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CHEMICAL AND BIOLOGICAL WARFARE

CHEMICAL AND BIOLOGICAL WARFARE. While limited use of chemicals and disease in warfare dates from ancient times, the origins of modern chemical and biological weapons systems date from the era of the two world wars. The term chemical warfare came into use with the gas warfare of World War I, and modern biological warfare dates from the weapons systems first introduced in the 1930s.

Early Gas Warfare

Following the first successful German gas attack with chlorine in the World War I battle at Ypres in 1915, the British, French, and, in 1918, the U.S. armies responded with gases including phosgenes, mustard gas, hydrogen cyanide, and cyanogen chloride. Initially spread from portable cylinders by the opening of a valve, delivery systems were extended to mortars and guns. In 1918 the U.S. War

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Department established the Chemical Warfare Service (CWS) as part of the wartime, but not the regular, army.

The specter of future gas warfare left by the war revived earlier efforts to ban chemical warfare. Gas caused 1 million of 26 million World War I casualties, including over 72,000 of 272,000 U.S. casualties. The first attempt to ban gas warfare was a separate proposition to the first Hague Peace Conference in 1899. The United States didn't sign, arguing that there was no reason to consider chemical weapons less humane than other weapons, and that since there were no stockpiles of gas weapons it was premature to address the issue. Following World War I, the United States signed but the Senate failed to ratify the 1925 Geneva Protocol prohibiting chemical weapons, again arguing that they were as humane as other weapons and that the United States needed to be prepared. This direction was anticipated when the immediate postwar debate in the United States over chemical warfare resulted in the CWS becoming a part of the regular army in 1920. In 1932, chemical warfare preparedness became U.S. military policy.

The use of gas warfare in the 1930s by Italy in Ethiopia, Japan in China, and possibly elsewhere increased concern going into World War II. But the gas war of World War I did not recur. U.S. strategists apparently considered using gas during one crisis in the Pacific, but President Franklin D. Roosevelt, who declared a retaliation-only policy on chemical warfare at the beginning of the war, with held his approval. The most significant development in chemical weapons during the war was the well-kept secret of German nerve gases.

Early Biological Warfare

Biological warfare received little attention in the United States prior to the outbreak of World War II. But with entry into the war, and growing awareness of other biological warfare programs, the United States established a large program and entered into a tripartite agreement with the programs of Canada and Great Britain.

These cooperating programs focused on antipersonnel weapons, while also doing anticrop and antianimal work. They experimented with a range of agents and delivery systems, and anthrax delivered by cluster bombs emerged as the first choice. A production order for an anthrax-filled bomb was canceled because the war ended. U.S. strategists considered using a fungus against the Japanese rice crop near the end of the war but dropped the plan for strategic reasons. Japan became the first nation to use a modern biological weapons system in war when it employed biological warfare against China.

Biological weapons introduced several new issues, including the ethical implications of the Hippocratic oath forbidding the use of medical science to kill. They also offered new military possibilities to be weighed in any debate over banning such warfare. The United States accepted the 1907 Geneva Regulations prohibiting biological weapons but subsequently joined Japan as the only nation not to ratify the ban in the 1925 Geneva Protocol. The United States again sidestepped the issue of biological weapons in the post–World War II United Nations negotiations to limit weapons of mass destruction. Meanwhile, U.S. strategic planners and their British partners advocated the tactical, strategic, and covert possibilities of biological weapons as well as their potential as weapons of mass destruction. They also emphasized the relatively low cost of such weapons and the fact that they did not destroy physical infrastructure, thus avoiding the costs of reconstruction.

The Cold War

In 1950 the U.S. government, concurrent with the growing tensions of the early Cold War, and especially the outbreak of the Korean War, secretly launched a heavily funded and far-ranging crash program in biological warfare. Gas warfare development expanded at an equal pace, especially work with nerve gas. Sarin was standardized in 1951, but emphasis shifted in 1953 to the more potent V-series nerve gases first developed by the British. VX was standardized in 1957, though a standardized delivery system was not developed. But biological warfare had a higher priority than chemical: indeed, the biological warfare crash program introduced in 1950 shared highest-level priority with atomic warfare. The primary objective for biological weapons was to acquire an early operational capability within the emergency war plan for general war against the Soviet Union and China. By the time of the Korean War, an agent and bomb were standardized both for anticrop and antipersonnel use while research and development went forward with a broad range of agents and delivery systems. In the post–Korean War period many agents and several delivery systems were standardized, one of the more interesting being the standardization in 1959 of yellow fever carried by mosquito vectors. Further, the U.S. government secretly took over the Japanese biological warfare program, acquiring records of experiments with live subjects that killed at least 10,000 prisoners of war, some probably American. In exchange, the perpetrators of the Japanese program were spared prosecution as war criminals.

Another indication of the priority of biological warfare was the adoption in early 1952 of a secret first-use strategy. U.S. military strategists and civilian policymakers took advantage of ambiguities in government policy to allow the Joint Chiefs of Staff (JCS) to put a secret offensive strategy in place. Though the United States reaffirmed World War II retaliation-only policy for gas warfare in 1950, the JCS after some debate decided that it did not by implication apply to biological warfare. They concluded there was no government policy on such weapons, and the Defense Department concurred. Consequently the JCS sent directives to the services making first-use strategy operational doctrine, subject to presidential approval. During the Korean War, the United States also created a deeply buried infrastructure for covert biological warfare in the Far East. Data from the Chinese archives for the Korean War, corroborated by evidence from the U.S. and Canadian archives, builds a strong case for the United States experimenting with biological weapons during the Korean War. The issue remains controversial in the face of U.S. government denial. In 1956 the United States brought policy into line with strategic doctrine by adopting an official first-use offensive policy for biological warfare subject to presidential approval.

Escalation and the Search for Limits

In 1969, President Richard M. Nixon began changing U.S. policy with regard to chemical and biological warfare. In the midst of growing public and congressional criticism over the testing, storage, and transportation of dangerous chemical agents, Nixon resubmitted the 1925 Geneva Protocol, which the Senate ratified in 1974. But the United States decided there was evidence the Soviets had chemical weapons in their war plans, which set off efforts to reach agreement with the Soviets on a verifiable ban while at the same time returning to a posture of retaliatory preparedness. In 1993 the United States joined Russia and other countries in signing the Chemical Weapons Convention. The Senate delayed ratification because it was dissatisfied with the lack of "transparency" in the Russian and other programs. But negotiations continued and further agreements were reached between the U.S. and Russia.

Nixon also unilaterally dropped biological warfare from the U.S. arsenal in 1969, and in 1972 the United States signed the Biological Warfare Convention banning all but defensive preparations. The Senate ratified the convention in 1974. Negotiations to extend the 1972 convention to include an adequate inspection system continued with little progress through most of the 1990s, and early in his presidency George W. Bush withdrew from these negotiations.

Attempts to limit biological weapons under international law floundered for several reasons. There was no accord on the terms of an inspection agreement. Mutual suspicions were heightened by the Russian government's admission that their Soviet predecessors had violated the 1972 convention, and by charges and counter-charges of hidden capabilities across the international landscape.

This unrest was enhanced by a generation of growing use of biological and chemical weapons. The United States had used the biological anticrop AGENT ORANGE in the Vietnam War. Chemical weapons were used in the Iran-Iraq war and by Iraq against the Kurds. The Soviets apparently used chemical weapons in Afghanistan, and there were unconfirmed reports of the use of both chemical and biological weapons elsewhere.

Also highly controversial was the issue of whether provisions for defense against biological warfare under the 1972 convention provided an opening for research for offensive use. Concern in this respect increased with greatly expanded funding for defense against biological weapons; evidence of offensive work hiding under the rubric of defensive work; new possibilities with recombinant DNA and genetic engineering; and pressures for preparedness arising from the 11 September 2001 terrorist attack on the United States. At the beginning of the new millennium these considerations thickened the fog surrounding the question of whether biological and chemical warfare would be limited or extended.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Brown, Frederic J. Chemical Warfare: A Study in Restraints. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1968. Reprint, Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1981.

Cole, Leonard. The Eleventh Plague: The Politics of Biological and Chemical Warfare. New York: Freeman, 1997.

Endicott, Stephen, and Edward Hagerman. The United States and Biological Warfare: Secrets from the Early Cold War and Korea. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1998.

Harris, Robert, and Jeremy Paxman. A Higher Form of Killing: The Secret History of Chemical and Biological Warfare. New York: Hill and Wang, 1982.

Harris, Sheldon H. Factories of Death: Japanese Biological Warfare, 1932–45, and the American Cover-Up. London and New York: Routledge, 1994. Rev. ed., New York: Routledge, 2002.

Miller, Judith, Stephen Engelberg, and William Broad. Germs: Biological Weapons and America's Secret War. New York: Simon and Schuster, 2001.

Edward Hagerman

See also Bioterrorism.