclosed, the name of the collection is not identified, nor is there a volume number which would allow other scholars to locate and check the documents". They claimed that even if genuine the documents do not prove the United States did not use biological weapons, and they pointed out various errors and inconsistencies in Weathersby and Leitenberg's analysis.[75] According to Australian author and judge, Michael Pembroke, the documents associated with Beria (published by Weathersby and Leitenberg) were mostly created during the time of the power struggle after Stalin's death and are therefore questionable.[76] In 2018, he concluded that: "It seems likely that the full story of the United States' involvement in biological warfare in Korea has not yet been told."[77]

In September 2020, Jeffrey Kaye, who posted a few dozen CIA communications intelligence [COMINT] reports detailing germ warfare attacks by U.S. planes, has said[78][unreliable source] the cache of CIA documents helps disprove the Weathersby/Leitenberg Soviet documents by showing that many of the claims in them are demonstratively false. Kaye wrote, "The information from the COMINT data corroborates charges that North Korea and China were under bacteriological attack in 1952, and disconfirms some of the evidence offered suggesting the attacks were really a hoax or an exaggerated response to presumed, but more innocent attack."

As one example of the disproof of assertions by Leitenberg and Weathersby, he states that the latter two authors support for the Soviet archival documents claim that the Soviet Union, China and North Korea all ceased making biological weapons charges in early 1953. But both newspaper records and CIA source documents show that such claims continued throughout 1953 and thereafter.[79][80][81] Even more, Kaye states that the CIA documents included with his article corroborate other accounts of germ warfare by both China and North Korea's government, and hundreds of witnesses interviewed over the years, including by IACL and ISC investigators, Al Jazeera, and British investigators Peter Williams and David Wallace.[82]

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Allegations of biological warfare in the Korean War - Wikipedia

On the Kazakh-Uzbek border, surrounded by miles of toxic desert, lies an island. Or at least, something that used to be an island.

Vozrozhdeniya was once home to a vibrant fishing village fringed by turquoise lagoons, back when the Aral Sea was the fourth-largest in the world and abundant with fish.

But after years of abuse by the Soviets, the waters have receded and the sea has turned to dust; the rivers that fed it were diverted to irrigate cotton fields. Today, a layer of salty sand, riddled with carcinogenic pesticides, is all that remains of the ancient oasis.

This is a place where the mercury regularly hits 60C (140F) in the sandy soil, and where the only signs of life are the skeletons of desiccated trees and camels shading under giant, stranded boats.

Now Vozrozhdeniya has swallowed up so much of the sea that its swelled to 10 times its original size, and is connected to the mainland by a peninsula. But it is thanks to another Soviet project that it is one of the deadliest places on the planet.

From the 1970s, the island has been implicated in a number of sinister incidents. In 1971, a young scientist fell ill after a research vessel, the Lev Berg, strayed into a brownish haze. Days later, she was diagnosed with smallpox. Mysteriously, she had already been vaccinated against the disease. Though she recovered, the outbreak went on to infect a further nine people back in her hometown, three of whom died. One of these was her younger brother.

A year later, the corpses of two missing fishermen were found nearby, drifting in their boat. Its thought that they had caught the plague. Not long afterwards, locals started landing whole nets of dead fish. No one knows why. Then in May 1988, 50,000 saiga antelope which had been grazing on a nearby steppe dropped dead in the space of an hour.

The islands secrets have endured, partly because it isnt the kind of place where you can just turn up. Since Vozrozhdeniya was abandoned in the 1990s, there have only been a handful of expeditions. Nick Middleton, a journalist and geographer from Oxford University, filmed a documentary there back in 2005. I was aware of what went on, so we got hold of a guy who used to work for the British military and he came to give the crew a briefing about the sorts of things we might find, he says.

He scared the pants off me, to be honest.

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The deadly germ warfare island abandoned by the Soviets - BBC

Sakura, or Japanese cherry blossom, is Japans unofficial national flower. With the lovely shades of pink and white, these blossoms create beautiful scenery. However, the Japanese Militarys Operation Cherry Blossoms at Night during World War II was far from being lovely. That was because it was a codename for their plan to attack civilians in the United States by delivering weaponized bubonic plague.

The plan was inspired by the Director of Unit 731, Surgeon General Shiro Ishii of the biological warfare unit of the Imperial Japanese Army located in Harbin, Manchukuo. There, they conducted research on the use of chemical and biological warfare agents by experimenting with the Allied prisoners of war, some of which were said to be survivors of the Bataan Death March. They tested them with bubonic plague, anthrax, smallpox, botulism, and cholera. They also dropped bombs of biological agents on Chinese military and civilian targets to further confirm their effectiveness. Unconfirmed reports suggested that around 500,000 Chinese were killed by Japanese biological warfare.

Early on, the Japanese forces wanted to use biological weapons against the US and Filipino forces defending the Bataan Peninsula by dropping bombs filled with plague-carrying fleas. However, the US troops surrendered even before the plan commenced.

In 1945, when situations were getting desperate for Japan, Ishii devised the plan that they codenamed Operation Cherry Blossoms at Night, although it was also known as Operation PX. The idea was to use five new I-400-class submarines, each with three Aichi M6A Seiran float-planes, to sail the Pacific ocean and launch the aircraft with either plague of flea-filled bombs that would crash into the cities of the West Coast, with San Diego being the first target, followed by Los Angeles and San Francisco. The submarine crews would also infect themselves and run to the shore in a one-way suicide mission. Chief of the Army General Staff Yoshijiro Umezu rejected the idea, mainly because they did not have five I-400 submarines. Apart from that, he said, If bacteriological warfare is conducted, it will grow from the dimension of war between Japan and America to an endless battle of humanity against bacteria. Japan will earn the derision of the world.

It was not until August 1945 that he developed an interest in carrying out the plan, with the possibility of producing more I-400s by the proposed attack date in September.

Japans I-400-class submarines were the largest of its type ever built until the nuclear ballistic missile submarines in the 1960s were produced by the US and Soviet Union. The I-400 was 400-feet long, had a displacement of some 6,000 tons, carried 21-inch torpedo tubes forward, a 5.5-inch deck gun, plus a triple-mount 25 mm antiaircraft gun with a range that could reach any location worldwide and back to Japan. They also had a 100 ft watertight hanger than stored three floatplane dive bombers that could be launched from a steam catapult and then recovered with a crane.

The Cherry Blossoms at Night operations were all set and were supposed to be carried out had the Japanese forces not surrendered on August 15. Regardless, they still had a final plan to use their biological weapons just after their surrender, with Ishiis plan to stage suicide germ attacks against the US occupation troops that were in Japan. This did not happen, too, as Umezu and Kawabe disagreed with the idea, not wanting Ishii to die in a suicide mission. They instead asked him to wait for the next opportunity, which never really came.

On August 22, the Japanese submarines were ordered to destroy all their sensitive equipment related to the operation. The I-400 and I-401 fired off all their torpedoes and then catapulted their float-planes with their wings still unfolded, sinking all of them at the bottom of the deep abyss. When the war ended, the US Navy was still able to recover around 24 surviving Japanese submarines, three of which were I-400s that they all took to Sasebo. The Soviets, under the Japanese surrender agreement, expressed intent to inspect these submarines, so the US Navy sailed the I-400, I-401, I-201, I-203, and I-14 to Pearl Harbor to keep the Soviets from gaining access to Japanese submarine technology.

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The Terrifying Cherry Blossoms at Night of the Japanese Military - SOFREP

I was lucky enough to attend the Students for Liberty conference, LibertyCon 2022, in Prague last weekend.

Oh, my goodness. What a beautiful city is Prague! Id never been before, but I shall be returning ASAFP.

While there, I heard a talk by Li Schoolland, a Chinese-American businesswoman, who is the director of external relations Asia Pacific for the Acton Institute. She fled China in 1984, having survived Chairman Maos Cultural Revolution.

She made the case that China, not the US, is the paper tiger. What did she mean and what does it imply for investors and the Chinese economy?

The expression paper tiger is used to describe something that appears powerful or threatening, but is in fact weak and vulnerable.

The term was made famous by Mao Zedong, the notorious chairman of the Chinese Communist Party and founder of the Peoples Republic of China, in 1957. He said: All the reputedly powerful reactionaries are merely paper tigers. The reason is that they are divorced from the people.

Look! Was not Hitler a paper tiger? Was Hitler not overthrown? I also said that the tsar of Russia, the emperor of China and Japanese imperialism were all paper tigers. As we know, they were all overthrown.

US imperialism has not yet been overthrown and it has the atom bomb. I believe it also will be overthrown. It, too, is a paper tiger.

Theres rather a lot to unpick there. As time is of the essence, we shall ignore that classic of the Godwins Law genre (whoever mentions Hitler first loses the argument), as well as the hypocrisy of criticising authoritarian rulers for being divorced from the people.

Schoollands main argument was that today Chinas regime is divorced from the people and so is a paper tiger. As an authoritarian, corrupt and often incompetent planned economy, it is vulnerable. The events of the past week would seem to bear her out.

Dont buy Chinese stocks! she said. There are so many frauds. Many exist solely to secure funds, with no operating business behind them. Over 60% of Chinas market capitalisation is state owned. If you buy stocks, you are supporting an authoritarian regime.

Even something like TikTok (ByteDance is the parent company) is under the regime. Ive been unable to verify this: but Schoolland argued that, never mind its use as a surveillance tool, if you read the small print, then once uploaded, your videos effectively become the property of the Chinese state.

Like TikTok, central bank digital currencies (CBDCs) a field in which China very much has the lead are a useful surveillance tool. Those tools will now be used on all those athletes who downloaded money apps during the Olympics. As well as to control, they will be used to market stuff. The app will know if you need a loan, say, as well as what type of loan and what your circumstances are, and so will begin marketing financial products to you.

Property is no better as an asset class. Over 30% of the build cost of a property in China is government bribery, she says. Im not quite sure how you verify that figure, but it doesnt sound implausible.

Meanwhile, despite all the pictures you might see of amazing buildings in Chinas cities, says Schoolland, more than 43 million people still live on less than a dollar a day although that has come down from more than 100 million in the 2000s.

China is heavily indebted too, which makes it vulnerable. Its debt-to-GDP ratio, Schoolland argues, is greater than the stated 70%. Its closer, in fact, to 275%.

Shanghai is unravelling with the extended lockdown there. Supply chains are breaking down. There is much discontent and, Schoolland insists, revolution is very much in the air. China needs a new system, not just a new leader, she says.

The evidence of the past few weeks hints that Schoolland may well have a point.

Supply chains have been disrupted, inflation is biting especially in food and energy prices, interest rates are being held down, the currency is at its weakest since late 2020, international funds are selling out of Chinese assets, attempts to lure domestic investment into capital markets arent working, the stockmarket is down by over 20% this year and a slowing property market is also eroding wealth.

On top of everything else, the evidence of the last two years is that viruses are beyond government control, and that lockdowns do more damage than good. Nevertheless, President Xi Jinping remains committed to Covid zero. Irony of ironies, he blames Covid on the germ warfare of US imperialism.

But you cant just ignore China as an investor; its too big. The way to play it, for me, is to be in the business of selling it stuff.

Xi has committed to boosting infrastructure construction to bolster the economy. Planned investment this year amounts to at least $2.3trn, according to Bloomberg. Load up on base metal mining stocks, is my advice.

The Peoples Bank of China has declared it will promote the healthy and stable development of markets and provide a good monetary and financial environment and that liquidity will remain reasonably ample.

We are back to that centrally-planned economy thing again. Oh dear.

But that money has to go somewhere.

Dominics film, Adam Smith: Father of the Fringe, about the unlikely influence of the father of economics on the greatest arts festival in the world is now available to watch on YouTube.

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Avoid Chinas stockmarket heres what to invest in instead - MoneyWeek

The once nearly vanquished disease measles is making a worrying comeback. This week, the World Health Organisation and UNICEF reported that global cases of the viral illness have so far jumped almost 80% in 2022 compared to last year. Without immediate action, the conditions are ripe this year for a large-scale resurgence of the vaccine-preventable illness, they warn.

According to data collected by the organisations, there were around 17,000 measles cases reported in the first two months of 2022 a 79% increase over cases reported during the same period in 2021. The majority of cases have come from countries in Africa and the Mediterranean, such as Somalia, Yemen and Afghanistan. And as of April 2022, theyve tracked 21 large outbreaks in the last 12 months.

Measles is a highly contagious disease (moreso than even the latest Omicron variant of the coronavirus). So in unprotected populations, it can swiftly spread and cause widespread illness. And given the early start, the WHO and UNICEF fear that millions of cases could happen this year. For context, about 860,000 cases were reported in 2019 the highest annual number since 1996.

Signs of measles infection include flu-like symptoms along with a distinct rash that usually starts in the face several days later. Though most people dont develop serious complications, it can be deadly, especially to younger malnourished children. In 2019, its estimated that over 200,000 people were killed by measles, mostly children under five. Recently, its also become apparent that even a mild case of measles can effectively reset the immune system, causing us to forget our immunity to other infectious diseases, at least temporarily.

Despite its threat, measles is easily preventable, thanks to a highly effective vaccine (97% effective with the full two doses) that provides lifelong protection against infection. Vaccination has steadily eroded the global incidence of measles over the decades, and for a time, it appeared as if measles would be eradicated. But because the germ is so contagious, it requires high vaccine coverage in a population at least 95% to provide herd immunity and protect those too young or otherwise unable to get vaccinated. And sadly, the world has been losing ground in vaccinating everyone lately, leading to the return of measles in many areas, including the U.S., though it remains locally eliminated here.

The last few years of the pandemic have seen lower reported case numbers of measles but also further gaps in vaccination coverage. Adding to the trouble has been ongoing warfare in Afghanistan and more recently Ukraine, which has disrupted routine vaccination programs and has led to the mass displacement of refugees. These pandemic- and war-related disruptions, along with the return to socialising for many, will likely allow measles to explode back onto the world stage, the WHO and UNICEF warn.

It is encouraging that people in many communities are beginning to feel protected enough from COVID-19 to return to more social activities. But doing so in places where children are not receiving routine vaccination creates the perfect storm for the spread of a disease like measles, said Catherine Russell, UNICEF executive director, in a statement.

In 2020 alone, according to their data, around 23 million children missed out on their recommended vaccines, a number higher than 2019. And unless we can catch up soon, measles threatens to become the sort of nightmare this year it often used to be.

The covid-19 pandemic has interrupted immunization services, health systems have been overwhelmed, and we are now seeing a resurgence of deadly diseases including measles. For many other diseases, the impact of these disruptions to immunization services will be felt for decades to come, said Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, director-general of the WHO. Now is the moment to get essential immunization back on track and launch catch-up campaigns so that everybody can have access to these life-saving vaccines.

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A Perfect Storm Could Make Measles a Nightmare in 2022, WHO and UNICEF Warn - Gizmodo Australia

Jack Colwell| South Bend Tribune

Donald Trump is right. If he were still president, the situation would be far different in Ukraine.

If Mike Pence had ignored his Hoosier values of truth, justice and the Constitution and cooperated in overturning the election results, Trump could now be president.

There would be no danger of armed conflict between Russia and NATO over Ukraine.

There would be no NATO. Trump contended throughout his first term that NATO was outdated. He belittled and insulted leaders of European nations in the alliance. He was reluctant to support the collective-defense agreement known as Article 5. By now in a second term, he would have pulled out of the alliance and scuttled it.

There would be no suggestion from a President Trump that Vladimir Putin is a butcher and must go after Russia invaded Ukraine. Trump praised the genius of Putin as Russia amassed troops for the invasion. And he wouldnt let a little thing like Russia seeking to dominate its neighbor ruin his bromance with Putin. Hey, he pulled out of Syria and let Russia dominate there.

There would be no long, heroic stand by Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy. He would have been dead a month ago. Trump holds a grudge. Zelenskyy didnt announce an investigation of Joe Biden before the election, even when Trump held up needed defensive weapons for Ukraine to force it. Fervent Trump supporters like Reps. Marjorie Taylor Greene and Madison Cawthorn havent forgotten. They call Zelenskyy a thug and corrupt. Trump, if still president, wouldnt forget and wouldnt coordinate massive arms shipments and sanctions to save Zelenskyy and thwart friend Putin.

There would be no Ukraine. Without the United States and a unified NATO providing the help to stall the invasion, Russia would have smashed into Kyiv and disposed of Zelenskyy, still with a terrible toll in Ukraine civilian deaths but with less delay against an outgunned Ukrainian military left without needed weapons.

Trump, though no longer president, still speaks out, claiming that he really won re-election and demonstrating how he would be responding to Putin if still in the White House.

Trump calls for Putin to do something now, something very important.

It wasnt a call for Putin to halt the massacres in Ukraine. It was a call for Putin to release possible dirt on President Bidens black-sheep son Hunter.

Trump resurrected and embellished a controversial, last-minute 2020 campaign contention that Hunter Biden might have (or might not have) received money through funding of a firm by the wife of Moscows mayor.

She gave him $3.5 million, Trump stated as fact. Why? I would think Putin would know the answer to that. I think he should release it, Trump said. I think we should know that answer.

Putin would of course be believed if he announced, Yes, the Bidens accepted millions in bribes along with that thug Zelenskyy to set up a Nazi government and germ warfare labs in Ukraine.

Well, U.S. intelligence agencies didnt believe Putins claims that troops on Ukraines border werent going to invade. They wouldnt believe he had turned truthful now after a life of lies.

But Trump would believe. He famously declared at a meeting with the Russian leader that he believed the word of Putin over findings of his own intelligence agencies.

If Putin did provide dirt helpful for Trumps election in 2024, it would pretty much cinch that Trump, if president again, would approve Putins conquest of Ukraine and signal no concern over Putins desire to return other countries, Poland, Hungary and the Baltics, to their status in the old Soviet Union.

While investigations continue into what Hunter Biden and Donald Trump Jr. might have done wrong, the possible transgressions of either child of a president, proven or not, shouldnt hinder the efforts to save all those children in Ukraine.

Jack Colwell is a columnist for The Tribune. Write to him in care of The Tribune or by email atjcolwell@comcast.net.

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Colwell: Things would surely be different in Ukraine if Trump were president - South Bend Tribune