The Dead Hand

by David Hoffman

  In 1957, high-altitude photography of the island in the Aral Sea by U-2 spy planes showed more than 150 buildings, grouped into two settlements about two and a half miles apart. Still, intelligence analysts found the photos inconclusive. Another U-2 photo run was made in 1959. The photos offered no more clues; the U.S. analysts still had doubts. They said the facilities seemed too crude for testing of biological weapons. In 1965, the Soviet program still remained a mystery. A CIA study that year concluded: “Despite a considerable expenditure of time and resources, the pursuit of intelligence on biological warfare activities in the USSR has been unrewarding. There is no firm evidence of the existence of an offensive Soviet BW program.” The CIA analysts were puzzled because they expected to find a Soviet germ warfare program, but had not. They titled their report “The Enigma of Soviet BW.”25

  The United States entered the search for biological weapons early in World War II, following Great Britain, which feared the Axis powers would use the weapons. In October 1941, Secretary of War Henry Stimson asked the National Academy of Science for advice about the dangers. The response in February 1942 was that biological warfare was feasible.26 In May, a small civilian agency was set up, the War Reserve Service, under George W. Merck, chairman of Merck & Company, the pharmaceutical company, to begin developing a biological weapons program. In December, the army’s Chemical Warfare Service took over and prepared a large-scale research and development program. By April 1943, ground was broken for a research facility at Camp Detrick, Maryland, a small air national guard training site forty-five miles north of Washington. In December 1943, the Office of Strategic Services had received “inconclusive” intelligence that Germany might use biological weapons, perhaps putting anthrax or Botulinum toxin in their cross-channel rockets.27 The U.S. program was expanded, and more fully integrated into the War Department. Alarm about a possible German biological weapon led British Prime Minister Winston Churchill to ask the United States for 500,000 anthrax munitions. The army refitted a plant at Vigo, Indiana, in 1944 for the production of anthrax spore slurry. The Vigo plant was equipped with twelve 20,000-gallon fermenters, capable of producing fill for 240 four-pound anthrax bombs an hour. The plant underwent safety tests, but the war ended before production began.28 The Germans never weaponized biological agents; it turned out the Japanese program was much more active. During the war, the American biological weapons program was conducted with the secrecy equivalent of the Manhattan Project, and details were unveiled only in January 1946 by Merck. One aspect that remained hidden until later was the United States grant of immunity from prosecution to the leaders of Japan’s notorious Unit 731 in exchange for details about their research.29

  During the Korean War, extensive propaganda from the Soviet Union and China accused the United States of using biological weapons in Korea. Documents declassified in recent years show that although the United States attempted to accelerate and acquire biological weapons during the war, the effort to create a viable weapons program was unsuccessful.30 After the war, the program expanded with the Cold War and competition with the Soviet Union. A facility built at Pine Bluff, Arkansas, for large-scale fermentation, concentration, storage and weaponization of microorganisms began production in 1954. Human experimentation using military and civilian volunteers started in 1955. Biological bombs were detonated inside a one-million-liter hollow metallic spherical aerosolization chamber at Fort Detrick, Maryland, known as “the 8 ball.”31 An open-air testing site was built at Dugway Proving Ground in Utah. In May 1962, the army created a biological and chemical warfare coordinating organization, the Deseret Test Center, located at Fort Douglas, Salt Lake City, Utah. This center served as the headquarters for the biological warfare test operation. The United States carried out as many as 239 open-air trials between 1949 and 1969. Among them, American cities were unknowingly used as laboratories to test aerosols and dispersal methods; the test sites included tunnels on the Pennsylvania Turnpike.32 These field tests were carried out with harmless microbes that simulated the behavior of biological warfare. In the 1950s, an American program known as St. Jo developed and tested bombs and delivery methods for possible wartime use of anthrax weapons against Soviet cities. One hundred seventy-three test releases were made of noninfectious aerosols in Minneapolis, St. Louis and Winnipeg, Canada, cities chosen to have approximately the same climate, urban and industrial development and topography as Soviet cities. The weapon to be used was a cluster bomb holding 536 biological bomblets, each containing thirty-five milliliters of anthrax spore slurry and a small explosive charge.33Much more ambitious tests with live agents were used in sea trials carried out in 1965 and 1968 against monkeys as targets on ships and islands in the Pacific Ocean. The 1968 test showed that a single airborne dissemination tank could disperse a virulent infectious agent over nearly a thousand square miles.34 British trials using simulants between 1963 and 1969 also showed that if released by a ship or airplane along a hundred-mile-long line, significant concentrations of bacterial aerosol had passed more than fifty miles inland after a few hours. The trials confirmed that aerosolized bacteria could remain viable for several hours in the open, with 80 percent of the population infected up to forty miles, and half the population infected between forty and eighty miles inland.35

  There was growing concern among scientists about the use of chemical and biological weapons in war. On February 14, 1967, some five thousand scientists, including seventeen Nobel Prize winners and 129 members of the U.S. National Academy of Sciences, asked President Lyndon Johnson in a petition to “re-establish and categorically declare the intention of the United States to refrain from initiating the use of chemical and biological weapons.” Among those who organized the effort were Matthew Meselson, professor of molecular biology at Harvard University. The petition prompted a White House effort to draft a statement saying the United States would not be the first to use biological weapons in the future, but the military objected, and Johnson never issued the statement.36

  Then came an accident. It involved a chemical weapons test but had much broader repercussions. At 5:30 P.M. on Wednesday, March 13, 1968, an air force jet roared over a circular target grid laid out at Dugway Proving Grounds on the Utah desert floor and sprayed 320 gallons of the lethal nerve gas VX. As the plane zoomed up, a valve failed to close. The deadly VX continued to pour from the plane, was picked up by wind gusts and spread as far as forty-five miles away. Within three days, thousands of sheep in the Skull and Rush valleys were sickened or died.37 The incident came to light only a year later when revealed in a television newsmagazine broadcast.38 Representative Richard McCarthy, a Democrat of Buffalo, New York, who saw the broadcast, began to challenge the army, angered by the secrecy surrounding chemical and biological weapons. “The rule seemed to be: tell as little as possible, and if you get caught in a mistake, fabricate your way out of it,” McCarthy said. Although some scientific research results from the U.S. program were openly published, there were also secret parts, including the Pacific Ocean field tests.

  Nixon had just taken office. His new defense secretary, Melvin Laird, a former eight-term congressman from Wisconsin, aware of the congressional mood, wrote to National Security Adviser Henry Kissinger that “it is clear the administration is going to be under increasing fire” from Congress. Laird urged a full-scale review of American germ warfare policy.39

  Nixon faced huge protests at the time over Vietnam. The United States had used herbicides such as Agent Orange to defoliate forests and destroy rice crops, and tear gas to force out North Vietnamese fighters from bunkers, drawing international condemnation. Also, that summer the United Nations issued a startling report by fourteen scientists emphasizing the powerful impact of biological weapons, which, if used, could transform a society and its environment. The scientists said that in an attack, biological weapons would infect a wide area. The use of ten tons of agent might cover 38,610 square miles, slightly larger than the state of Indiana. The notion of using biological weapons in war �
�generates a sense of horror,” the scientists said. “Mass disease, following an attack, especially of civilian populations, could be expected not only because of the lack of timely warning of the danger but because effective measures of protection or treatment simply do not exist or cannot be provided on an adequate scale.”40 The World Health Organization, providing the scientific and medical details for the UN panel, estimated that 110 pounds of dry anthrax, if used by a single bomber against a target city in a suitable aerosol form, would affect an area far in excess of 7.7 square miles, “with tens to hundreds of thousands of deaths.”41

  On November 25, 1969, Nixon announced the United States would unilaterally stop all offensive biological weapons research and destroy the stocks, while maintaining a program of defensive research. He also pledged no first use of chemical weapons, but said the United States would retain them. He vowed to finally send the 1925 Geneva Protocol to the Senate for ratification and he endorsed a British proposal for a follow-up treaty to limit biological weapons. It was the first time in the Cold War that an entire class of weapons was discarded unilaterally.42

  Why did Nixon do it? He appears to have acted, at least in part, out of a personal desire to show that he was a more effective leader than his predecessors had been, especially Kennedy and Johnson. Nixon asserted to Kissinger the decision “wouldn’t have been possible without Nixon trust. And … Eisenhower didn’t even suggest these things.”43 According to diaries kept by his chief of staff, H. R. Haldeman, Nixon called Haldeman the night of the announcement and wanted to talk politics, urging Haldeman to convene a staff meeting for the next day so Kissinger could emphasize at the meeting that President Johnson could not have attained all Nixon had done—including the biological weapons decision—because Johnson “didn’t have the confidence of the people or the world leaders.”44

  Nixon also adopted the view that nuclear weapons were the supreme deterrent and made biological weapons unnecessary. In his briefing for members of Congress, Kissinger’s written talking points said, “We do not need BW for deterrence when we have nuclears.” After Kissinger’s press briefing, Nixon asked Kissinger in their phone conversation “if he was able to get across the point on deterrent, and K said he had.” White House speechwriter William Safire, who drafted Nixon’s renunciation, asked the president whether a few biological weapons should be retained as a deterrent. “We’ll never use the damn germs, so what good is biological warfare as a deterrent?” Nixon replied. “If somebody uses germs on us, we’ll nuke ’em.”45

  Nixon was also urged by scientists to give up biological weapons. Meselson, who knew Kissinger from Harvard, submitted a memorandum to him in September 1969, saying the United States should ratify the Geneva Protocols, outlawing the use of chemical and biological weapons in war. Meselson wrote, “Very small quantities of disease germs would be sufficient to cover large areas: a light aircraft can deliver enough to kill populations over several thousand square miles.” Medical defenses can be “rendered ineffective” against germ warfare, he said, and “reliable early warning systems have not yet been devised.” As a deterrent to attack, he added, the United States already had nuclear weapons. Thus, “we have no need to rely on lethal germ weapons and would lose nothing by giving up the option to use them first.” Meselson added, “Our major interest is to keep other nations from acquiring them.”46

  Separately, scientists on a panel of the President’s Science Advisory Committee finished a report in August urging Nixon to scrap offensive biological weapons research and destroy the stockpiles.47

  Nixon announced his decision in the Roosevelt Room of the White House after informing congressional leaders. In his talking points for the press and members of Congress, Kissinger said, “Control and effectiveness of BW agents is questionable.”48 Nixon adopted this argument in his announcement: “Biological weapons have massive, unpredictable, and potentially uncontrollable consequences. They may produce global epidemics and impair the health of future generations.”49 In fact, the American and British trials had shown biological weapons could be well-controlled strategic weapons. Nixon had omitted the related category of toxins from his first statement, but on February 14, 1970, renounced them as well.

  A few months after the toxins announcement, Laird sent an inventory of the U.S. biological weapons arsenal to the White House. It included 220 pounds of anthrax dried agent. According to Laird’s list, the U.S. also had 804 pounds of dried tularemia bacteria and 334 pounds of the incapacitating agent Venezuelan equine encephalomyelitis virus, dried, with another 4,991 gallons in liquid suspension. Also in liquid suspension were 5,098 gallons of Q fever. The list said the United States had filled 97,554 munitions with toxins, biological agents or simulants.50 The United States also stockpiled 158,684 pounds of wheat rust and 1,865 pounds of rice blast, both to be used as anti-crop weapons. No missiles were armed with biological warheads, although a bomblet-containing warhead for the short-range surface-to-surface Sergeant missile had been designed. There were eight aircraft sprayers.51 General Earle Wheeler, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, had told Nixon at the National Security Council meeting that the Pine Bluff facility could go into production on thirty days’ notice.52 The military arsenal was destroyed by 1973, although the CIA was admonished during a congressional hearing two years later for illegal retention of extremely small amounts of toxin samples.

  In his original declaration, Nixon expressed hope that other nations would follow the U.S. example. The Soviet Union did not.53

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  THE ANTHRAX FACTORY

  Ground zero for testing smallpox and other biological weapons in the Soviet Union was a hot, arid and sandy island, isolated and remote. It was named Vozrozhdeniye, or Rebirth Island, and located in the middle of the Aral Sea, once the fourth-largest inland sea in the world. In the early 1970s, the sea was drying up. Rivers that fed the sea had been diverted for cotton irrigation by Soviet planners. The shoreline receded and water deteriorated, while pesticide runoff increased, threatening birds, fish and small mammals with extinction.

  In mid-July 1971, a Soviet civilian research ship, the Lev Berg, named after a famous Russian biologist and geologist, set sail from Aralsk, a city of fifty thousand then at the northern tip of the sea. On those summer days, the mission of the Lev Berg was to sample the ecological damage. The ship left July 15 and made a long circle around the shoreline. Winds across the water always drifted in a southerly direction. On July 31, the Lev Berg was south of Vozrozhdeniye Island. The ship then returned to home port August 11. A twenty-four-year-old woman who had worked on the deck of the ship, hauling nets and archiving samples, went home and became very ill. In the weeks that followed, she came down with smallpox, then spread it to nine other people in Aralsk. Three died, including two infants under one year old.1

  No direct evidence exists that a smallpox test was the reason for the outbreak, but a senior Soviet official, Pyotr Burgasov, said years later that a test had been conducted there. At the time of the smallpox outbreak, Burgasov was Soviet deputy minister of health.2 He recalled: “A highly potent smallpox formula was being tested on Vozrozhdeniye Island in the Aral Sea …

  Suddenly I got a report saying that deaths from unknown causes had been registered in the town of Aralsk. Here is what happened: A research vessel from the Aralsk Shipping Company came within 15 kilometers of the island (it was forbidden to approach closer than 40 kilometers) and a lab assistant went out on deck twice a day, taking plankton samples. Smallpox pathogen—a mere 400 grams of the formula had been exploded on the island—“got” her; she contracted smallpox, and when she returned home to Aralsk, she infected several more people, some of them children. There were no survivors. When I had pieced together the facts, I called the chief of the USSR General Staff, asking him to forbid Alma-Ata–Moscow trains to stop in Aralsk. Thus a nation-wide epidemic was prevented. I called Andropov, KGB head at the time, and told him about the exceptionally potent smallpox formula developed o
n Vozrozhdeniye Island. He ordered me to keep mum. This is what real bacteriological weapons are like! Minimum effective range: 15 kilometers. You can easily imagine what would have happened had there been not just one lab assistant, but 100 or 200 people around at the time.3

  The smallpox outbreak was hushed up by the Soviet authorities and never reported to the World Health Organization.

  In 1971, the same year as the Aralsk outbreak, a renewed diplomatic effort was made to strengthen international control over germ warfare. The 1925 Geneva Protocol had covered both chemical and biological weapons. The British proposed at the Conference on Disarmament in Geneva to separate germ warfare from chemical weapons, and to tackle biological weapons first. The idea was that it would be easier to ban germ warfare before moving on to chemical weapons.4 Nixon’s decision to close down the American biological weapons program had given a new impetus to negotiations.

  The Soviet Union had long insisted on an “immediate and simultaneous ban” on both biological and chemical weapons. But in March 1971, they suddenly agreed to split the two issues. The Soviet Union and the United States approved a new treaty prohibiting biological weapons, which was sent to the United Nations in August and approved unanimously by the General Assembly in December. The Biological and Toxin Weapons Convention was signed in London, Washington and Moscow on April 10, 1972. The four-page agreement banned the development and production of biological weapons, and the means of delivering them. Specifically, Article 1 declared:

  Each state party to this Convention undertakes never in any circumstances to develop, produce, stockpile or otherwise acquire or retain: (1) Microbial or other biological agents, or toxins whatever their origin or method of production, of types and in quantities that have no justification for prophylactic, protective or other peaceful purposes; (2) Weapons, equipment or means of delivery designed to use such agents or toxins for hostile purposes or in armed conflict.