Biological weapons are not used by the US due to practicality, not morality.<p>1. It's difficult to manufacture biological agents in large quantities.<p>2. It's hard to store biological agents for long periods of time, since living things tend to die.<p>3. It's hard to disperse biological agents over a large area. Spray tanks require flying at low altitude at slow speeds, or multiple deployments at high speeds. Munitions with bursters are problematic because the explosive burster tends to destroy much of the biological agent that you're trying to spread.<p>4. It's easy to protect troops in the field from biological agents and all major countries maintain and exercise the capability to do so.<p>5. Biological agents are slow acting and unreliable in their effect.<p>Long after the Korean War, the Soviet microtoxin program overcame many of these problems. The Americans took a different approach and focused on improving nerve agents, with the most recent development (that I know of) being a multi-part agent called GB-2.
I stopped reading when the author categorized "prisoners of war being told to read confessions over Chinese propaganda radio" as "testifying publicly", almost at the start of the piece:<p>> It was the propaganda version of an incendiary bomb. In 1952 U.S. Air Force and Marine flyers, shot down during the Korean War, testified publicly that they had been ordered to drop biological weapons (BW) on China and North Korea.<p>The two sentences feel intentionally written to obfuscate the fact that the statements were made under duress as POWs; it strongly implies that they testified, after the war, about dropping biological weapons.<p>Even if much of what he does discuss did happen (the US secretly pardoning Japanese units that did absolutely horrific experiments on people for chemical and biological warfare, for example, and of course we used a lot of horrific shit in Korea and Vietnam), there's so much that is unsourced / uncited mixed in.<p>Half the links in the text are to his own writing, another chunk are to other Medium blogs, with a sprinkling of newspaper clippings (because the newspapers were so trustworthy back during that time)...pass.
This reminds me of a video I stumbled across on YT : <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eMq-fApmzts">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eMq-fApmzts</a><p>This guy alleges that the US were 'kind' on Japan (only light tribunal?) after the war because they wanted to acquire the bio-warfare knowledge of the Japanese.<p>And the Japanese tested bio-bombs.
CIA: Oh we totally did that in the 40's, 50's, 60's, 70's, 80's, 90's and we totally tried to cover it up for decades but hey we totally stopped now! Proof? We said we stopped didn't we? Why do you need proof?<p>Anyone who thinks we're still not doing it is a fool. COVID19 is in all likelihood bioweapons research gone wrong. It doesn't take much sleuthing to uncover the Eco Health Alliance application DARPA to test furin cleavage sites on bat corona viruses. DARPA told them "no" and yet here we are. Saying what I'm saying will get you labeled a conspiracy theorist. Would be a shame if there were ever people that conspired and we used that heuristic to dismiss people.<p>But that's OK with me, conspiracy theories are having a phenomenal few years! We should may consider changing the name to "spoiler alerts".
Reading this, my meta conspiracy theory is that conspiracy theories are rarely false, it's just that talking about them at all disqualifies you from being invited to participate in them. Your option is either to be a practical conspirator by joining in, or remain on the outside as a just theorist.
I've heard another variation of this story. The broad outline is that the USG thought the Chinese/Soviets had some sort of mind-control/brainwashing technique that triggered these confessions. It was allegedly a large part of the impetus that led them to create their own ARTICHOKE/MKULTRA program. But in the end the CIA determined the only technique that was really necessary and used on the men for this purpose was sleep deprivation.<p>I'm not claiming either version of the events is true/false. Just relaying another I've heard.
This reminds me of Gulf War I when Iraqi TV was displaying what they claimed was the wreckage from a downed America fighter jet. It was shell halves from an American cluster bomb, a CBU-58 I think.
<a href="https://sc.vern.cc/@jeff-kaye/cia-mkultra-and-the-cover-up-of-u-s-germ-warfare-in-the-korean-war-3e3cce505d35" rel="nofollow">https://sc.vern.cc/@jeff-kaye/cia-mkultra-and-the-cover-up-o...</a> was a good long read. Biowarfare and mind control have come a long way since those relatively ancient times.<p>Now we have synthetic DNA to develop gain of function in viruses that can target segments of population such as the elders and those with comorbidities. We can follow up on that with proprietary MRNA shots formulated to take down targeted individuals in a one two punch.<p>MKULTRA ended in name only. NATO now has a sixth operational domain of cognitive warfare that uses social media and other advanced tools. <a href="https://www.projectcensored.org/18-the-human-mind-as-new-domain-of-war-nato-plans-for-cognitive-warfare/" rel="nofollow">https://www.projectcensored.org/18-the-human-mind-as-new-dom...</a>
If you don't have a medium login (like me) you can read the full article archived[1]<p>A bit tangential to the central thesis, but John Marks' 1979 classic <i>The Search for the Manchurian Candidate</i>, referenced by TFA, is online[2].<p>Chapter 8, <i>Brainwashing</i>[3], has interesting details about CIA-friendly journalist Edward Hunter's PR campaign to frame "brainwashing" (a term he coined) as a uniquely communist form of political indoctrination via technological means.<p>> In September 1950, the Miami News published an article by Edward Hunter titled " 'Brain-Washing' Tactics Force Chinese into Ranks of Communist Party." It was the first printed use in any language of the term "brainwashing," which quickly became a stock phrase in Cold War headlines. Hunter, a CIA propaganda operator who worked under cover as a journalist, turned out a steady stream of books and articles on the subject. He made up his coined word from the Chinese hsi-nao—"to cleanse the mind"—which had no political meaning in Chinese.<p>> American public opinion reacted strongly to Hunter's ideas, no doubt because of the hostility that prevailed toward communist foes, whose ways were perceived as mysterious and alien. Most Americans knew something about the famous trial of the Hungarian Josef Cardinal Mindszenty, at which the Cardinal appeared zombie-like, as though drugged or hypnotized. [...] Americans were familiar with the idea that the communists had ways to control hapless people, and Hunter's new word helped pull together the unsettling evidence into one sharp fear.<p>Marks then touches on the bioweapon allegation without further examination:<p>> The brainwashing controversy intensified during the heavy 1952 fighting in Korea, when the Chinese government launched a propaganda offensive that featured recorded statements by captured U.S. pilots, who "confessed" to a variety of war crimes including the use of germ warfare.<p>1: <a href="https://archive.is/8stAi" rel="nofollow">https://archive.is/8stAi</a><p>2: <a href="https://www.druglibrary.org/schaffer/lsd/marks.htm" rel="nofollow">https://www.druglibrary.org/schaffer/lsd/marks.htm</a><p>3: <a href="https://www.druglibrary.org/schaffer/lsd/marks8.htm" rel="nofollow">https://www.druglibrary.org/schaffer/lsd/marks8.htm</a>
You can not have "Government by the people, for the people" when you allow some people to keep secrets from other people under the guise of "national security"<p>Self governance is incompatible with states secrets, and only leads to abuse, corruption, and tyranny.<p>History is full of known abuses, and for every known abuse there is the potential for LOTS of unknown abuse.<p>One can say "well congress will hold them accountable" but along time ago congress passed a law to declassify everything around JFK assassination, yet multiple presidents after bring pressured by the CIA for "national security reasons" have refused to release all kinds of document in direct violation of that law.<p>the CIA, any other agency with the power to "classify" things, is a direct and ever present threat to not only liberty but the underpinning of democracy everyone claims to support.
I thought medium.com content wasn’t allowed to be posted? Or at least anytime I post anything from medium, it is shadowbanned or whatever the term for not allowing comments..
The birth of the US biological warfare program took place at around the same time as the birth of the US nuclear weapons program, but the former is far less well known - because the nuclear weapons were actually used, and the biological weapons were not. At the same time, Nazi Germany had also developed a massive chemical weapons program based on the novel nerve agents, sarin and tabun (developed as organophosphorus pesticide agents but found to be far too toxic for use on crops), at the same time. Nazi Germany never used these agents (though Goebbels apparently called for their use against the Normandy invasion by US allies, but Hitler feared retaliation by similar means so nixed it).<p>A not-too-bad overview of some of this history is in "The Biology of Doom" by Ed Regis, but it was written with CIA cooperation and hides a lot of facts, such as the scale of the insect-borne disease vector program (i.e. things like spreading fleas infected with bubonic plague, or distributing insect pests to destroy crops, or the chemical destruction of cropland by Agent Orange in Vietnam).<p>Regis claims the US biological warfare program wasn't sufficiently advanced to launch attacks on Korea, but the US had also collected all the data from the Japanese biological warfare program from Shiro Ishii, of notorious Unit 731, and this wasn't revealed until the 1970s. Best evidence points to a fairly experimental biowarfare assault being launched on North Korea, with poor results. Quite psychotic, but that's America in the 1950s for you.<p>The offensive biowarfare program ran from 1942 (see 'Merck Report') to 1969 when Nixon closed it down (publicly anyway) after a massive sheep kill caused by US Army testing of VX agent outside Dugway Utah. Look up "Shady Grove" etc, for example, which demonstrated you could infect the entire eastern seaboard with a few jets loaded with liquid suspension of anthrax spores:<p><a href="https://www.jstor.org/stable/3092154" rel="nofollow">https://www.jstor.org/stable/3092154</a><p>That's by Jonathan Tucker, longtime researcher of this subject. Died somewhat mysteriously in 2011 right before being put in a position to expose a lot of shady behavior related to the 9/18 and 10/9 anthrax attacks:<p><a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/local/obituaries/biological-weapons-expert-tucker-56-was-known-for-fluency-in-politics/2011/08/02/gIQAiIV2sI_story.html" rel="nofollow">https://www.washingtonpost.com/local/obituaries/biological-w...</a><p>Governments just hate having their history of recklessly stupid biological warfare research exposed. P.S. here's the most likely source of the those anthrax attacks:<p><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Clear_Vision" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Clear_Vision</a><p>Oh, and the ~ $12 trillion economic damage Covid epidemic which killed about as many people as the Holocaust was caused by idiots in a Chinese virus lab who got their technology and funding from the USA. Oops...