Chapter 3
A Global Contamination Zone
Early Cold War Planning for Environmental Warfare
Jacob Darwin Hamblin
Vannevar Bush, the American engineer who dominated government scientific research in the 1940s, once mused that there was something in man that made him hesitate about poisoning or spreading diseases in humans, cattle, or crops. Even Hitler had refrained from it, Bush said in his 1949 book Modern Arms and Free Men. Whatever the reason, he wrote, “somewhere deep in the race there is an ancient motivation that makes men draw back when a means of warfare of this sort is proposed.” (1) The chapter in which he wrote this dealt in particular with two strange methods of warfare, biological and radiological. Both of these promised to harm one’s enemies indirectly through contaminated land, water, or entire ecosystems, and both have since fallen under various rubrics, including weapons of mass destruction and environmental warfare. (2) Bush was intimately familiar with the latest developments on them; he wrote the book while serving as chair of the National Military Establishment’s Research and Development Board, which liaised with the Joint Chiefs of Staff ( JCS) on military matters related to science and technology. He suggested in his book that few military men took biological weapons seriously, that relatively little money was spent on them, and that scientists shied from involvement in developing such weapons, all because of this innate human reaction against them. (3) Since that time, the general public’s antipathy toward biological weapons in particular and toward any kind of modification of the environment for purposes of war has been borne out by international conventions such as the Biological and Toxin Weapons Convention of 1972 and the Environmental Modification Convention of 1977.
Despite Bush’s comments and subsequent developments, studies in the strategic uses of biological and radiological warfare were pursued vigorously by the United States after World War II, partly in collaboration with Canada and the United Kingdom. (4) Most of the scholarly attention toward this research has dealt with biological weapons, and to some extent, the literature has been in the category of exposé, i.e., attempts to uncover actual use of such weapons or suggestively to call attention to the extent of research. (5)
Other works deal with contemporary policy issues, with brief attention to the origins of the research. Historical analyses are few and either focus on work during World War II or jump right into specific controversies of the 1950s and 1960s. (6) The present essay carves out a small piece of this story, the United States in the late 1940s, to examine scientists and strategic planners at the dawn of the Cold War. These years are particularly intriguing for a couple of reasons. First, military planners expecting an imminent war with the Soviet Union felt that the war was unlikely to be one in which atomic bombs could prove decisive; the United States did not yet have enough of them, the Soviet Union had not developed them at all, and rocket delivery systems were still a dream of the future. The war to come was likely to be a long total war, as the last had been, and each potentiality had to be considered. Second, these were years of significant reorientation within the corridors of power in the United States – the air force was born; the navy revolted against major budget cuts; the entire military establishment was reorganized; and civilian scientists from the war years (like Bush) wielded unprecedented influence in strategic planning. Many of the conflicts during this period revolved around control of weapons systems and clashes of ideas about how to fight a war. [7] In this historical context, how did they envision the coming confrontation with the Soviet Union, and what role would environmental manipulation and contamination play in that conflict?
Bush’s portrait of reluctant American scientists and military leaders, restrained by their abhorrence for this kind of warfare, understates the extent to which the strategic and tactical potential of massive environmental contamination gripped the imagination of the defense establishment during the early years of the Cold War. Radiological and biological weapons attracted not only those wanting cheap yet lethal weapons on a grand scale but also those who believed that the Soviets already possessed them. It is true that some military leaders during World War II, such as Admiral William Leahy, found biological weapons repugnant to Christian ethics; [8] and to be sure, American incorporation of these weapons into war plans was slow, developing only fitfully before the 1950s. But this slowness had little to do with deliberate moral choice and much more to do with the chaotic administrative and political milieu within the defense establishment in the late 1940s. This kind of warfare provoked big questions, certainly, but not exclusively ones of morality; rather, much more practical questions about the future slowed the development of biological and radiological weapons. For every incentive in pushing forward with these weapons, there were potential unpleasant consequences: a rival gaining control of the weapon system, the civilian technocrats second guessing military policies, political ammunition for the world government movement, and the alienation of key geopolitical allies. There were numerous efforts to integrate radiological and biological, and some new chemical, weapons into war plans, even to develop a unitary strategic concept for them. But the real desire to capitalize on the potentiality of these weapons – or as Bush termed them, instrumentalities – was tempered by the negative institutional and political consequences of developing them to their full potential.
Radioactivity and the future of war
Of the kinds of warfare mentioned above, radiological warfare has been least analyzed by historians. [9] Radiological weapons are not atomic bombs; they can be any kind of device – such as an explosive or spray – that utilizes the highly toxic material from the fission of uranium and/or waste products from the processing of plutonium. Today, they sometimes are called “dirty bombs.” [10] These were an early candidate for a decisive weapon system based on environmental contamination, either to prevent troop movement or to attack enemy crops and water supplies.
The use of radioactivity in warfare worried American military planners as early as World War II. General Leslie Groves, the military head of the Manhattan Project, later pointed out that some scientists had believed that radioactive warfare was militarily more significant than the bomb, because a nation could produce the necessary materials without having to build a deliverable fission explosive. In a December 1941 report titled “Radioactive Poisons,” the physicists Eugene Wigner and Henry DeWolf Smyth suggested a research program on the subject, so Groves solicited the advice of James Bryant Conant, the president of Harvard University and chair of the National Defense Research Committee. Eventually, both Conant and Groves concluded that offensive use of radioactivity by the enemy would be unlikely because of insufficient material and the inability to deliver it by aircraft. 11 However, such weapons could be used defensively far more easily – for example, by contaminating land from which one’s own army had retreated. As the United States planned the invasion of Normandy, this loomed as a disturbing possibility, and in 1943, a Manhattan Project scientist compiled a report on the possible hazards and effects. The principles laid down were used to plan Operation Peppermint, devised as a response to German use of radioactive weapons against Allied troops. [12] This entailed the manufacture of portable ion-chamber survey meters for troops to detect gamma radiation. Ultimately, however, the Germans did not contaminate the countryside as some Americans had imagined they would. [13]
A number of scientists who had worked on military projects during World War II came to see radiological warfare – not merely atomic bombs – as the environmental weapon of the future. One of these scientists was Joseph G. Hamilton, a researcher at the Radiation Laboratory at the University of California, Berkeley. Under contract with the Manhattan Project, Hamilton conducted experiments on patients without their consent, including injections of plutonium. [14] Such experiments continued during the Cold War, providing the data for studies of radiation effects on humans. After the war, two of Hamilton’s colleagues, the soil chemist Roy Overstreet and the plant biochemist Louis Jacobson, promoted the study of radioactive warfare against crops. They wrote to Hamilton in November 1946 about their “belief that one very ominous phase of atomic warfare has not been fully anticipated and has not been given the thorough investigation it requires.”
On the basis of some small-scale experiments conducted at Berkeley, they predicted that fission products could likely be used to make agricultural land barren. [15] They poured solutions of fission elements into soil columns and discovered that most of the radioactivity remained in the first few millimeters. These upper layers held the radioactive material so tenaciously that Overstreet and Jacobson concluded that it would not sink down by water leeching – and indeed even their efforts to remove the radioactive material efficiently with chemical reagents failed. However, barley plant roots absorbed it quite easily. After a certain degree of concentration, this process proved toxic to the plant. [16]
As a means to interfere with an enemy’s agriculture, this seemed most promising. After dropping radioactive material onto soil, the fission products would be taken up by plant roots. Even if the plants themselves were not killed, the amount of cesium and strontium they absorbed would transform life-giving, economy-sustaining staple crops into fields of poisonous weeds. One of Overstreet and Jacobson’s more suggestive remarks was that the operations at the government’s nuclear works at Hanford, Washington, had already produced many megacuries of long-lived radioactive waste, which presently had to be collected and stored safely. “This takes on an added significance,” they pointed out, “when one reflects that the widespread distribution of one megacurie of long-lived activity such as Sr 90 or Cs 137 may be ample for the destruction of some 250,000 acres of agricultural land for a period of years.” [17] It seemed possible to create a powerful weapon cheaply simply by taking out the trash – converting radioactive waste into radioactive weapons.
Overstreet and Jacobson’s findings prompted Hamilton and others to speculate on a future in which friendly and enemy food supplies could be contaminated easily. It did not take long to consider even more direct effects on humans. Hamilton took news of these experiments to Colonel Kenneth Nichols at the Manhattan Engineering District. Simultaneously alarmed and brimming with enthusiasm, he wrote of the promising use of “radioactive warfare” against large concentrations of people. Radioactive agents seemed novel in several respects: they could be used in small quantities; they could not be detected by touch, smell, or taste; damage was both acute and chronic, killing some people immediately but causing the decline of others over time; effects could be long lasting; and the process of decontamination would be difficult if not impossible. In addition, the creation of lethal topsoil could prove a “most ominous complication” for humans. Rain and melting snow would wash some of it away, transporting it into creeks and rivers, and then possibly on to major population centers built around major waterways. [18] He strongly urged the armed services to study “the full potentiality of such an agent,” as a protection against its possible use by an enemy. [19]
Partly because of the wartime human radiation experiments, Hamilton had a fair grasp of the internal and external effects of fission products on the body, and he had already developed some ideas about how this kind of warfare could target cities. He guessed that if radioactive materials could be spread efficiently, they would create large areas where mortal injury to lungs and bones could be expected. Already the technology existed to make this happen. Radioactive aerosols were used in experiments on the respiratory effects of inhalation by animals. These could be combined with conventional smoke-producing agents designed to obscure ships and troop movements. “Such a type of preparation would appear well adapted,” Hamilton wrote, “for producing fission product aerosols to subject urban populations to fission product poisoning by inhalation.” And once accomplished, as scientists had learned during Operation Crossroads, a 1946 Pacific Ocean atomic test, exposed structures were nearly impossible to decontaminate. [20]
Hamilton speculated about future military tactics in which the natural and built world would become a radioactive minefield. A bridge, a canal, a road, a mountain pass – all might become targets to prevent the effective movements of armies. Aerosol sprays might, without a shot being fired, render a military base inaccessible and thus unusable. The economic strength of a nation could be sapped by the contamination of railways, shipyards, docks, power plants, factories, and mills. The right mix of fission products with short half-lives might have the advantage of minimizing the destruction of economically important infrastructure, which could then be captured and utilized. [21]
Hamilton had written these reflections on the last day of the Manhattan Engineering District’s control of atomic matters, December 31, 1946. The following month, the Atomic Energy Commission (AEC) came into existence, and another body, the Military Liaison Committee, was set up as an interface between the new AEC and the armed services. Nichols wrote to the chair of that committee that the “extensive data” collected in recent years during the Manhattan Project had provided ample evidence to suggest military applications of fission products. He suggested that “the entire problem should be the subject of a comprehensive attack; and that the military services have a vital interest in such a program.” [22]
Some military officials, particularly in the army, did not require much convincing. The chief of the Army Chemical Corps, Major General Alden H. Waitt, recommended to the War Department two weeks later that the AEC should start working on such a project right away. [23] For Waitt, this was an obvious course of action. As waste, fission materials were troublesome; as war materials, they were “potentially far more toxic than most of the agents which have heretofore been developed.” He was intrigued by a line in the Smyth Report – the official administrative history of the atomic bomb project, authored by Henry DeWolf Smyth, that was published less than a week after the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The line read: “the fission products produced in one day’s run of a 100,000 kw chain-reacting pile might be sufficient to make a large area uninhabitable.” Thus far, Waitt pointed out, no practical studies had been made by the military “for obtaining such results.” Waitt saw the passage from the Smyth Report as a desired outcome by a potential future weapon. He wanted research to be made relevant to weapons production and suggested a program to devise munitions tailored to employing fission products. [24]
None of the foregoing suggests moral restraint on the part of civilian research scientists or military officials, as Bush suggested. Given their enthusiasm, then, how should one explain the failure to develop these weapons and integrate them into strategic plans? For one, the leading scientists in government came to an opposite conclusion, creating ambiguity where previously there had been a clear trajectory for action. It was the civilians on the Joint Research and Development Board, particularly Bush, the chair, and James Conant, the chair of its committee on atomic energy, who put a damper on the enthusiasm for immediate development of offensive weapons in radioactive warfare. Their attitudes were carryovers from the Manhattan Project, during which they had played down the relevance of radioactive weapons, and now they were reluctant to reverse their position. They now decided that various disadvantages – such as the scarcity of materials and the relative ineffectiveness of them – made the initiation of specific projects seem premature. But as a research and development problem it seemed promising. Bush therefore recommended handing it over to the Armed Forces Special Weapons Project (AFSWP), the new army-navy organization that inherited the remaining military responsibilities for atomic energy after the creation of the AEC in 1947. [25]
In fact, both the AFSWP and the AEC initiated research projects on military uses of radioactive material toward the end of 1947 – sometimes using the term radiological warfare instead of radioactive warfare. This was a period of bitter struggle for control of atomic energy, with the military losing out to the new civilian-dominated AEC. The AFSWP briefly became a fiefdom of Major General Leslie Groves, who moved quickly to initiate military-run studies with the cooperation of high-level civilian scientists, as he had done during the war. He discussed the plans verbally with AEC officials, and they agreed to support a program of research, coordinated by six AFSWP members working under a thick veil of secrecy. [26] In the meantime, however, the AEC also initiated its own civilian-run project at Los Alamos while congratulating Groves on his “wise decision.” Both sides promised to keep the other well informed of any developments. [27] This duplication of effort undoubtedly reflected differing views about responsibility for weapons research between civilian and military groups; perhaps both sides saw that this line of inquiry might open a new avenue for control and influence, and neither wanted to leave it to the other.
This wrangling for influence not only kept the development of radiological weapons an open question but also led to disagreements about how – if at all – to integrate environmental contamination into war planning. Ultimately, a number of civilian scientists who advised both the AEC’s Military Application Division and AFSWP’s group effectively reversed the wartime conclusions of Bush and Conant. They believed that this kind of contamination-based warfare could prove decisive. One report by Paul Aebersold, W. S. Hutchinson, Karl Z. Morgan, and M. D. Peterson identified polonium, dangerous only when inside the body, as an especially promising candidate: it was “difficult to detect, insidious in its nature, practically impossible to decontaminate or defend against,” and it was easily manufactured in large quantities by fission. They recommended it for strategic attack on vital population centers or as a sabotage weapon. [28] The eminent mathematician John von Neumann advised the AEC in 1947 on the advantages of radioactive weapons, emphasizing that they could be fashioned to any size, unlike atomic bombs. “In a continuing war,” he pointed out during one meeting, “a country which has solved the problem of making plutonium but not the atomic bomb has at that time a military potential . . . not very different from one who cannot only make plutonium but can also produce a nuclear explosion.” Thus, von Neumann argued, a strong nation needed reactors but not necessarily bombs. He calculated that the materials generated from making the Nagasaki bomb could lethally contaminate 6.4 square miles, whereas the bomb itself had produced an “important damage area” of only about 3 square miles. This difference could be increased if more attention were paid to putting waste products to efficient use. All of this would be especially pertinent in a long-term war because stockpiling such weapons, with their short half-lives, would not be effective. [29]
These estimates spurred more interest in radiological warfare, but still no single agency gained control of it. One consequence was that much of the research for it was conducted on a catch-as-catch-can basis within bomb tests, which included most interested parties. Groves noted that Operation Sandstone, the planned atomic test on the Eniwetok Atoll in the Pacific, included participants from both the AEC and the AFSWP radioactive warfare groups. Those charged with keeping the test participants safe were also charged with analyzing the bomb’s biological effects and the possible outcomes of being blanketed with nonbomb radioactive debris. Many of the personnel film badges used to record radiation exposure, for example, were intended not as safety monitoring devices but as research tools. [30] “Experiments related to radioactive warfare are being carried out in Operation Sandstone,” Groves pointed out; much of the relevant work fit under the rubrics of instrumentation, protective devices, and medical effects. [31] Despite this research, however, there was no single group conducting a concerted, well-directed effort toward development.
Absolute weapons
The preliminary work on radiological warfare complemented a growing body of recent studies of biological warfare, also devised to harm people directly or indirectly on a large scale. The United States had pursued this secretly during the war, and in 1946, it issued a public report by George W. Merck, who had headed the work. Merck was the president of the American pharmaceutical giant Merck and Company. This report was soon joined by an article in the Journal of Immunology by the bacteriologist Theodor Rosebury and his colleagues summarizing some of the prewar work – this was later expanded into the 1949 book Peace or Pestilence. [32] Behind the public documents was a robust and more organized program than the ones related to radiological warfare. Still, biological warfare also was impeded by rivalries and institutional roadblocks.
The Joint Chiefs of Staff were far from certain how to incorporate the possibly radical changes in warfare brought about by atomic bombs and biological weapons. Much of their thinking was distilled in a 1947 classified paper titled “Estimate of the Effect on the Nature of War of Future Technical Developments in Weapons,” which attempted to look at the face of war ten years ahead. The paper projected a future in which rockets would deliver atomic bombs, submarines would not need to resurface for air, tanks and infantry would be more mobile and possess more reliable equipment, and fighter planes would break the speed of sound. But it also warned of the tendency to jump too far into the future, without diligent attention to present capabilities. After all, “we must not allow ourselves to think that the era of ‘push-button’ or ‘Buck Rogers’ warfare has arrived or that it is likely to arrive in the next ten years.” The United States should not devote so many resources to future weapons, the document warned, that it finds itself incapable of fighting an unexpected war. [33]
Interservice rivalry and uncertainty about the future of the military both played important roles in constraining the incorporation of atomic and biological weapons into strategic plans. Probably the Buck Rogers comment reflected sensitivity by the navy of a tendency toward exuberance on the part of the newly formed air force. Indeed, over the next couple of years, the navy would be fighting the efforts of the air force to monopolize aviation and to focus on strategic bombing as the cornerstone of American military strategy. The head of the JCS at that time was Leahy, who already had pointed out the immorality of attacking crops with biological and chemical weapons. Yet he did not take a strong moral stand here; perhaps he and others saw an opportunity to ensure the importance of the navy. Under Leahy, the JCS played down strategic atomic bombing, stating that no other nation was likely to have more than a few atomic bombs available for use in the next ten years. And the possibility of their strategic use with long-range rockets was still a distant one. The JCS tried to make the navy seem more relevant to immediate needs, pointing out that submarine-launched rockets could seriously harass American coasts and, if loaded with radioactive materials, could disperse lethal doses onto American cities without need for a bomb at all. Biological weapons were named second after atomic bombs as the weapons developments likely to have an impact on the nature of war. The full potential of such weapons were not known, but “the possibility and, in fact, the probability of biological warfare being extremely effective cannot be ruled out.” [34]
As in World War II, the JCS expected the next war to be a total war requiring the participation of every life and drawing upon the nation’s industries running at full capacity. As scholars of this concept have argued, total war meant that every person was a combatant, soldier and civilian alike, each a participant in the clash of whole societies, not merely the clash of armies. Total war enlisted all the industrial, human, and technological power of one civilization against another. [35] Weapons of biological annihilation embodied total war thinking, as the environmental historian Edmund Russell has argued regarding chemical weapons, because they implicitly targeted civilians and were seen as tools of extermination. [36] But whereas chemical weapons were deemed most useful in tactical situations, radiological and biological warfare had large-scale strategic potential against people, industry, and agriculture. The JCS expected the era of new weapons to consolidate and extend such total war thinking. “The civil population of the United States,” they wrote, “will be drawn much more closely into war of the future than ever before.” The underlying assumption was that “the most profitable targets for attack by new weapons” would be the vital areas of industry, military power, communication, and population. Direct attacks on the American industrial system and population (i.e., cities) should be expected. [37] If this were so, the methods of warfare that maximized the death of large numbers of people would prove more decisive than the kinds of weapons that proved tactically advantageous on the battlefield.
Once again, radiological and biological weapons appeared to have a role in the United States’ strategic vision, and environmental contamination seemed poised to play an important part in war planning. However, they proved more problematic than atomic bombs amid the tensions of the Cold War, despite frequent arguments that they were more humane. The mere existence of these kinds of weapons began to work against the Truman administration, further complicating their development. Rosebury’s article and subsequent book on biological weapons, for example, became headaches for the government. This was not because Rosebury had written a critical exposé, but because the government held to a policy of silence. This became very difficult to justify once Rosebury’s work was in the public domain. His book was very explicit about its chronological cutoff point – prior to his participating in the secret wartime work – but one of his chapters was tantalizingly entitled “How Much Can Be Told?” clearly implying that the United States continued to work on such subjects. [38] So the policy of silence became somewhat ridiculous and even counterproductive. Robert W. Berry, assistant to the secretary of defense, had pointed this out to the JCS in March 1948; because “the subject gets frequent and not always judicious discussion in the press,” some public statements might help to exert greater control over how journalists treated it. [39]
One of these apparently injudicious treatments was an article that appeared toward the end of 1947 in United Nations World titled “Absolute Weapons . . . More Deadly Than the Atom.” The author, retired Navy Rear Admiral Ellis M. Zacharias, pointed out that even the disavowal and destruction of atomic bombs would leave weapons in the arsenal that could wipe out mankind. These weapons he called chemical, biological, and “climatological,” capable of exterminating not only humans but also all vestiges of animal and human life. He emphasized: “This is not a prediction of horrors to come. These weapons exist.” Several countries had them, and even countries incapable of atomic bombs could build them in the future. Rumors had it, he wrote, that the United States had not three major secret weapons projects (atomic, biological, and radiological) but perhaps four or five. Zacharias’s sensational article observed that the Soviets were not idle in the face of American successes. He speculated that, in addition to exploring rocket technology, they were pressing forward with an intensive project on the military applications of cosmic rays. [40]
For Zacharias, the distinctive character of these new “absolute weapons,” when coupled with rocket technology, was that they would permit the waging of an intercontinental “push-button” war, and that the war’s tactical nuances would be insignificant compared with the strategic goal of destroying lives and property on a massive scale. If the future indeed held this kind of conflict, even seemingly modern armaments like aircraft carriers, long-range bombers, incendiary bombs, and automatic heavy artillery “represent an era of warfare which will never again return.” The wars of the future would be enormously destructive, with the landscape continuing to kill trespassing life long after the war itself. The postwar world would be one of quarantine, keeping healthy people out of contaminated areas and keeping infected people in them, with futile attempts to do the same with animals, insects, and vegetation. Zacharias’s solution was to take the matter to the United Nations, to abolish these “absolute weapons.” [41]
The appeal to international control provoked some to see the existence of such weapons as a potential hobbyhorse for global political agendas. Some were disdainful of its apocalyptic tone. Henry Geiger, whose journal of commentary Manas was then in its fourth issue, seethed about it as a prime example of the growing exploitation of fears as a springboard for political action, in this case for strong international organization. [42] The late 1940s saw considerable interest in the movement for world government, with its slogan “One World or None.” The most famous advocate of this was the pacifist Albert Einstein, but others whose hands were more closely connected to fabricating weapons held such ideas as well. Harold Urey, no stranger to atomic bombs and other of Zacharias’s “absolute weapons,” wrote in favor of a “supra-government” and world citizenship in 1949. [43]
Another proponent of world government was the psychiatrist Brock Chisholm, the former Canadian deputy minister of health, and later the director general of the World Health Organization. In a September 1948 address at the annual meeting of the American Psychological Association, Chisholm also spoke of world citizenship. But he spoke of the disturbing fact that the old notion of competitive survival, long aided by science and technology, “has become synonymous with race suicide.” His speech, published in Science, emphasized the importance of developing a consciousness of belonging to humanity rather than to any individual nation. [44] The term race suicide was not new; it had been employed for years by eugenicists worried about disproportionate breeding between Anglo-Saxon and other ethnic populations. But Chisholm used the term in reference to the entire human race, believing that the risk of damaging it severely or wiping it out completely was quite real.
Chisholm and others coupled the fear of fantastic new weapons with a “one world” solution. But casting these weapons in the language of global contamination – as a menace to all humankind, animals, and vegetation – deeply troubled some of the influential American scientists who thus far had dominated the nexus between science and the state. It also drove them back to defending their initial skepticism about the new weapons. One of these was Harvard president James Conant, who had the displeasure of giving a speech at the same venue as Chisholm on April 28, 1948, at the Waldorf-Astoria Hotel, for the Community Service Society of New York. He was astonished at what he heard Chisholm say and found it “truly alarming,” as he wrote his friend Vannevar Bush the next day. Chisholm had made a categorical statement that there was no way that defensive warfare could catch up to the destructive possibilities already existing in offensive warfare; thus, the next war could mean the suicide of the human race. Conant was especially disturbed by Chisholm’s decision to single out biological weapons as the culprit:
The conclusions he drew in terms of education, cooperation, one world, etc. are not to the point. What disturbed me was his categoric statement about bacteriological warfare. It developed that it was not the atomic bomb, which he more or less pooh-poohed, but bacteriological warfare on which he based all his arguments. Conant saw the political implications clearly when Chisholm’s statement that no one should be elected to office except on the issue of survival of the human race met with loud applause by some twelve hundred people in the Waldorf Astoria. [45]
Conant pointed out to Bush that these ideas played directly into the hands of Henry A. Wallace, a critic of President Truman and third-party candidate in the 1948 campaign for the presidency. Wallace advocated for a more conciliatory posture toward the Soviet Union and criticized a variety of Cold War gestures on the part of the administration, such as the atomic monopoly, the continuance of the military draft, and the growing rhetoric of containing communism. 46 The month before Chisholm’s remarks, Truman had taken a hard line against Wallace, explicitly branding him and his supporters as communists. Aside from the election, the political context for this was the communist coup in Czechoslovakia and subsequent war scare of 1948, during which some believed a general war with the Soviet Union was imminent. 47 Whether they admitted it publicly or not, many influential Americans feared a biological conflict. For example, the director of the Rockefeller Foundation’s Division of Natural Sciences, Warren Weaver, worried about giving grants to non-Americans conducting biological research: “Under the conditions of modern total war,” he wrote a colleague, every element of science would be important to national security. With biological weapons, “food, drugs and many other things are as essential as are the special weapons designed by the physicists and engineers.” [48] In the midst of a war scare, here was Chisholm openly explaining what a total war would mean in a world that possessed biological weapons. Conant, never enamored of biological weapons but a firm believer in the importance of the atomic bomb in deterring Stalin, used the occasion to argue against secrecy. Biological weapons were not significant yet, he felt, and might never be – the public ought to know that. In the face of Chisholm’s apocalyptic imagery, it was the government’s responsibility to tell the American people whether he was right or wrong rather than just to allow speculation and fear to dominate. “At all events,” he wrote, “unless this line of argument can be answered, all intelligence [sic] people will end by being on Mr. Wallace’s side as far as armament and military policy are concerned.” Conant believed that disarming on the part of the United States and efforts to conciliate the Soviet Union would be interpreted as a sign of weakness. He urged Bush to use his influence to organize a civilian panel to tell the truth to the American people. “To do otherwise is to play directly into the hands of Stalin and Molotov,” he wrote. “Dr. Chisholm’s arguments are worth a fifty-group air force to the Soviet rulers!” [49]
Conant’s strongly worded warning reverberated through the military establishment. Bush wrote to Secretary of Defense James Forrestal that it was time for a public statement on biological warfare. Forrestal had suggested as much to the president two months earlier, along with a request that the United States formulate a definitive national policy, perhaps in conjunction with the United Kingdom. “The existing practice of complete silence which is our present policy on biological warfare has permitted public opinion to drift, impelled often by exaggerated bits of information, sometimes random and sometimes apparently directed, that come from non-official sources.” Thus, public awareness was not yet based on a strong foundation of facts. [50] The truth was that no policy toward them existed at all. At the time, Bush’s Research and Development Board had felt that making a statement might be premature. After Conant’s letter, Bush was less sure and suggested that a statement might be made without the existence of a policy. [51]
The slowness of developing a policy was due, in part, to Bush’s own reticence; but in addition, the Joint Chiefs of Staff had not resolved its own reservations and internal conflicts about the importance of environmental contamination. The JCS wanted to make a thorough comparison of the three kinds of contamination-based warfare, namely biological, radiological, and chemical, before committing to their firm incorporation into military planning. All three, as Captain W. G. Lalor put it, “had a similar potential in that they would be employed to contaminate areas for neutralization or mass casualty effect without material destruction.” [52] Admiral Leahy, who headed the JCS, supported studies on biological warfare, protection against attack, and coordination of intelligence about other countries’ activities. [53] But he and the JCS were still struggling with service responsibilities, technological systems, and other implications, including the question of whether to include biological warfare under the rubric of “weapons of mass destruction.” Thus far they had deferred judgment and certainly were not ready for a national policy on their use. [54]
Bush believed that the slowness could be solved by an integrated look at all three methods of nonfission weapons of mass destruction – chemical, biological, and radiological (which he and others called CBR). Seeing the reluctance of military authorities “to view these methods of warfare in proper perspective in the complex of weapons systems,” Bush tried to offer some tentative conclusions about CBR in August 1948. They were based on admittedly shaky foundations. Radiological warfare had little reliable information to recommend it – it was “still a matter principally of speculative thinking rather than experimental exploration.” Biological warfare had received far more attention, but quantitative results were fragmentary at best. Only in chemical warfare were the data reasonably well established, but even so, the newer munitions presented an array of uncertainties. The end result was that the importance of these methods had become a matter of “random conjecture and to ‘sales’ efforts in behalf of one kind of warfare or another,” with no framework for formulating actual war plans. [55]
Although he pointed at the military for slowness, Bush also was largely to blame because he had resisted explicit policy formulation. But here was an opportunity to get his and Conant’s ideas out into the open again. Conveniently, there was already a panel in existence, sponsored by the Army Chemical Corps, that dealt with chemical and biological warfare and another, a joint undertaking of the AEC and the National Military Establishment, concerned with radiological warfare. Both were headed by the same man, W. A. Noyes, and Bush asked him to combine the groups so that their final product would report on the whole, integrated potential of all three kinds of warfare. [56] Ultimately, the Noyes group put a damper on the expectations for radiological warfare. Despite concluding that a radiological warfare program was essential, it stated that radiological weapons would not revolutionize war or even prove decisive in a large-scale conflict. Contamination of an area to prevent troop movements was not feasible; at least 50 percent death rate would be needed for psychological effect. Serious contamination was still possible, but offensive capabilities were at least two years away, and this would mean careful selection of just a few targets. [57]
With this information in hand, government consensus appeared to return to the skepticism favored by Bush and Conant during the war. This conclusion acted as a political salve at a time when fear of biological weapons was high. Forrestal was prepared to make a public statement to diffuse the public hubbub over these superweapons. The public statement did not occur in time for the election, but instead was issued in March 1949, just before Truman replaced Forrestal as secretary of defense. Because most of the apprehensions had been related to biological warfare, Forrestal addressed the issue head-on. “Biological warfare,” he stated, “is an attempt to harness certain forces of nature for purposes of war.” By this, he meant disease, to be used against the enemy’s people, livestock, and crops. He pointed out that the armed forces of any democratic nation had the responsibility of informing the public of their activities, as long as it was consistent with national security. The Merck Report had been the first effort to do that, but it had sparked discussions that were “extravagant, inaccurate, and unduly spectacular in the light of present scientific knowledge.” There were some specific impressions Forrestal hoped to correct:
For example, it has been stated that a single plane with a small bomb filled with a biological agent would be capable of wiping out the population of an entire city with a single blow. . . . [I]n a recent article it was stated that one ounce of a particular biological material would be sufficient to kill 200,000,000 people. . . . One article stated that biological warfare makes it possible to kill the inhabitants of an entire continent very quickly. . . . Such claims are fantastic and have no basis in fact. Forrestal went on to say that it would be folly to underestimate the potential of biological weapons, but presently there was no reason to make extravagant claims about the use of superweapons to spread diseases at will. [58]
Ironically, this effort to dispel fantastical rumors piqued the interest of those within government who believed that the rumors would not be so far off the mark if the weapons were more fully explored. As before, the views of Bush and Conant did not represent true consensus. A few days after making this statement, Forrestal appointed his own ad hoc committee, chaired by the entomologist Caryl Haskins, to examine the whole problem of biological warfare. The committee included leading civilian and military figures, such as Alfred L. Loomis and Alden H. Waitt. Forrestal originally had planned to limit their task to unconventional uses, such as sabotage; however, Forrestal wrote to Haskins, “I now believe that we should avail ourselves of this opportunity to undertake a full examination of all the technical and strategic possibilities of biological warfare.” He encouraged the committee to be “highly imaginative” but realistic, taking into account all political, economic, and strategic implications. [59]
When Forrestal’s successor, Louis Johnson, received the report, he found that a new concept had been created. Under Haskins’s leadership, the committee had determined that all of these new weapons – unlike atomic bombs – had one thing in common; namely, their primary goal was to kill or cause disease in living organisms. “Radiological weapons and some of the newer chemical weapons,” the committee reported, “are essentially ‘biological’ in effect and closely resemble biological weapons in the importance of their future capabilities and in respect to strategic employment, defensive requirements, and public relations.” The committee thus invented a unitary concept – CEBAR (chemical, biological, and radiological) – that blended the three “as a new entity in national defense planning.” These were the silent weapons, directed exclusively against man – directly as a biological entity or indirectly by diminishing humans’ food and other living resources. [60]
In another about-face on the importance of environmental contamination, the Haskins group effectively reversed the tone of the Noyes committee and challenged reservations about incorporating CEBAR into military planning. In contrast with Forrestal’s public statement playing down the likelihood of spreading epidemic diseases, the group pointed out that the foreseeable improvements would increase the potency of biological agents to a very large degree; indeed, they stated that the biological and medical fields were on the threshold of great advances comparable to atomic fission in physics, including the ability to spread epidemics or set off “other biological ‘chain-reactions.’” This term was employed to reflect a parallel to atomic bombs, to be sure, but it also hinted at ecologic vulnerability – indirect causes and effects through the food chain. Although it was true that human epidemics were currently beyond their grasp, they explicitly stated that epidemics were quite possible in plants and animals, without any new knowledge. Thus, the present rudimentary state of knowledge should not impede the integration of CEBAR into national planning. These weapons’ usefulness – in military operations, foreign affairs, economic policies, psychological warfare, “and perhaps even other more subtle applications of national power, can be as important as bold and imaginative planning sees fit to make it.” The JCS thus far had seen the insufficient understanding of CEBAR as a reason to avoid integrating it into strategic plans. Haskins and his colleagues disagreed, recommending that strategic planning with CEBAR in mind should be undertaken without any further delay. [61]
With this single foot forward, the Haskins group also acknowledged a possible reason to take two steps back. In his committee’s report to the secretary of defense, Haskins pointed out that the United States needed to be very careful about the international implications of CEBAR weapons. The government already had implied, by referring in 1945 to atomic bombs and “other weapons of mass destruction,” that these fell into a special moral category requiring international concern and control. Technically, only chemical weapons had been identified explicitly as requiring special rules. Biological weapons seemed to qualify, too, because of their close association with chemical weapons. No commitment at all had been made about radiological weapons. Some in government had suggested removing biological warfare and radiological warfare from the category. But although Haskins agreed that they might not be realistically classed this way, the potential was there. Changing national policy would invite dissent and criticism. The Soviet Union might offer to give up such weapons to embarrass the United States. Because such a propaganda stunt “might have considerable appeal to large sectors of the American public and world opinion,” Haskins argued against any change to the concept that CEBAR weapons were in fact weapons of mass destruction. [62] In effect, American policy toward this apparent family of weapons was locked in by fear of successful propaganda.
Although Haskins had recommended research and integration into strategic plans, he directed this primarily toward human-centered defensive research and animal- and crop-centered offensive research. Haskins had visited the United Kingdom a few months earlier and had concluded that both countries had insufficient knowledge to tell whether epidemic human diseases could be started and controlled at will. It seemed to be a giant gamble. The only relevant experience, the great influenza epidemic of 1918–19, suggested that the damage from epidemics would likely be worldwide in scope. Only with more research on defending (i.e., immunizing) against these diseases could offensive warfare against humans be realistically contemplated. Antilivestock and anticrop weapons seemed the most logical choice for offensive use. These would have less of an effect on the United States because of its wide variety of foods and its surpluses of grains; but against countries like India or China, with their large populations and high reliance on single crops, anticrop agents could prove devastating. [63]
The real enemy, of course, was the Soviet Union. The constant Cold War tension in the years prior to the Korean War led the government’s advisers to consider war likely, if not inevitable, and they believed that the Soviet Union was developing these same kinds of weapons. Haskins’s committee guessed that the Soviet Union might be further along in offensive warfare against humans than the United States. They based their conclusion on the possibility that the Soviets might have engaged in human experimentation and the possibility, suggested by the Central Intelligence Agency, that they might view nonconforming communist satellites such as Yugoslavia as testing grounds. [64] It seemed clear to Haskins’s committee that some kind of American human experiments would be necessary to prevent the possible disparity in expertise between the United States and the United Kingdom, on the one hand, and the Soviet Union, on the other, from growing even further. This would require human volunteers, the use of publicly acceptable methods of experimentation, and a vigilant awareness of public relations. The report emphasized that even if the dangers to these volunteers were great, the risk would be deemed necessary: “In no other way can the needed knowledge be obtained.” [65] Given the catastrophic potential of war, such choices seemed morally justifiable to these men.
The secretary of defense continued to seek advice on the subject after Haskins’s committee was dissolved, and he soon convened yet another committee under the leadership of Earl P. Stevenson. No stranger to unorthodox forms of warfare, Stevenson had suggested in 1942 that bats might be used to drop small incendiaries on the Japanese countryside. [66] Now Stevenson followed Haskins in embracing all three weapons systems, but he disagreed that they should be lumped together, thus abandoning the short-lived concept of CEBAR. Haskins had stated that the essentially biological effects of all three justified a unitary concept, but the new committee viewed them as different enough to warrant separate consideration. What Haskins had seen as a unified theme, Stevenson saw as a provocative question about the nature and direction of war toward the destruction of life – a question his committee and the JCS’s Joint Strategic Plans Group was content to put in abeyance for the time being:
The so-called “larger problem” of determining the total effect on a nation’s war effort of large-scale personnel destruction (such as might be potentially possible by BW [biological warfare]) as opposed to the presently accepted method of material destruction was discussed. It was generally agreed that a study . . . on this question would be helpful in determining the extent to which this nation should back large-scale anti-personnel weapons.
In the meantime, Stevenson acknowledged that their immediate obstacle was not this “larger problem”; instead, it was the inability to get the proverbial ball rolling on development, planning, and policy. He attributed this to the fact that few in government took the subject seriously enough. When he and members of the Joint Strategic Plans Group met to discuss his committee’s forthcoming report, they agreed that the United States needed a strong program of development of biological weapons at the proving grounds in Dugway, Utah, to obtain planning data; in addition, they urged the creation of production facilities and serious efforts to integrate biological warfare and radiological warfare into strategic plans. But most significant of Stevenson’s recommendations to the Department of Defense and the JCS was his strong argument for abandoning the “retaliation only” policy on the use of biological and radiological weapons. [67]
The attempt to overthrow the retaliation-only policy has elicited considerable comment from historians wishing to portray an eagerness on the part of the United States to use biological weapons. The aforementioned meeting took place on June 21, 1950, and four days later, North Korea invaded South Korea. Stevenson completed his committee’s report by the end of the month. Thus, it is with this prelude – a clear desire to integrate both biological warfare and radiological warfare into strategic plans (chemical weapons were judged useful only tactically) and a definite recommendation that the United States stop swearing not to use them unless an enemy did so first – that we enter the first major controversy about the United States and biological warfare. During the Korean War, the North Koreans and the Chinese, backed by the Soviet Union, accused the United States of experimenting with biological warfare in Korea. The official protests came in February 1952 directly from Bak Hun Yung, the North Korean foreign minister, and Zhou Enlai, the Chinese foreign minister. These charges were supported by the confessions of captured American airmen, who subsequently abjured their statements on their return to the United States. [68]
The U.S. government denied the charges, and Secretary of State Dean Acheson challenged the Chinese and the Koreans to allow the International Red Cross to enter the war zone and make an independent scientific assessment of the landscape and alleged victims. The Chinese forbade this, calling the International Red Cross untrustworthy for having collaborated with the Nazis during World War II. They also did not trust the World Health Organization, as it was a United Nations body and UN troops were fighting against North Korea. Kuo Mo-Jo, the president of the Chinese People’s Commission for World Peace, appealed to the World Peace Council, whose founding president, Frédéric Joliot-Curie, was a communist, to send an international group of scientists to investigate. The scientists’ lengthy report came to the conclusion that the United States had indeed engaged in biological warfare. [69] Because the members of the scientific team (including the illustrious British scientist Joseph Needham) all were sympathetic to communism, the conclusion convinced few skeptics. The London Times quoted British diplomat Selwyn Lloyd as saying, “never had so much been written by such confirmed fellow-travelers to prove so little.” [70]
Several Western scientists were thoroughly persuaded that the Americans had employed biological weapons in Korea. From Britain, Needham proved a reluctant participant in the scientific team sent to China, but he returned with a renewed conviction, which he carried throughout his life. [71] The team included a Swede, two Italians, a Frenchman, a Brazilian, and a Russian, all of whom exchanged outraged letters with one another after the prisoners of war retracted their statements in 1953. [72] Their outrage was not one of embarrassment but rather of continued abhorrence at what they considered an atrocity by the Americans, now clearly being covered up with, as the Italian microbiologist Franco Graziosi put it, “ridiculous retractions.” [73] In France, the most famous figure to denounce the United States was Joliot-Curie, a Nobel Prize–winning physicist who had married Marie Curie’s daughter Irène (also a Nobelist, like her mother, who had won two).
The Chinese showered Joliot-Curie with corroborating information, all of which is still held at the archives of the Institut Curie in Paris. He received copies of the handwritten confessions of American airmen, along with photographs of the alleged players: airmen, American spies sent to gather evidence, and the Chinese scientists who identified the infected animals and insects. He also received several photographs of flies, spiders, beetles, fungi, and other alleged carriers of pathogens. [74] The Chinese also drew heavily upon the slim public record of biological weapons. In addition to references to the Merck Report, Rosebury’s 1947 paper and 1949 book, and statements by Forrestal, there were numerous newspaper clippings – from the New York Times and other major papers, to military-audience papers like Stars and Stripes, to communist-friendly venues such as the Daily Worker. All reported bits and pieces of evidence about research centers, projects, efforts to incorporate biological weapons into war plans, and the postwar use of Nazi and Japanese scientists by the United States. [75]
The allegations were not resolved in subsequent years, but two developments in 1998 complicated the question for historians. The first was the publication of a book by Stephen Endicott and Edward Hagerman amassing all of the circumstantial evidence that might imply that the United States had experimented with biological warfare in Korea. The book emphasized the prewar enthusiasm for biological warfare expressed by the Noyes, Haskins, and Stevenson committees. [76] However, despite their conviction that the United States was guilty, they produced no direct evidence. As one historian concluded, they relied on inference and innuendo: “Unfortunately, their book is full of smoke,” Sheldon Harris wrote, “but they found no smoking gun.” [77] The second development was the publication of materials from Russian archives that document the post-Stalin power struggle in the Soviet Union, during which Lavrentiy Beria ousted a rival, Semen D. Ignatiev.
One of the principal accusations against Ignatiev was that he knowingly concealed from his government the fact that the allegations were false, thus leading the Soviet Union into an embarrassing geopolitical predicament. These documents included statements about the creation of false contamination zones, the deliberate infection of condemned Korean prisoners with cholera and plague bacilli, and the manipulation of the foreign scientists visiting China. [78] Joseph Needham, who died in 1995, might have been chagrined to read these documents, which identify the Russian scientist on his international panel, the bacteriologist N. N. Zhukov-Verezhnikov, as an agent of the Soviet Union’s Ministry of State Security. [79]
Although the internal debate about the retaliation-only policy is an intriguing entrée into the controversy over use of biological warfare in Korea, JCS archival documents suggest that the proposed leap to a new policy was intended to dislodge bureaucratic roadblocks to research, not to encourage actual use. The army, navy, and air force disagreed among themselves about whether to change the policy. Stevenson’s original reason – supported by the army and air force – was that the retaliation-only policy hampered both offensive and defensive research, tending to relegate it to a low priority and stifle American efforts for war readiness. According to this view, radiological weapons and biological weapons were paper tigers, as Mao Zedong once said of the United States; even insiders did not think they would be used offensively, so why commit the funds? The strongest reason for the change was not an immediate military need but rather a perceived need to remove obstacles in their development. In this view, the retaliation-only policy encouraged indecision and insufficient financial support. [80]
Opposition to the army and air force view was not due to any particular moral stand on the nature of war or a repugnance to targeting populations. Rather, as the navy pointed out, removing this restriction would horrify the American public and American allies, and it easily could be used as propaganda by the Soviet Union. The navy, also favoring a strong program, argued that the lack of preparedness was rooted elsewhere, and that the United States should look to the United Kingdom as a model of a strong development program that did not alter the policy on use. [81] Admiral Forrest P. Sherman, chief of naval operations, pointed out that trying to change the policy secretly would probably prove impossible, and in any event, it would get bogged down in the National Security Council, further impeding rather than increasing readiness. He wrote: “The current theme of the Soviet propaganda program . . . is aimed at proving that the USSR is the champion of peace and of the outlawing of weapons of mass destruction, while the United States is an imperialist nation, bent on conquering the world, and is preparing as rapidly as possible to use the most cruel, diabolical weapons of mass destruction to accomplish its purpose.” Changing the policy, with this in mind, would be incredibly counterproductive for the United States. [82]
Ultimately, the change did not occur. The chair of the JCS, General Omar Bradley, tried to address the problem by emphasizing that a high priority should be given to the development of these new weapons despite their retaliation-only status. The navy’s view – particularly because of its sensitivity to political ramifications – won the day. But Bradley did recommend, and Secretary of Defense George C. Marshall made it a directive, continuing strong programs in all three fields. [83]
This essay has attempted to illuminate the political and institutional dynamics influencing American decisions about radiological and biological warfare between World War II and the Korean War. These decisions would have ramifications for the development of other kinds of environmental warfare in subsequent years. The term environmental warfare now means any manipulation of the forces of nature for hostile purposes. It came into currency after the intensive use of chemical defoliants by American military forces in Vietnam and during the negotiations for the Environmental Modification (Enmod) Convention of 1977. Environmental warfare should not be confused with the incidental effects of war on the natural environment. Although a number of outspoken scientists have linked large-scale military conflagration with environmental catastrophe, environmental warfare is different: it entails the purposeful use of the environment as a means of waging war. One aspect of environmental warfare is the manipulation of the earth’s biota to harm one’s enemy. Some scientists believed in the 1980s that they were on the threshold of even greater forms of environmental control – not just of biotic forces but of atmospheric and geotectonic ones as well. [84]
Since World War II, researchers and war planners have conceptualized weapons that exploit our knowledge of the land, the water, and the wind to harness their formidable powers. 85 The Enmod Convention of 1977 attempted to prohibit use of such weapons, though it allowed nations to possess them. [86] Today we typically conceptualize biological, radiological, and chemical weapons as “weapons of mass destruction,” a label that not only allows us to lump them with nuclear weapons but also blurs their status as tools of environmental warfare. But it is worth remembering how the entomologist Caryl Haskins thought of them: as weapons that targeted living things rather than material infrastructure. They utilized the pathways of nature to spread disease, to kill livestock, and to starve the enemy by poisoning crops. Far from unintentional, this kind of environmental warfare was the ultimate expression of total war.
Vannevar Bush suggested that there was something holding people back from developing such weapons or planning wars based upon them – after all, even Hitler had found them repellent. The modest aim here is to show that enthusiasm was actually high, but that there were bureaucratic and political difficulties in integrating such weapons into war plans – for relatively pedestrian reasons when compared to the intrinsic moral question. Yet for historians, the moral question remains prominent because it is essential in evaluating how events might have unfolded within the moral climate of the time. It may be tempting to believe that American leaders uniformly found biological and radiological warfare abhorrent, but it would be wrong to presume that these weapons naturally fell outside the boundaries of war planning. Quite the opposite is true, and many considered the weapons to be morally equivalent to existing weapon systems or even preferable because they could be used through the environment as tools of interdiction, to control the enemy’s movements rather than kill soldiers or civilians outright. It is a curious fact, for example, that some American political leaders outspokenly saw radiological weapons as a potential solution to the Korean problem – as well as the problem of radioactive waste. In an article entitled “Atomic Death Belt Urged for Korea,” the New York Times pointed out in 1951 that Congressman Albert Gore had advised President Truman to “dehumanize” a belt across the Korean peninsula. The dangerous wastes from plutonium processing could be put to good use, he said, and the president could avoid the political repercussions of using an atomic bomb:
Just before this is accomplished, broadcast the fact to the enemy, with ample and particular notice that entrance into the belt would mean certain death or slow deformity to all foot soldiers; that all vehicles, weapons, food and apparel entering the belt would become poisoned with radioactivity, and, further, that the belt would be regularly re-contaminated until such time as a satisfactory solution to the whole Korean problem shall have been reached. This would differ from the use of the atomic bomb in several ways and would be, I believe, morally justifiable under the circumstances. [87]
Certainly, Gore was aware of a moral objection, but it did not constrain him.
The fact that such a plan did not materialize had little to do with moral or ethical constraints; rather, there would have been practical difficulties in making it work. The article juxtaposed Gore’s suggestion with a reference to the AEC’s report of August 1950, “The Effects of Atomic Weapons,” which devoted considerable space to radiological warfare but played down its tactical value. Because physiological effects would be delayed, the AEC report stated, the weapons would have primarily a psychological effect. [88] Such weapons would contribute to an enemy’s calculus of opportunities and risks, but they could not stop soldiers or tanks. The tactical advantage of using the weapons would not be worth the political consequences. Others reinforced this conclusion in the New York Times a day after the reporting of Gore’s idea, including Senator Brien McMahon, chair of Congress’s Joint Committee on Atomic Energy. One of the few comments on morality came from an army publication that stressed the humaneness of radiological weapons, on the basis of the fact that people could choose to avoid the accumulation of harmful radiation simply by evacuating the target areas. Thus, wars might be won without killing people at all, the author seemed to suggest, simply by arming the countryside itself. Dead, contaminated landscapes could prove to be the mark of a more humane style of warfare. Most of these comments suggest enthusiasm bridled by practical limitations – and political limitations as well. Korea, after all, was not a total war necessitating the expenditure of every ounce of strength. We must look to the efforts to integrate these weapons into strategic plans, for a global conflict with the Soviet Union, to understand how Americans thought they might fight sometime in the coming decade. [89] Is it safe to assume that, had World War III occurred in the early 1950s, these absolute weapons would have been used? It is tempting to say, “Absolutely.” But the truth is that, for the reasons discussed here, environmental contamination was not fully integrated into war planning during the early Cold War. Given a short war, the answer may be “probably not.” However, the United States was not betting on a short war with the Soviet Union. The conflict promised to be a long, protracted struggle, global in scope and total in its use of human and industrial resources. This would have been an ideal setting to make use of those radiological weapons with a short shelf life, as von Neumann suggested. And in a total war, biological weapons targeting humans and crops might have seemed strategically necessary. Military planners expected the Soviet Union to make use of the full range of weapons in its possession, particularly if its atomic arsenal was small, and that would have called for retaliation in kind. Had a long general war taken place, it appears likely that it would have involved the purposeful spread of disease among crops and humans, as well as widespread radioactive contamination with or without atomic bombs – a scale of environmental warfare that fortunately still lives only in the realm of fiction and speculation.
Notes:
1 Vannevar Bush, Modern Arms and Free Men: A Discussion of the Role of Science in Preserving Democracy (New York, 1949), 147.
2 Weapons of mass destruction are more widely known. The term environmental warfare denotes the manipulation of the environment for hostile purposes and has come to include many variants beyond the manipulations of the biosphere discussed in this chapter; manipulations of space and/or celestial bodies, the atmosphere, the lithosphere, and the hydrosphere also fall into the category of environmental warfare. See Arthur H. Westing, ed., Environmental Warfare: A Technical, Legal and Policy Appraisal (London, 1984).
3 Bush, Modern Arms and Free Men, 142–7.
4 The tripartite (U.S., U.K., Canada) collaboration on chemical, biological, and radiological weapons is inventoried and discussed in Gradon Carter and Graham S. Pearson, “North Atlantic Chemical and Biological Research Collaboration: 1916–1995,” Journal of Strategic Studies 19, no. 1 (1996): 74–103. On the U.K. program, see Brian Balmer, Britain and Biological Warfare: Expert Advice and Science Policy, 1930–65 (New York, 2001); and Balmer, “Killing ‘Without the Distressing Preliminaries’: Scientists’ Defence of the British Biological Warfare Programme,” Minerva 40, no. 1 (2002): 57–75.
5 The question of use during the Korean War has provoked the most controversy and has received the most attention. One book that attempts to prove that the United States secretly experimented with biological weapons during the conflict is Stephen L. Endicott and Edward Hagerman, The United States and Biological Warfare: Secrets from the Early Cold War and Korea (Bloomington, Ind., 1998). Another book, focused on revelations of secrets, is Seymour M. Hersh, Chemical and Biological Warfare: America’s Hidden Arsenal (New York, 1968).
6 On World War II, see Barton J. Bernstein, “America’s Biological Warfare Program in the Second World War,” Journal of Strategic Studies 11, no. 3 (1988): 292–317. On the postwar period, for a multiauthored history with thematic chapters devoted to individual countries’ programs, allegations of use, terrorism, and other subjects, see Mark Wheelis, Lajos Rózsa, and Malcolm Dando, eds., Deadly Cultures: Biological Weapons since 1945 (Cambridge, Mass., 2006). For a single-authored account of biological weapons throughout the twentieth century, see Jeanne Guillemin, Biological Weapons: From the Invention of State-Sponsored Programs to Contemporary Bioterrorism (New York, 2005). For a thorough analysis of specific pathogens and of the links between prewar and postwar research, see Gerard James Fitzgerald, “From Prevention to Infection: Intramural Aerobiology, Biomedical Technology, and the Origins of Biological Warfare Research in the United States, 1910–1955,” Ph.D. diss., Carnegie Mellon University, 2003. Also see George W. Christopher, Theodore J. Cieslak, Julie A. Pavlin, and Edward M. Eitzen Jr., “Biological Warfare: A Historical Perspective,” in Biological Weapons: Limiting the Threat, ed. Joshua Lederberg (Cambridge, Mass., 1999). A significant historical background on anticrop weapons is included in Simon M. Whitby, Biological Warfare against Crops (London, 2002).
7 On reorganization, see Anna Kasten Nelson, “President Truman and the Evolution of the National Security Council,” Journal of American History 72, no. 2 (1985): 360–78. On the navy’s problems, see Jeffrey G. Barlow, Revolt of the Admirals: The Fight for Naval Aviation, 1945–1950 (Washington, D.C., 1994). There are many works written about scientists’ postwar roles; on Bush in particular, see G. Pascal Zachary, Endless Frontier: Vannevar Bush, Engineer of the American Century (Cambridge, Mass., 1999).
8 Bernstein, “America’s Biological Warfare Program,” 304.
9 One can run across references to it while looking into other topics, such as biological effects of radiation and/or nuclear fallout, research labs, and (in the case of the present author) radioactive waste. See Barton C. Hacker, Elements of Controversy: The Atomic Energy Commission and Radiation Safety in Nuclear Weapons Testing, 1947–1974 (Berkeley, Calif., 1994); Peter J. Westwick, The National Labs: Science in an American System, 1947–1974 (Cambridge, Mass., 2003); Jacob Darwin Hamblin, Poison in the Well: Scientists and Radioactive Waste at Sea at the Dawn of the Nuclear Age (New Brunswick, N.J., forthcoming).
10 A fact sheet about dirty bombs from the Nuclear Regulatory Commission can be found at
http://www.nrc.gov/reading-rm/doc-collections/fact-sheets/dirty-bombs.html11 “Background History,” Feb. 15, 1948, attached to L. R. Groves to Joint Chiefs of Staff, Feb. 15, 1948, National Archives and Records Administration (NARA) RG 218, Central Decimal File, 1948–1950, Box 206, Folder 5.
12 The report was A. V. Peterson, “Manual on Use of Radioactive Materials in Warfare.” See “Back-ground History,” Feb. 15, 1948, NARA RG 218, Central Decimal File, 1948–1950, Box 206, Folder 5.
13 Images of the portable Victoreen Model 247A ion chamber, developed in the war, can be found at the Oak Ridge Associated Universities Web site, at http://www.orau.org/ptp/collection/surveymeters/vic247a.htm
14 These studies initially were conducted on rats. The human work continued after the war, and Hamilton requested further supplies of plutonium to be used in human studies. Only in December 1946, just before turning over its activities to the newly created Atomic Energy Commission, did the district call a halt to the experiments. Colonel Kenneth D. Nichols said as much in a memorandum, pointing out that human experimentation was neither to be recommended nor interpreted as within the bounds of contract 48-A. However, the studies would be resumed under the AEC in 1947. U.S. Department of Energy, Advisory Committee on Human Radiation Experiments, Final Report, available at http://www.eh.doe.gov/ohre/roadmap/achre/report.html . See chapter 5.
15 R. Overstreet and L. Jacobson to Joseph G. Hamilton, Nov. 11, 1946, NARA RG 218, Central Decimal File, 1948–1950, Box 206, Folder 5.
16 Ibid.90
17 Ibid.
18 Joseph G. Hamilton to Colonel K. D. Nichols, Dec. 31, 1946, NARA RG 218, Central Decimal File, 1948–1950, Box 206, Folder 5.
19 Ibid.A Global Contamination Zone
20 Ibid.
21 Ibid.
22 K. D. Nichols to Chairman, Military Liaison Committee, Jan. 24, 1947, NARA RG 218, Central Decimal File, 1948–1950, Box 206, Folder 5.
23 Alden H. Waitt to Director, Research and Development Division, War Department General Staff, Feb. 7, 1947, NARA RG 218, Central Decimal File, 1948–1950, Box 206, Folder 5.
24 War Department, Office of the Chief, Chemical Corps, “Project: Radioactive Materials for Military Purposes,” n.d. [forwarded with letter dated Feb. 7, 1947], NARA RG 218, Central Decimal File, 1948–1950, Box 206, Folder 5.
25 J. B. Conant to Joint Research and Development Board, July 30, 1947, NARA RG 218, Central Decimal File, 1948–1950, box 206, Folder 5a; V. Bush to Chief, Armed Services Special Weapons Project, Oct. 14, 1947, NARA RG 218, Central Decimal File, 1948–1950, Box 206, Folder 5. On AFSWP, see Defense Threat Reduction Agency, U.S. Department of Defense, Defense’s Nuclear Agency, 1947–1997 (Washington, D.C., 1997), chap. 1.
26 L. R. Groves to Atomic Energy Commission, Dec 8., 1947, NARA RG 218, Central Decimal File, 19481950, Box 206, Folder 5a. The AFSWP members were Captain Frank I. Winant Jr. (navy), Colonel Robert N. Isbell (army), Lieutenant Colonel Karl H. Houghton (army), Major William W. Stone Jr. (army), Dr. Herbert Scoville Jr., and Rosemary T. Porter (USNR).
27 Carroll L. Wilson to Major General Leslie R. Groves, Dec. 24, 1947, NARA RG 218, Central Decimal File, 1948–1950, Box 206, Folder 5.
28 This report, “An Estimation of the Feasibility of Radiological Warfare,” May 1947, is quoted in “Background History,” Feb. 15, 1948, attached to L. R. Groves to Joint Chiefs of Staff, Feb. 15, 1948, NARA RG 218, Central Decimal File, 1948–1950, Box 206, Folder 5.
29 Von Neumann is quoted in “Background History,” ibid.
30 On the radiation protection group during Operation Sandstone, see Barton C. Hacker, Elements of Controversy: The Atomic Energy Commission and Radiation Safety in Nuclear Weapons Testing, 1947–1974 (Berkeley, Calif., 1994), chap. 1.
31 L. R. Groves to Joint Chiefs of Staff, Feb. 15, 1948, NARA RG 218, Central Decimal File, 1948–1950, Box 206, Folder 5.
32 George W. Merck, “Report to the Secretary of War on Biological Warfare,” Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists 2, no. 16 (1946); T. Rosebury, E. A. Kabat, and M. H. Boldt, “Bacterial Warfare,” Journal of Immunology 56, no. 7 (1947); Theodor Rosebury, Peace or Pestilence: Biological Warfare and How to Avoid It (New York, 1949).
33 “Estimate of the Effect on the Nature of War of Future Technical Developments in Weapons.” This document, though classified “restricted,” was a version of another higher-classification paper with more sensitive information deleted. No author or date, attached to (and explained in) Fleet Admiral William D. Leahy, memorandum to the Secretary of War and Secretary of the Navy, June 14, 1947, NARA RG 218, Central Decimal File 1948–50, Box 207, Folder “Future Technical Development of New Weapons.”
34 Ibid.
35 There is considerable literature on the concept of total war; some see origins in the wars of the French revolution, but others have analyzed it in particular regard to the American Civil War and the world wars. See Peter Paret, ed., Makers of Modern Strategy: From Machiavelli to the Nuclear Age (Princeton, N.J., 1986).
36 Edmund Russell, War and Nature: Fighting Humans and Insects with Chemicals from World War I to Silent Spring (New York, 2001).
37 “Estimate of the Effect on the Nature of War of Future Technical Developments in Weapons.” No author or date, attached to Fleet Admiral William D. Leahy, memorandum to the Secretary of War and Secretary of the Navy, June 14, 1947, NARA RG 218, Central Decimal File 1948–50, Box 207, Folder “Future Technical Development of New Weapons.”
38 See Rosebury, Peace or Pestilence, chap. 2.
39 Robert W. Berry to the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Mar. 1, 1948, NARA RG 218, Central Decimal File, 1948–1950, Box 206, Folder 5A.
40 Rear Admiral Ellis M. Zacharias, “Absolute Weapons . . . More Deadly than the Atom,” United Nations World (Nov. 1947): 13–15.
41 Ibid.
42 “Periodical: Random Notes,” Manas 1, no. 4 (1948), 6.
43 Many of these ideas are contained in Morton Grodzins and Eugene Rabinowitch, The Atomic Age: Scientists in National and World Affairs (New York, 1963). See esp. Sergei Vavilov, A. N. Frumkin, A. F. Ioffe, and Nikolai Semenov, “On Albert Einstein’s Support of World Government,” 125–9; Albert Einstein, “Einstein Replies,” 130–4; and Harold C. Urey, “The Paramount Problem: A Plea for World Government,” 106–20.
44 George Brock Chisholm, “Social Responsibility,” Science 109, no. 2820 (1949): 27–30, 43.
45 James Conant to Vannevar Bush, Apr. 29, 1948, NARA RG 218, Central Decimal File, 1948–1950, Box 206, Folder 6.
46 See Richard J. Walton, Henry Wallace, Harry Truman, and the Cold War (New York, 1976). On Truman’s outlooks on containing communism, see John Lewis Gaddis, Strategies of Containment: A Critical Appraisal of American National Security Policy during the Cold War (New York, 1982).
47 See Robert A. Divine, “The Cold War and the Election of 1948,” Journal of American History 59, no. 1 (1972): 90–110.
48 Weaver is quoted in John Krige, American Hegemony and the Postwar Reconstruction of Science in Europe (Cambridge, Mass., 2006), 123.
49 James Conant to Vannevar Bush, Apr. 29, 1948, NARA RG 218, Central Decimal File, 1948–1950, Box 206, Folder 6.
50 James Forrestal to the President, Mar. 16, 1948, NARA RG 218, Central Decimal File, 1948–1950, Box 206, Folder 6.
51 Vannevar Bush to James Forrestal, May 17, 1948, NARA RG 218, Central Decimal File, 1948–1950, Box 206, Folder 6.
52 W. G. Lalor to Chairman, Research and Development Board, July 6, 1948, NARA RG 218, Central Decimal File, 1948–1950, Box 206, Folder 6.
53 William D. Leahy to Secretary of Defense, July 7, 1948, NARA RG 218, Central Decimal File, 1948–1950, Box 206, Folder 6.
54 James Forrestal to the President, Mar. 16, 1948, NARA RG 218, Central Decimal File, 1948–1950, Box 206, Folder 6.
55 Vannevar Bush to Joint Chiefs of Staff, Aug. 17, 1948, NARA RG 218, Central Decimal File, 1948–1950, Box 206, Folder 7.
56 Ibid.
57 Rainbow Team to Major General Alfred M. Gruenther, Jan. 7, 1949, NARA RG 218, Central Decimal File, 1948–1950, Box 206, Folder 7.
58 National Military Establishment, Office of the Secretary of Defense, “Secretary Forrestal Issues
Statement on Biological Warfare Capabilities,” press release, Mar. 12, 1949, NARA RG 218, Central Decimal File, 1948–1950, Box 206, Folder 8.
59 Secretary of Defense to Caryl Haskins, Mar. 16, 1949, NARA RG 218, Central Decimal File, 1948–1950, Box 206, Folder 8.
60 Ad Hoc Committee on Biological Warfare of the Department of Defense, report, July 11, 1949, NARA RG 218, Central Decimal File, 1948–1950, Box 206, Folder 8.
61 Ibid.
62 Ibid.
63 Ibid.106
64 Haskins’s report alludes to the communist satellite question briefly and refers to a document furnished to the committee by the Central Intelligence Agency titled “Report on Possible Recent Uses of BW within Yugoslavia,” Nov. 23, 1948. See Ad Hoc Committee on Biological Warfare of the Department of Defense, report, July 11, 1949, NARA RG 218, Central Decimal File, 1948–1950, Box 206, Folder 8.
65 Ad Hoc Committee on Biological Warfare of the Department of Defense, report, July 11, 1949, NARA RG 218, Central Decimal File, 1948–1950, Box 206, Folder 8.
66 The letter describing this idea can be found in Andrew Carroll, Behind the Lines: Powerful and Revealing American and Foreign War Letters, and One Man’s Search to Find Them (New York, 2005). The document itself is online, read by former Batman actor Adam West, at http://www.gilderlehrman.org/collection/battlelines/chapter4/chapter4_7a.html
67 A. M. Prentiss Jr., Colonel (USAF), memorandum of conversation to Colonel Bayer, June 23, 1950, NARA RG 218, Central Decimal File, 1948–1950, Box 206, Folder 9.
68 The basic facts of these allegations can be found in a number of sources. Two that take opposite views about their plausibility are Stephen Endicott and Edward Hagerman, The United States and Biological Warfare: Secrets from the Early Cold War and Korea (Bloomington, Ind., 1998); and Kathryn Weathersby, “Deceiving the Deceivers: Moscow, Beijing, Pyongyang and the Allegations of Bacteriological Weapons Use in Korea,” Bulletin of the Cold War International History Project 11 (1998): 176–85.
69 “Report of the International Scientific Commission for the Investigation of the Facts Concerning Bacterial Warfare in Korea and China,” 1952, Archives, Institut Curie, Fonds Joliot-Curie, Box F-130.
70 “Virus Culture,” Times, Oct. 30, 1953, Archives, Institut Curie, Fonds Joliot-Curie, Folder “Correspondence Jean Malterre.”
71 Tom Buchanan, “The Courage of Galileo: Joseph Needham and the ‘Germ Warfare’ Allegations in the Korean War,” History 86, no. 284 (2001): 503–22.
72 These letters are contained in Archives, Institut Curie, Fonds Joliot-Curie, Folder “Correspondence Jean Malterre.”
73 Franco Graziosi to Jean Malterre, Nov. 25, 1953, Archives, Institut Curie, Fonds Joliot-Curie, Folder “Correspondence Jean Malterre.”
74 Archives, Institut Curie, Fonds Joliot-Curie, Box F-130.
75 Ibid.
76 Endicott had been working on the subject for many years, including a 1979 article in the journal Modern China emphasizing the importance to the U.S. Joint Chiefs of Staff of the term plausible denial. Stephen Endicott and Edward Hagerman, The United States and Biological Warfare: Secrets from the Early Cold War (Bloomington, Ind., 1998); Stephen L. Endicott, “Germ Warfare and ‘Plausible Denial’: The Korean War, 1952–1953,” Modern China 5, no. 1 (1979): 79–104.
77 Harris and other scholars, in reviewing the book, pointed out these biases while guardedly acknowledging that more information needs to be released by governments before making definitive statements one way or the other. Sheldon H. Harris, Factories of Death: Japanese Biological Warfare, 1932–1945, and the American Cover-Up (New York, 2002), 327. Harris’s review is in the Journal of American History 87, no. 1 (2000): 285–6. See also John Ellis van Courtland Moon’s review in the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists 55, no. 3 (1999): 70–7.
78 The documents were published by the Japanese newspaper Sankei Shimbun, having been copied by hand by reporter Yasuo Naito. Because of archival access problems, the documents’ provenance has not yet been confirmed. Two scholars writing for the Cold War International History Project, Kathryn Weathersby and Milton Leitenberg, each wrote analyses of the documents in 1998, acknowledging the problem of verifying their provenance, yet both found them persuasive. Weathersby particularly pointed out that the indirect nature of the evidence, through a different subject entirely – namely “the byzantine power struggle within the Soviet leadership in the first months after Stalin’s death in March 1953” – gives them an added degree of credibility in laying to rest the allegations. See Kathryn Weathersby, “Deceiving the Deceivers: Moscow, Beijing, Pyongyang and the Allegations of Bacteriological Weapons Use in Korea,” Bulletin of the Cold War International History Project 11 (1998): 176–85; Milton Leitenberg, “New Russian Evidence on the Korean War Biological Warfare Allegations: Background and Analysis,” Bulletin of the Cold War International History Project 11 (1998): 185–99.
79 Explanatory note from Glukhov to the Ministry of Public Security of the DPRK, Apr. 1, 1953. This document is reproduced in Weathersby, “Deceiving the Deceivers,” 180.
80 Joint Strategic Plans Committee, report to the Joint Chiefs of Staff, on “Chemical, Biological, and Radiological Warfare,” Aug. 7, 1950, NARA RG 218, Central Decimal File, 1948–1950, Box 206, Folder 9. The army view is contained in J. E. Hull to Secretary of Defense, Aug. 22, 1950, NARA RG 218, Central Decimal File, 1948–1950, Box 206, Folder 9.
81 The disparity in army and navy views is evident in early drafts of Joint Strategic Plans Committee, report to the Joint Chiefs of Staff, on “Chemical, Biological, and Radiological Warfare.” NARA RG 218, Central Decimal File, 1948–1950, Box 206, Folder 9.
82 Memorandum by the Chief of Naval Operations for the Joint Chiefs of Staff on “Chemical,
Biological, and Radiological Warfare,” Sept. 6, 1950, NARA RG 218, Central Decimal File, 1948–1950, Box 206, Folder 9.
83 Omar N. Bradley (Chair, Joint Chiefs of Staff) to Secretary of Defense, Sept. 8, 1950, NARA RG 218, Central Decimal File, 1948–1950, Box 206, Folder 9. See also G. Marshall to Secretary of the Army, Secretary of the Navy, and additional recipients, Oct. 27, 1950, NARA RG 218, Central Decimal File, 1948–1950, Box 207, Folder “Chemical, Biological, and Radiological Warfare.”
84 Westing, Environmental Warfare, 1.
85 Richard A. Falk, “Environmental Disruption by Military Means and International Law,” in Westing, Environmental Warfare, 33–44.
86 Jozef Goldblat, “The Environmental Modification Convention of 1977: An Analysis,” in Westing, Environmental Warfare, 53–64.
87 “Atomic Belt Urged for Korea,” New York Times, Apr. 17, 1951, 3.
88 Ibid.114
89 “Atomic Belt Plan Held Not Feasible,” New York Times, Apr. 18, 1951, 16.
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