INTRODUCTION
On
November 25, 1969 – following a review by the National Security Council of U.S.
policy on chemical and biological weapons – President Richard Nixon announced
that the
“Biological warfare – which is commonly called ‘germ warfare’
– this has massive unpredictable and potentially uncontrollable consequences.
It may produce global epidemics and profoundly affect the health of future
generations,” Nixon said. “Therefore, I
have decided that the
By renouncing biological weapons, the
It can be argued that the
Little has been written about the Nixon decision and the
factors that led to the renunciation.
Nixon, who died in 1994, never wrote about his decision, and his
National Security Advisor, Henry Kissinger, has not addressed it. There are a number of conflicting stories,
widely circulated, about the influence of various persons and groups on Nixon’s
decision. The truth, as one might
guess, is very complicated. Nixon’s
decision was based on a number of factors, ranging from his and Kissinger’s
desire to overcome bureaucratic inertia, to the desire by Nixon, Kissinger, and
Secretary of Defense Melvin Laird to reign in the military, to their
willingness to give up biological weapons in exchange for maintaining a
chemical weapons program. It was also
rooted in the political reality of the time, in which opinion elites openly
expressed disdain for the military and expressed fear that the military’s mad
scientists would unleash unimaginable horrors on the world in the name of
national security.
Today, in the study of nonproliferation, there is much
interest in the idea of WMD rollback.
How, once a state obtains Weapons of Mass Destruction, can it be enticed
or persuaded to give up those weapons?[2] We know that nuclear rollback is possible; we
have seen it in
In this dissertation, I set out to untangle the conflicting
influences on Nixon, Kissinger, and the national security apparatus of the
In my analysis of the decision-making that led to
In a similar vein, I propose an explanation for Nixon’s
decision to renounce biological weapons.
I believe that opponents of the U.S. BW program determined the outcome
of the debate on the program by systematically excluding from that debate all
of the program’s supporters. They
accomplished this by –
- Creating
the impression that all, or almost all, scientists/academics – or, at
least, almost all of the most prestigious among them – opposed the U.S.
CBW program, especially the BW component, and that any supporters were
mere outliers.
- Stigmatizing
supporters of the U.S. BW program as war mongers and mad scientists by
creating the impression that the U.S. CBW program posed a threat to the
domestic civilian population.
- Depicting
CBW/BW supporters as stubbornly defending the status quo and standing in
the way of progress, in order to protect their own jobs, budgets, and
bureaucratic turf.
- Stigmatizing
the chemical weapons program and the use of chemicals such as defoliants
and riot-control agents, thus forcing CBW supporters to use whatever
influence they had on saving the CW program (which had a much larger
constituency), to the neglect of the BW program.
- Creating
the impression that many or most knowledgeable military leaders shared the
anti-BW point of view, so that the Chemical Corps and its allies would be
seen as outliers.
- Creating
a false unanimity simply by failing to invite pro-U.S.CBW/BW experts to
participate in the examination of the CBW issue.
- Weakening
the will of U.S.BW supporters by creating the impression –
- that
BWs were of no significant military value.
- that
BWs were redundant in that nuclear weapons could be used to retaliate
against an enemy that used BWs.
- that
a ban on BWs was inevitable.
…so that BWs were seen as not worth
“falling on one’s sword” over.
Note that I am not saying whether Nixon’s decision on
renunciation was right or wrong.
Supporters of the renunciation argue that, by leading to the Biological
Weapons Convention and the establishment of an international norm against BWs,
it slowed the proliferation of biological weapons, which a number of countries
might otherwise have taken up as cheap alternatives to nuclear weapons – as, in
the famous phrase, “poor man’s nuclear weapons.” Opponents point out that such a braking
effect is a matter of speculation, and that the renunciation and BWC might have
actually encouraged the Soviets to proliferate (as they allegedly did in Iraq,
Cuba, and elsewhere), to create a massive program of BW development, and to
attempt to develop a new class of biological superweapons based on genetic
technology – all in order to exploit their superpower BW monopoly, which,
without the renunciation and BWC, they would not have had.
I do, however, characterize Nixon’s decision as inconsistent
with the Rational Actor model in this important respect: that, as a result of
the exclusion of pro-U.S.BW views, not all pros and cons were fully considered
before the decision was made.
UNTANGLING THE THREADS
In telling
a story as complex as this one, I faced a number of choices. Do I examine the various aspect of a theme
such as arms control, then turn back and deal with another theme such as
scientists-activists’ involvement in public policy, and so on? Or do I tell the story from chronological
start to chronological finish? Most
authors handle such a problem by mixing the two approaches, and that is what I
have done.
I begin in
Chapter One with an introduction to biological weapons, for the benefit of the
reader who is not familiar with the field.
In Chapter
Two, I examine the role of Theodor Rosebury in the early public debate on
BWs. I show that much of the key
information on BWs was available to the public almost half a century ago and
that the issue need not have mystified policymakers, opinion leaders, and
analysts in the late 1960s. I also show
how Rosebury and his colleagues injected political ideology into the BW debate.
Chapter
Three focuses on the development of political activism on the CBW issue in the
1950s and 1960s, particularly with respect to the activities of the Pugwash
group. I show that Pugwash, the most
influential science-themed group in the CBW debate, was heavily influenced by
the Soviet bloc and by persons affiliated with pro-Soviet organizations.
Chapter
Four focuses on the development of arms control ideology and of the Arms
Control and Disarmament Agency, an agency that was, at least initially,
dedicated to developing policies based on that ideology. I show that the concept of the U.S.-U.S.S.R.
conflict as an action-reaction “arms race” had a strong influence on the CBW
debate, leading to the belief that a unilateral shutdown of the U.S. biological
weapons program would encourage the Soviets to practice restraint in that area
(when, in fact, it had no effect or discouraged
Soviet restraint).
In Chapter
Five, I show that the 1960s anti-CBW campaign among scientist-activists and
other arms control advocates was rooted in opposition to the use of chemicals
by the
In Chapter
Six, I look at the case of more than 6,000 sheep said to have been killed as a
result of an Army nerve gas test at Dugway Proving Ground. I show how opinion leaders and policymakers
jumped to the conclusion that the Army was responsible for the sheep’s deaths,
and I detail the impact of the Dugway incident on the CBW debate.
Chapter
Seven covers events between the Dugway incident and the coming-to-power of
President Nixon and his National Security Advisor, Henry Kissinger.
In Chapter
Eight, I look at how Nixon and Kissinger reorganized the process for making
national security decisions, and how they attempted to create a system that
would provide the president with a wider range of policy options.
My
discussion of the Nixon/Kissinger/National Security Council review of CBW
policy begins in Chapter Nine. In that
chapter, I take the story chronologically up to the point just before the
review became known to the public.
In the
three chapters following, I examine three aspects of the CBW policy review:
- Chapter Ten:
- Chapter Eleven: the work of the
panel of scientists assigned to the CBW policy review, and the fact that
pro-CBW views were excluded from the panel’s considerations.
- Chapter Twelve: the issue of the
feasibility of biological weapons as weapons, and how the failure to
appreciate the value of BWs created the danger, for the
In Chapter
Thirteen, I return to the story of the Nixon/Kissinger/National Security
Council review of CBW policy, from the point at which details of the review
became known to the public, to the announcement of President Nixon’s decision
on the matter. I examine how a decision
by Secretary of Defense Laird, combined with other factors, precluded the
possibility of a balanced review of CBW policy.
In Chapter
Fourteen, I apply Graham T. Allison’s Bureaucratic Politics Model to the
review, and look at the renunciation decision as the outcome of a political
game.
In Chapter
Fifteen, I look at the aftermath of Nixon’s decision: the resolution of what
Kissinger called the “slip up” over toxins, U.S. ratification of the Geneva
Protocol and negotiation of the Biological Weapons Convention (the BW ban), and
the creation of a Soviet superpower monopoly on BWs.
Finally,
in Chapter Sixteen, the Summary and Conclusion, I sum up the factors that led
to
ALL-OPEN-SOURCE ANALYSIS
This
dissertation is intended as an all-open-source analysis, the sort of work that
an intelligence analyst might create (excluding classified information). I examine the associations, affiliations, and
political beliefs of various actors to determine the presence or absence of
bias in debates and policy reviews in which they participated.
Let me be
clear:
I do not
argue that people with a certain political viewpoint should have been excluded
from the CBW/BW debate. On the contrary,
I suggest that the public would have been served by a debate that included all
sides, including those who were
systematically excluded, such as
experts in the Chemical Corps and others with actual experience developing and
producing biological weapons. The reader
should note that, in my analysis, I criticize people on both sides of the
partisan divide and at widely different places on the political spectrum, and
that, in a hypothetical, I draw a parallel between the CBW review and the Bush
administration’s allegedly biased decision-making process leading up to the
Iraq War.
I do not
suggest that a person’s credentials as a scientist should be doubted because of
his or her political views. I do,
however, examine, for evidence of bias, the backgrounds, associations, and
public statements of scientist-activists who chose to step outside the
scientific realm and make political
recommendations to policymakers.
What I
seek is an explanation for a presidential decision that was either visionary or
potentially suicidal, or both. In that
quest, I go where the evidence takes me.
CHAPTER ONE
Background:
biological weapons
The Journal of the American Medical Association, in 1997, declared: “The study of
the history of biological warfare is confounded by several factors. These include difficulties confirming
allegations of biological attack, the lack of reliable microbiological and
epidemiologic data regarding alleged or attempted attacks, the use of
allegations of biological attack for propaganda, and the secrecy surrounding
biological weapons programs. However, a
review of historical sources demonstrates that interest in developing
biological weapons has persisted throughout history and is likely to continue
into the future.”[5]
Biological weapons are weapons based on microbes – very small
living things – or on the chemicals produced by living things.
BWs can be based on bacteria, viruses, rickettsiae,
chlamydiae, or fungi. Toxin weapons,
based on poisons produced by living things, are considered both chemical and
biological weapons or, sometimes, placed in a category of their own. (As a general rule, I include toxin weapons
among biological weapons.) Biological
weapons can also be based on chemicals present naturally in the human body,
such as those that regulate the immune system.
Although biological weapons can be particularly effective in
killing large numbers of people, they can also be used to incapacitate or alter
the mental status of humans, to destroy crops or livestock, to deny territory
or render buildings unusable, or for assassination. As occurred in the 2001 anthrax letters
case, even a tiny amount of biological weapon material, inefficiently
delivered, can cause significant disruption and expense as well as a few deaths
and cases of longterm disability; a slightly larger or more efficiently
delivered amount may be sufficient to induce mass panic. In the future, BW expert Ken Alibek has
noted, biological weapons may be used to damage military equipment, fuel, or
plastics, including plastic components of computers.[6]
Biological weapons can be used in such a way as to make it
nearly impossible to identify the responsible party or even to determine
whether the effect is manmade or natural.
At the same time, the difficulty in distinguishing BW production from
legitimate production of biological material, along with other factors, makes
it relatively easy to hide a biological weapons program. Unambiguous evidence of a BW program is very
hard to find.[7]
BWs IN HISTORY
Biological weapons are as old as civilization, and have taken
many forms.[8]
The concept of fomites – disease-carrying objects – was known
in antiquity. The word toxic comes from the Greek toxikon, which derives from toxon, Greek for arrow. Around 850 B.C.,
Homer wrote, in the Iliad and the Odyssey, of the use of poison
arrows. In the Fifth Century B.C., Herodotus
wrote of the Scythian archers who mixed decomposed adders with human blood and
excrement and buried the mixture in vessels.
Adrienne Mayor, in MHQ: Quarterly
Journal of Military History, wrote that the resulting poison “would
certainly contain the bacteria of gangrene and tetanus (Clostridium perfringins and Clostridium
tetani) while the venom would attack red blood cells, nervous system and
could even induce respiratory paralysis.”
She noted that a Scythian archer had a range of over 1,600 feet and
could launch about twenty arrows per minute.[9]
In the
(A latter-day form of
low-tech biological warfare was the use, by the Viet Cong (Communist guerrillas
in
Another ancient technique of biological warfare is the
poisoning of wells. In the 6th
Century B.C., the Assyrians used rye ergot for this purpose.[15] In the Peloponnesian War, during the Spartan
siege of
The Carthaginian general
By the 14th and 15th
Centuries, corpses were being used in sieges.
The smell itself was a factor – defenders of a castle at Thun L’Eveque
in northern
In 1346, as Tartars conducted a siege at the Crimean port
city of
In 1422, at Karlstein in
In 1495, the Spanish are said to have infected French wine
with blood from leprosy patients.[21]
In 1650, a Polish general reportedly put saliva from rabid
dogs into hollow artillery spheres and fired them against his enemies.[22]
In 1710, Russian troops battling the Swiss at Reval (now
In 1763, during the French and Indian War, Sir Jeffrey
Amherst, commander of British forces in North America, suggested the use of
smallpox to “reduce” the Indian population and ultimately to “extirpate this
execrable race.” After a smallpox outbreak
at
During the American Revolution, the British reportedly
exposed civilians fleeing
During the War Between the States, Dr. Luke Blackburn, future
governor of
Meanwhile, although chemical weapons were used occasionally –
the British used sulphurous fumes during the siege of
Also in 1915, Dr. Anton Dilger, a German-American physician
working near Washington, D.C., produced large quantities of anthrax and glanders
pathogen, which was used by German agents in an attempt to infect 3,000 horses,
mules, and cattle headed from the U.S. to Allied forces in Europe.[29] It has also been reported that German
operatives in
In 1925, the Geneva Protocol (The Protocol for the
Prohibition of the Use in War of Asphyxiating, Poisonous or Other Gases and
Bacteriological Methods of Warfare) banned chemical and bacteriological[32]
warfare. Because the protocol did not
ban research, production, and stockpiling of chemical and biological weapons,
and because many of the countries that ratified it reserved the right to use
such weapons in retaliation, the protocol amounted to a no-first-use agreement.[33]
The
In 1930, in
In 1933, Major Leon Fox of the U.S. Army Medical Corps
argued, in an article in Military Surgeon,
that “Practically insurmountable difficulties prevent the use of biologic
agents as effective weapons.”[36]
“Bacterial warfare,” Fox declared, “is one of the recent
scare-heads that we are being served by the pseudo-scientists who contribute to
the flaming pages of the Sunday annexes syndicated over the Nation's press.” [37]
(It was not the last time that a scientist would declare
biological weapons unviable. See Chapter
Twelve.)
Although the Germans, during World War II, did horrific
experiments on concentration camp prisoners, those were apparently done to
study disease and to develop vaccines and medicines, not to develop biological
weapons. Other than a reported case of
Germans poisoning a Bohemian reservoir, it appears that they did not use
biological weapons. Ironically, a
biological “weapon” of sorts was used against them: The German army avoided
areas with epidemic typhus, so physicians in an area of occupied
In contrast to the Germans, the
Japanese conducted a large biological weapons program codenamed Water
Purification Unit 731, under the command of the aforementioned Shiro
Ishii. The program studied anthrax,
tularemia, plague, botulism, smallpox, glanders, typhoid, typhus, and other
diseases for use as weapons. It employed
more than 3,000 scientists and technicians and killed at least 10,000 prisoners
who died from infection, were executed for autopsy, or were cut open for examination
while alive. During this program, the
Japanese attacked 11 Chinese cities with biological agents; the attacks
included water and food contamination with cholera, anthrax, and salmonella,
and the release from low-flying aircraft of an estimated 150 million
plague-infected fleas along with grain to attract rats that would carry the
plague to humans.[39]
The fact that the Japanese were conducting biological warfare
was reported in the
(Still, even after the war, some
remained skeptical of the reports.
Waldemar Kaempffert of The New
York Times wrote, “The Japanese were accused in this war of having dropped
plague germs on one Chinese town, but the evidence was not very convincing,
since plague is endemic in China.”[41])
With the end of World War II, the
Why?
I believe the answer to that question
begins with the story of Theodor Rosebury.
CHAPTER TWO
Theodor Rosebury and the beginning of the biological Cold War
An analysis of the decision to renounce biological weapons
cannot be limited to a study of the events of 1969, any more than an analysis
of the
At the beginning of the Cold War, the small group of
scientists who were prominent in the debate over weapons of mass destruction –
as nuclear, radiological, chemical, and biological weapons were already known –
included many who were Communists or otherwise looked with favor on the Soviet
Union, or who believed that peace was desirable with the Soviets at almost any
price in terms of national sovereignty and self-determination. In the 1940s, the first major independent
report on biological weapons was written for a scientific organization strongly
influenced by the Communists, by two distinguished scientists who would later
be blacklisted for alleged Communist ties.
That report would evolve into Peace
or Pestilence: Biological Warfare and How to Avoid It.[42] The analysis in Peace or Pestilence was so prescient that, half a century later,
the book would appear on al Qaeda’s BW reading list.
The story of Theodor Rosebury and Peace or Pestilence is that of the initial effort by people sympathetic
to the
ROSEBURY STEPS UP
Theodor Rosebury had a rich career that took him from dental
science – a recent article called him the “grandfather of modern oral
microbiology”[43] – to fame
as a writer of popular science books.
His 1969 book about microflora on the human body, Life on Man, received a special commendation at the National Book
Awards. In his most popular book, Microbes and Morals – the Strange Story of
Venereal Disease, he attacked the theory that syphilis was introduced into
In the fall of 1941, as World War II ravaged
Rosebury got interested in biological weapons as Hitler rose
to power and as the looming threat of Nazism inspired an occasional newspaper
article on the BW threat. By early 1942,
his concern heightened as his saw no public indication of
Five years later, in 1947, after the conclusion of the war,
the report was released to the public and published in the Journal of Immunology.
Two years after the publication of the Rosebury-Kabat report,
Rosebury expanded the report into a book, Peace
or Pestilence.
The degree to which Rosebury and his colleagues had worked
out the issues related to BWs is astonishing.
In the book, Rosebury outlined a number of principles and other concepts
that should be familiar to us today:
- That,
contrary to some news accounts, BWs would not wipe out all the people, let
alone all the life forms, in a large city.
- That,
on the other hand, the threat of BWs is very real. “There have been competent bacteriologists
who would dismiss BW altogether as impracticable, but only because they
have failed to appreciate its distinctive principles.”
- That
weapons can be made from bioregulators.
- That
“BW is distinctive among forms of warfare in its requirement that the
weapon be not merely aimed at the target but also suited for it.”[48]
- That
BWs could be aimed at plants and animals as part of economic warfare and
to inflict psychological damage.
- That
the potential psychological effect of a disease is an important factor in
determining a pathogen’s suitability for BW purposes.
- That
ten criteria for the selection of BW agents are infectivity, casualty
effectiveness, availability, resistance, means of transmission,
epidemicity, specific immunization, therapy, detection, and retroactivity.
- That
it is useful to determine the percentage of a given animal population that
would be killed by an infectious agent at different levels of exposure –
number of germs inhaled, for example.
(Rosebury mentions the concept of “LD50.”)
- That
the airborne spread of a BW agent is greatly limited by mechanical,
engineering, and meteorological factors.
- That
BW defense will probably always lag behind offense.
- That,
to poor countries, BWs may function as cheap substitutes for nuclear
weapons.
- That
“retroactivity” – the danger that a BW might backfire on its user – is not
as great a factor in intercontinental wars such as a hypothetical
U.S./Soviet conflict as it is in a traditional war between neighbors.
- That
BWs would be useful primarily against civilians as opposed to military
forces.
- That
BWs are varied in their range of strategic and tactical uses.
- That
BW scientists might seek out previously unknown pathogens, or create new
ones that combine traits from different microbes, or make existing pathogens
resistant to drugs and vaccines.
Rosebury writes: “It is now possible to alter the hereditary
constitution of bacteria so as to produce new types by what amounts to a
marriage of different kinds, just as new varieties of dogs and wheat can
be produced by crossbreeding. So
far only varieties of the harmless colon bacillus, which we all have in
our intestines, have been dealt with in this way, but who knows what
tomorrow may bring?”[49]
Peace or Pestilence was among the books listed in a 1999
memo on chemical and biological warfare from Muhammed Atef, the al Qaeda
military chief, to Ayman al-Zawahiri, bin Laden’s lieutenant.[50] Also listed were such works as Tomorrow’s Weapons (1964) and Chemical Warfare (1921).
In a 2004 blog entry, Gene Healy of
Not every aspect of Rosebury’s analysis stands the test of
time. He wrote that that “the bubonic
form of plague” is a poor choice for a BW.[52] He declared that “We may be reasonably safe
for a while on the atomic side, for we are told that it will be many years
before any other nation can hope to catch up with us in making atomic bombs.”[53]
(The
In his scientific analysis, Rosebury was rarely wrong. But it appears that, to him, the scientific analysis
was a means to an end – that is, a way of making a political point.
POLITICAL ANALYSIS
In the 1947 Journal of
Immunology article based on their 1942 report, Rosebury and Kabat said the
purpose of the release was to promote the cause of peace. “Our report tells the world what to expect if
war is not abolished.”[55] The New
York Times, in an editorial, explained that, “As socially minded
scientists, Drs. Rosebury and Kabat are not so much concerned with teaching the
Army how to use infectious diseases as weapons as with arousing the conscience
of the world. . . . Because they can conceive no effective control of bacteria
and viruses as weapons Drs. Rosebury and Kabat are convinced that if we are to
escape mass infection we must abolish war.”[56]
Rosebury continued that theme in a speech at a 1947 meeting
of the Association of New York Scientists.
“If an understanding of biological warfare demonstrates the futility of
an approach through technology alone to the complex political and economic
problems of war, perhaps it will point the way to peace. We may find that we cannot buy peace by
controlling weapons alone – certainly not by controlling one weapon, however
potent. We may find it unavoidable to
make a frontal attack on the whole problem of war – on the political rivalries
of nations that lead to war. . . . If we must achieve mutual respect and
tolerance among nations as the first major objective on the road to peace, then
we must establish such relations between the
In December 1947, officials of the
In 1949, in Peace or
Pestilence, Rosebury reiterated his point that nothing short of universal
peace can save the world by a devastating biological war. “There are various ways of destroying men,
and while all of them are morally bad, some seem worse than others.”
Which brings us to a consideration of BW as the ‘worst’ or
‘most horrible’ of weapons.
“Some very responsible men have expressed the idea
publicly. James F. Byrnes, for example,
when he was Secretary of State, considered BW, compared with the atomic bomb,
‘an even more frightful method of human destruction’; and Walter Lippmann,
prompted by the United States Navy release of January 4, 1946, regarded BW as
‘even more deadly and malignant’ than the bomb.” But “there is no reason to believe that
international agreements outlawing particular weapons have ever had the slightest
effect. Today few people seem to place
any stock in them, although Mr. Gromyko [Soviet diplomat Andrei Gromyko] has
continued somewhat plaintively to suggest that what the world now needs above
all is a good convention outlawing bad weapons.
“Back in the thirteenth century the Council of Lateran
declared the cross bow illegal in war, and a couple of hundred years later
Bayard demanded that the musket be outlawed as a coward’s weapon which could be
used to kill a brave knight without engaging him in combat.”[60] And “There is no reason to believe that the
international prohibition of weapons has ever been effective.” Rosebury’s logic
was that atomic weapons control may be possible; he called the
Acheson-Lilienthal Report calling for an international body to control atomic
power and atomic weapons “a work of technical genius” and “a thing of beauty,”
though, like “a sailing vessel built in a basement,” it went nowhere.[61] But he believed that biological weapons have
characteristics that make international control, short of world government,
infeasible.
“The production of atomic bombs might be controlled through
international inspection and policing because large-scale development of
fissionable products requires installations of a unique sort which offer only
limited opportunities for disguise. But
the facilities required for BW differ hardly at all from those used all over
the world in peacetime research and industry; the possibilities for disguise
and subterfuge, for hiding military activity under a cloak of normal science
and production, are legion. For a system
of inspection and policing to be effective in controlling BW it would see,
unavoidable that it enter intimately into the medical, public-health,
industrial, and related activities upon which the daily life and welfare of
nations depend. Such control, it seems
to me, would have to reach down so deeply into the personal lives of
individuals throughout the world as to be possible only with the most highly
centralized kind of world state – far more tightly organized, to be sure, than
any world government suggested by present-day theorists. Quite aside from the practicability or
impracticability of achieving such a state, it appears plain that it would be
undesirable because the resulting scrutiny would not be worth its cost in
sacrifice of personal freedom, however this moot word may be defined.”[62]
I believe that Rosebury’s position is correct, that
international control of biological weapons is impossible or nearly so. It is the next step in his logic that reveals
his overriding political motivation.
WHY DESTROY THE WORLD
OVER NOTHING IMPORTANT?
Throughout the post-World War II period, in the aftermath of
the use of atomic bombs to end the war, political activists have argued that
destruction is fast approaching, and that only this policy or that policy can
save us. Nuclear war destroying our
cities, turning our children or their children into monsters, putting the world
into a winter so dark that civilization and perhaps our species come to an end
– these horrors must be prevented by establishing world government, or by
surrendering to our adversaries. A
variation on this argument is the main point in Peace or Pestilence.
“The power of destruction is now so great on both sides that,
once we let loose in the inexorable chain reaction of war, the clock of
civilization may be turned back centuries, if not millennia. Perhaps we will leave the world to the rats
and the cockroaches . . . We can choose to save the world for ourselves and our
children, with science as our servant . . . Or we can choose the easier road,
the road of hate and fear that would lead us to destroy our neighbors because
we don’t like the way they live and because we are sure they are threatening to
destroy us.”[63]
Note the sarcasm. “. .
. destroy our neighbors because we don’t like the way they live and because we
are sure they are threatening to destroy us.”
The idea that a totalitarian state based on an apocalyptic ideology
would consider a free, democratic superpower an existential threat was, to
Rosebury, ridiculous.
To Rosebury, the Cold War was “two great nations, each
slightly swollen with pride, [that] seem to be striving to divide the world
between them; and in both men prepare for another and even bloodier war. . . .
To many the threat of a new conflict seems to have a fabricated quality, like
that of a fight between the local bully and the new boy.”[64]
He wrote, “World War II had submerged all but two contenders
for global hegemony; and these two, in militarily muscle-bound pugnacity, were
proceeding to divide the earth into two training camps for the greatest
championship finish fight of all time.
The smaller countries, finding the prospect of getting out of the way
uncomfortably gloomy in the newly contracted spherical geography, hastened to
plan loyalty to one camp or the other.”[65]
He thought the
Note the use of the term “so-called” and the sarcastic quotes
around the word “menace.”
Rosebury found “a clear indication of the fundamental
dissimilarity of Hitler’s
Rosebury’s attitude toward the
Killing all those people, simply to prevent the advance of the
Soviets, was unacceptable to Rosebury.
Rosebury’s political analysis, first in the Rosebury-Kabat
report and then in Peace or Pestilence,
made him a star in leftwing political circles.
He became the sort of person who gets called an intellectual, who gets
invited to meetings of intellectuals, and who is called upon to sign petitions
put forth by people who consider themselves intellectuals.
THE CONFLICT BETWEEN
DIFFERENT VALUE SYSTEMS
Below, I discuss the political affiliations of Rosebury and
his partner Kabat. I also discuss the
politics of the American Association of Scientific Workers, for whom the
Rosebury-Kabat report was originally written.
I believe these affiliations, taken as a whole, suggest the
early involvement in the BW debate of the Communist Party or, at least, of
those who sympathized with and felt empathy for the Communist Party’s sponsor,
the
With regard to the importance of
personal and political factors in one’s profession, the spectrum of value
systems ranges from science (in which personal and political factors are
unimportant), to the arts, to politics, to intelligence (in which those factors
are extremely important). At the
opposite ends of the spectrum:
- In
science, a person’s background, moral values, friendships and family
relationships, and sponsorships are usually irrelevant. Scientific experiments and observations
are publicly described in great detail so that efforts can be
replicated. Scientific theories
suggest predictions about the results of future experiments and
observations, and those predictions are subsequently shown to be true or
false. Science doesn’t care about a
practitioner’s religion or politics; it doesn’t matter if he or she is a
believer in God or an atheist, or a Nazi or Klansman or Communist, or a
Republican or Democrat or something else.
It doesn’t matter if the scientist works for a university or a
tobacco company or an environmental organization. All science is based on
verification. Wrongheaded
scientists are proven wrong, and those few who lie are usually caught (or
so it is assumed), so the degree of trust in the scientific community is
high. Science abhors secrecy.
- In
intelligence work, personal and political factors are extremely
important. Very little information
on a person is out-of-bounds if one is trying to determine that person’s
loyalty or truthfulness on matters that could determine the fate of
nations. Even the most private
matters such as sexual activity may be important in certain situations –
say, when a person with access to sensitive information might be subject
to blackmail. In contrast to the
scientific community, which assumes truthfulness and objectivity, the
intelligence community bases its behavior on the suspicion that a given
individual is biased or is practicing deception. Intelligence work demands secrecy.
Sometimes the values of science and of intelligence work come
into direct conflict. In one such case,
the security clearance of the great scientist Robert Oppenheimer was revoked
more than a half-century ago, but the debate over that decision continues to
this day. Indeed, the continuing
controversy was undoubtedly a major reason that a book about Oppenheimer won
the 2006 Pulitzer Prize for biography.
Biodefense is, and will always be, a controversial field
because it brings scientists together with intelligence analysts, policy
analysts, law enforcement personnel, and counterterrorism agents. On heated issues – for example, on
allegations that a particular country is violating the Biological Weapons Convention
– a conflict of values is unavoidable.
I discuss the politics of Rosebury and Kabat and the AASW in
order to point out potential biases that might have affected their analysis,
and to show that, as early as World War II, biological weapons issues were tied
up in the conflict between the
The reader should keep in mind the 1995 Klehr-Haynes-Firsov
study of documents linking the Communist Party USA to the
THE POLITICS OF
ROSEBURY & CO.
I am not the first person to express concern about the
possible biases of Rosebury and Kabat.
In 1947, Harry R. Rudin wrote, in a letter to The New York Times, that Rosebury and Kabat’s political motives may
have tainted their research. The two men
“let themselves get involved in ‘value judgments,’ the bogy of all real
scientists,” Rudin wrote. “. . . It should
be obvious to any critical reader that such so-called moral values give an indelible
taint to any scientific work, like the one these men undertook to do.”[70]
Here is a list of the items that led me to conclude that the
Rosebury-Kabat report and Peace or
Pestilence were created under heavy influence from people inclined toward
the Soviet point of view on Cold War issues.
(These items are in chronological order, not in order of importance or
probative weight.)
- Rosebury
signed a
- In a
1948 letter to Nobel Prize-winner Harold Urey, Cuthbert Daniel, who had
worked on the atomic bomb project at
- In
1948, Rosebury was one of “40 leading intellectuals” (as the meeting’s
call described them) brought together by Harlow Shapley of the World
Federation of Scientific Workers, the international affiliate of the AASW,
to discuss the cause of and cure for the Cold War. At the time, Rosebury was described in
the Chicago Daily Tribune as a
“biological warfare expert from
- That
year, Rosebury publicly backed the Progressive Party presidential campaign
of former Vice President Henry A. Wallace.[77] According
to historian Arthur Schlesinger Jr., radical journalist (and Wallace
supporter) I.F. Stone wrote in 1950, “The Communists have been the
dominant influence in the Progressive Party. . . . If it had not been for
the Communists, there would have been no Progressive Party.”[78]
- In
1950, Rosebury was terminated as a
- In
1955, Rosebury was one of 73 “American intellectuals, consisting mainly of
university scholars and clergymen,” as The
New York Times put it, who signed a petition asking President
Eisenhower to reconsider the prosecution of alleged Communists for mere
membership in the Communist Party.[80]
·
Kabat,
Rosebury’s partner on the biological warfare paper, was likewise blacklisted at
one point. For example, a National
Institutes of Health grant was cancelled due to concerns over “loyalty” –
though the National Science Foundation made a point to provide grants to Kabat
and other scientists blacklisted by NIH, provided they had not admitted being
Communist or been proven disloyal in a judicial proceeding.[81]
·
When
Kabat received the National Medal of Science in 1991, Nature reported, “he valued this honour greatly, particularly
because of the difficulties he had in the 1950s when the NIH cravenly
terminated his grants as a fallout of the politics of the McCarthy era. Fortunately, the Office of Naval Research and
National Science Foundation continued to support him. Kabat saw the medal as recognition of a
career-long record of accomplishment, and as a personal vindication.”[82] The Boston
Globe in 2000 noted: “During the McCarthy era, he was blacklisted after an
associate alleged to the FBI that he had been a communist. Mr. Kabat made
several appearances before loyalty boards, and his research grants were
canceled. His right to travel abroad was restricted.”[83]
Each item may be explained away. One could have opposed prosecution for mere
Community Party membership on the reasonable ground that many members were
naïve; they had joined the party in the pursuit of justice on issues such as
lynching and they simply refused to believe accusations of Soviet atrocities
and of Soviet control of the Communist Party USA. One could have supported PR in
It is the accumulated weight of the
items that matters. And the items must
be considered in connection with the fact that the AASW was under significant
Communist influence.
- AASW
was founded in 1938 during a meeting of the American Association for the
Advancement of Science. The new
group would, the founders said, bring scientists to a recognition and
fulfillment of the social and economic responsibilities.[84] In effect, it would be the political
arm of the AAAS. The first five
AASW chapters, formed during the AAAS meeting, were to be in
An evaluation of AASW’s political orientation should take
into account:
- Historian
Jessica Wang of UCLA has described AASW as one of the organizations
through which “scientists on the progressive left (the left-wing end of
American liberalism) directly questioned the wisdom of industrial
capitalism and its capacity to produce social justice.”[86]
- At
the beginning of World War II, the AASW’s most active branch, the
Boston/Cambridge branch, engaged in a flip-flop typical of
Communist-dominated organizations of the time. It took a strongly anti-Nazi position
until the Ribbentrop-Molotov Pact was announced, then changed its position
to neutrality. (The
Ribbentrop-Molotov Pact was the alliance between Nazi Germany and the
- The
organization continued to back
- On
- In resigning,
Ernest Hauser of MIT stressed his objections to the “real implications of
the peace resolution,” adding that “there were a number in the local
branch inclined toward un-American ideologies.” And George Kistiakowsky of Harvard said,
“The local branch of the association is evidently under Communist
domination and I believe there is danger of un-American activities.” Kistiakowsky would later be Science
Advisor to President Eisenhower and, by 1968, a prominent opponent of the
- In 1946, an international
organization was created to include AASW, its British counterpart, and
scientific workers’ groups in other countries. The World Federation of Scientific
Workers chose as its president Frédéric Joliot-Curie, a prominent member
of the Communist Party.[92] During the 1950s, Joliot-Curie promoted
false charges that the
- The
vice presidents of the WFSW were N.N. Semenov of the
- The
WFSW treasurer was Harlow Shapley of the
- Also
in 1946, the Chicago Daily Tribune
reported that the Canadian government’s “report on soviet espionage
networks, showing how communists acquired control of the executive
committee of the Canadian Association of Scientific Workers, has directed
the attention of investigating agencies to similar scientific groups in
the United States. . . .
- “Government
investigators who have scrutinized some of the propaganda of the
scientists’ organizations say they do not question the loyalty and
sincerity of the overwhelming majority of their members. The investigators suggest, however, that
scientists’ groups are singularly subject to infiltration by espionage
agents because of their zeal for disseminating scientific information and
their innocence in political affairs.”[96]
SCIENTISTS AS POLITICAL
EXPERTS
Throughout the Cold War, the
During the protracted struggle between the
In Peace or Pestilence,
Rosebury seemed to be of two minds; he suggested that scientists are no more qualified
than anyone else to analyze public policy, then fell back on the argument that
scientists have problem-solving skills that are absent in others. “A scientist is no better than other men and
usually no worse,” Rosebury wrote. “His
opinions on matters within his own sphere merit the respect of those who have
fewer facts that he; but in all other areas they are like the opinions of other
men. A scientist may nevertheless have one kind of skill that need not be
limited to his own specialty. He may know
how to frame a problem and thus take the first purposeful step toward solving
it.”
But, of course, it is in the framing of a problem that a
person’s bias has most effect, and it is the scientist who – because he comes
from a professional uniquely dependent on openness and trust – is easiest to
deceive. Electrons don’t lie, but
scientists and others who live in totalitarian countries and fear for the
safety of their families will usually do what they are told to do, and believe,
or pretend to believe, what they are told to believe.
Philip Noel Baker, the British M.P., Pugwash activist, and
Nobel Peace Prize winner, wrote that “The scientists speak with an authority
which the ordinary citizen, the non-scientist, cannot challenge, and to which
he is compelled to listen.”[98]
But consider the views of James Randi, the magician known as
The Amazing Randi, who has made a second career out of exposing con men who
make claims of the paranormal, such as Uri Geller, whose mystic powers (such as
bending spoons with his mind) were supposedly confirmed by a number of
scientists.[99]
Scientists, Randi wrote, “think logically, from a
cause-and-effect paradigm. A trickster
supplies all the misdirection, the elements expected by logical inference, the
necessary aspects that identify a situation as normal – then he uses a
different approach, a set of actions, a scenario that leads the dupe to accept
that the expected situation is being fulfilled – but it’s not. The scientist’s conclusion is that nature –
which he knows does not change the rules to deceive – has been abrogated in
some way. In other words, it’s magic.
“The conjuror or con man is a very good provider of
information. He supplies lots of data,
by inference or direct statement, but it’s false data. Scientists aren’t used to that scenario. An electron or a galaxy is not capricious,
nor deceptive; a human can be either or both.”
Scientists, he asserted, are “far easier” to fool than other
people “because they assume that someone not thinking logically, cannot deceive
them because he’s not their intellectual equal. They think they’re
smarter than the con man, not recognizing that such deception is the strength
of the con man, his only profession.”[100]
Throughout the past century, scientists, even (especially?)
great ones like Rosebury, fell for one con after another, from phrenology to
white supremacy and eugenics, from “scientific socialism” to the “population
bomb.”
Therefore, policymakers have a special responsibility to
examine carefully any issue in which science plays a significant role, to
ensure that the scientific advice they receive is not biased by ideology or by
any effort to promote a political agenda – or, if unbiased advice is not
available, to ensure that all sides in a debate are considered before important
decisions are made.
As we shall see, the failure to meet that responsibility was
a key factor in the decision to renounce biological weapons.
CHAPTER
THREE
Pugwash and the quest for peace with the Soviets
A critical element in the development of the debate over
biological weapons was the involvement of the Pugwash Conferences on Science
and World Affairs.
Pugwash was an outgrowth of the so-called atomic scientists’
movement that arose in the aftermath of World War II. Many scientists who worked on the development
of the atomic bomb had done so in the belief that their work was necessary to
stop Nazi Germany, which they believed was developing its own A-bomb. Following the defeat of the Nazis, many
scientists began to reconsider the morality of their work. This reexamination intensified after two
atomic bombs were dropped on imperialist
Richard V. Allen wrote in 1966 that, after World War II, in
which the democracies were allied with the Soviet Union, “Many in the West felt
that the foundation of peace in the postwar world depended upon the
continuation of the alliance, and some were willing to go to almost any length
to preserve it.”[101]
Scientists who had worked on the atomic bomb in order to
ensure the defeat of Nazi Germany saw their handiwork used for a very different
purpose – to bolster
Worse, in the view of many,
SCIENTISTS AND THE
“PEACE” MOVEMENT
Out of these concerns grew a network of atomic
scientist-activists that produced the Bulletin
of the Atomic Scientists and the
Federation of Atomic (later, American) Scientists in 1945; the Emergency
Committee of Atomic Scientists, which included Albert Einstein, Leo Szilard,
and Linus Pauling, in 1947; and Szilard and Matthew Meselson’s Council for
Abolishing War/Council for a Livable World in 1962, which claimed that year’s
election of George McGovern to the U.S. Senate as its first victory. The Union of Concerned Scientists, a
science-themed political group founded in 1969, was a second-generation spinoff
of this movement.
Soon after the founding of the atomic scientists’ movement
came the first major WMD-related propaganda drive of the Cold War, featuring
the “Ban the Bomb!” slogan. It was
launched in March 1950 as the Stockholm Peace Pledge. One part of the pledge read: “We demand the
absolute banning of the atom weapon, arm of terror and mass exterminator of
populations.” By October of that year,
the Soviet-front World Peace Council claimed 500 million (!) signatures on the
pledge. [102]
The atomic scientists’ movement and the “peace” movement came
together with the creation of what became known as the Russell-Einstein
Manifesto, a declaration of the dangers of nuclear weapons and a call for
peaceful resolution of international conflict.
The document was prepared by Bertrand Russell, the famed mathematician
and socialist philosopher, based on his
In 1995, Rotblat and Pugwash jointly would win the Nobel
Peace Prize.
Einstein and Russell were critics of
As for Russell, although he was sometimes critical of the
The declaration, prepared by Rotblat, that would come to be
known as the Russell-Einstein Manifesto was signed by Russell, Einstein,
Rotblat, Frédéric Joliot-Curie (a Communist, winner of the Stalin Prize, and
head of the Soviet-front World Federation of Scientific Workers), Cecil F.
Powell (a longtime executive committee member of Joliot-Curie’s WFSW[107]),
Linus Pauling (mentor of Matthew Meselson and a future winner of both the Lenin
Peace Prize and the Nobel Peace Prize), and five others who were considered
among the leading scientists/intellectuals of the time. Einstein died on
The document, released on July 9, began:
In the tragic situation which
confronts humanity, we feel that scientists should assemble in conference to
appraise the perils that have arisen as a result of the development of weapons
of mass destruction, and to discuss a resolution in the spirit of the appended
draft.
We are speaking on this occasion, not
as members of this or that nation, continent, or creed, but as human beings,
members of the species Man, whose continued existence is in doubt. The world is full of conflicts; and,
overshadowing all minor conflicts, the titanic struggle between Communism and
anti-Communism.
Almost everybody who is politically
conscious has strong feelings about one or more of these issues; but we want
you, if you can, to set aside such feelings and consider yourselves only as
members of a biological species which has had a remarkable history, and whose
disappearance none of us can desire.
We shall try to say no single word
which should appeal to one group rather than to another. All, equally, are in
peril, and, if the peril is understood, there is hope that they may
collectively avert it.
We have to learn to think in a new
way. We have to learn to ask ourselves,
not what steps can be taken to give military victory to whatever group we
prefer, for there no longer are such steps; the question we have to ask
ourselves is: what steps can be taken to prevent a military contest of which
the issue must be disastrous to all parties?
The manifesto warned that a nuclear war would not just
destroy large cities, but “the best authorities are unanimous in saying that a
war with H-bombs might possibly put an end to the human race. . . . Shall we
put an end to the human race; or shall mankind renounce war? People will not face this alternative because
it is so difficult to abolish war.”
The authors of the manifesto admitted that the abolition of
war “will demand distasteful limitations of national sovereignty,” but declared
that there was no other choice is mankind was to survive.
There lies before us, if we choose,
continual progress in happiness, knowledge, and wisdom. Shall we, instead, choose death, because we
cannot forget our quarrels? We appeal as human beings to human beings: Remember
your humanity, and forget the rest. If you can do so, the way lies open to a
new
The document ended with a resolution
to “urge the governments of the world to realize, and to acknowledge publicly,
that their purpose cannot be furthered by a world war, and we urge them,
consequently, to find peaceful means for the settlement of all matters of
dispute between them.[108]
A conference inspired by the Russell-Einstein Manifesto was
arranged. The original plan, to meet in
Eaton was a political activist who
claimed to have delivered the 1932 Democratic nomination to Franklin D.
Roosevelt and claimed to have blocked the presidential ambitions of Wendell
Willkie, the Republican nominee for president in 1940, and Robert Taft, who
twice narrowly lost the GOP nomination.
He thought the Eisenhower
administration was deranged in its attitude toward the Soviet Union, calling
John Foster Dulles, Eisenhower’s secretary of state, an “insane fanatic” who
“goes gaily on gambling with the destiny of the world without restraint from
any quarter” and who “blithely courts the ultimate world catastrophe of the
bomb without consulting the Senate Foreign Relations Committee and the House
Foreign Affairs Committee.”
Regarding the idea of anti-Communism
as a security measure, Eaton said: “All this is folly. We are the only major nation that doesn’t
have a single Socialist in its national legislature, the only nation without a
large parliamentary representation of people who believe in government
ownership of everything.” He referred to
his beliefs as “enlightened capitalism” and promoted
Russell, Rotblat, Powell from the WFSW, and the WSFW’s Eric
Burhop – another future winner of the Lenin Peace Prize – took the lead in
organizing the first Pugwash conference.[110]
In attendance were 22 people, but, as Rotblat said later,
“What 22 people!”[111] There were five scientists from the Soviet
bloc (one from Hungary, one from Poland, and three Soviets, including Aleksandr
Topchiyev, vice president of the Soviet Academy of Sciences); six scientists
and one law professor from the United States; one scientist each from
Australia, Austria, and France; three from Japan; and two each from Canada and
Britain. One the Canadians was G. Brock
Chisholm, first director general of the World Health Organization. There were 14 physicists, two chemists and
two physicians, a biologist and a biophysicist, the lawyer, and Eaton.
One of the
Not officially acknowledged was a 23rd person –
Burhop, who was excluded from the official list of delegates in order to
minimize the appearance of Communist influence.[112]
Also present was Vladimir Pavlichenko, who served as an interpreter
and handler for the Soviet representatives.
According to J.P.P. Robinson, Pavlichenko, assistant general scientific
secretary of the Soviet Academy of Sciences, participated in numerous Pugwash
meetings (including all of the first 15 conferences) over the next 33
years. “It was generally assumed
throughout the Pugwash movement that Pavlichenko was an officer of the KGB, an
assumption of which he must have been aware but did nothing to change.”[113]
Pugwash came about at a time when policymakers increasingly
turned to scientists for advice, and when scientists’ tradition of ignoring the
boundaries of nation-states was seen as transcending the Cold War. J.P.P. Robinson noted that –
Pugwash came into existence because
it was able to build those two attributes – access to policy levels of
government, and transnational peer-grouping – into something for which a
genuine though unstated need existed: an enduring open framework for East-West
dialogue on security-related issues at a time when exchanges of mutual
suspicions and propaganda were clogging the more conventional channels of
communication.
There was also a belief in the
‘objectivity’ of science and how the special wisdom of scientists, and the
manners of scientific discourse, could illuminate the options open to policy
makers for resolving East-West conflict.
Insofar as this implied that scientists could somehow detach themselves
from their social context, such thinking seems odd today, and perhaps did not
actually count for much even then. . . . Such was the answer-for-everything
public image of science in the 1950s that politicians saw benefit in welcoming
the enterprise. As time went on and that
image of science changed, the fact that Pugwash did not seek to operate in the
public eye as a mass movement enabled governments to tolerate it, sometimes to
listen to it, and sometimes to use or exploit it.”[114]
Pugwash, Robinson wrote, was a way for scientists to deal
with their feelings of “double loyalty” – i.e., “sense of duty not only to
their country but also to their science.”[115]
The Pugwash gatherings soon became regular affairs, but, at
first, there was little action on the CBW issue, just some residual interest in
the issue raised by false allegations of biological warfare by the
Robinson wrote that “The absence of international machinery
for investigating reports of germ warfare, such as those heard during the
Korean War, was what originally triggered Pugwash attention to CBW.” In
addition, “The reference to weapons of mass destruction (WMD) in the Pugwash
manifesto imported an allusion to chemical and biological weapons, for in
United Nations parlance ‘WMD’ had by then become a technical term expressly
embracing not only nuclear weapons but also radiological and CBW weapons.”[116]
SCIENTISTS AS
PEACEMAKERS ON THE CBW ISSUE
The first time Pugwash addressed CBW to a significant extent
was at the Third Conference, in
At the Kitzbühel conference, several speakers addressed CBW
issues, and Pugwash officers called a special conference on the subject, to be
held
Martin M. Kaplan – a WHO microbiologist who was referred to
Pugwash by Peter (later Lord) Ritchie Calder, president of the Soviet-front
World Peace Council – played a major role in planning the CBW conference.[118]
Robinson noted that “Who the people at Kitzbühel were who
pressed for a conference on CBW, the official history does not record. Perhaps
they were among the 8 of the 84 Kitzbühel participants who were also among the
26 participants at the Fifth Conference,” the one on CBW. Those were Kaplan, Pavlichenko, Rotblat,
Rotblat’s friend and collaborator Patricia Lindop, radar developer Robert
Watson-Watt, Bulletin of the Atomic
Scientists editor Eugene Rabinowitch, and two other notable activists, G.
Brock Chisholm and Bentley Glass.[119]
Chisholm was the first Director-General of the World Health
Organization. He was a founder of the
World Federation for Mental Health, which believed, according to its founding
document, that “the ultimate goal of mental health is to help [people] live
with their fellows in one world,” i.e., a world with a single government. Chisholm, in a 1945 lecture, declared that
“With the other human sciences psychiatry must now decide what is to be the
immediate future of the human race” because “no one else” could do so.[120] Chisholm explained later that, “To achieve
world government, it is necessary to remove from the minds of men their
individualism, loyalty to family tradition, national patriotism, and religious
dogmas.”[121]
“Human beings today constitute a social menace on a global
scale,” Chisholm told a 1961 meeting of the Society for Social Responsibility
in Science.[122]
Regarding Glass: During the 1950s, as a member of the
American Civil Liberties Union and chairman of an “academic freedom” committee
of the American Association of University Professors, Glass was a prominent
opponent of requiring academics and government employees to sign loyalty oaths
and spoke out against the firing of alleged Communists. He also served as president of AAUP. He was a supporter of Linus Pauling’s claims
that fallout from nuclear testing would cause millions of cases of birth
defects (“feeblemindedness”) in future generations. In 1970, he declared in a speech to the
American Association for the Advancement of Science that “No parents will in
the future have the right to burden society with a malformed or mentally
incompetent child.” He also said in 1970
that scientific progress was likely to halt in a generation or two.[123]
One of the attendees in Kitzbühel at the Third Conference was
Linus Pauling, whose protégé Matthew Meselson would play a key role in CBW
debate.[124] Pauling, 1954 Nobel Prize winner for
chemistry, would go on to win the Nobel Peace Prize in 1962, the Lenin Prize for
1968-69, and the
The Third Conference ended with a statement declaring:
“Scientists are, because of their special knowledge, well equipped for early
awareness of the danger and the promise arising from scientific
discoveries. Hence, they have a special
competence and a special responsibility in relation to the most pressing
problems of our times.”[126] Events in the coming decades would cast doubt
on the “special competence” of scientists in public policy, but, in the 1950s,
the idea was fashionable.
By the end of the Third Conference, planning was underway for
the CBW conference, which would be Pugwash’s fifth conference overall. The steering committee for the CBW conference
was made up of Chisholm, Glass, Kaplan, Rotblat, French microbiologist André
Lwoff, and Mikhail Dubinin of the
Attendees at the Fifth Conference,
At this time, back in the
Bertrand Russell’s welcoming address to the CBW conference
drew attention to the p.r. campaign, and some have seen the Kitzbühel
conference as a reaction to it. “Yet
that campaign had barely begun at the time of the Kitzbühel conference,” J.P.P.
Robinson wrote, “and to see the Fifth Conference simply as reaction to it is to
characterize the conference itself as no more than propaganda, an analogous
play to the public gallery. That would manifestly belittle its achievements,
for the Fifth Conference and what it set in train were clearly much more than
that.
“The aforementioned Final Statement, for example, is a
strikingly constructive and prescient document. And the
papers of the meeting presented information which substantially extended what
was known in the public domain about CBW.”[128]
One such revelation was by a Soviet, Mikhail M. Dubinin, who
stated that “Some of the substances . . . in the class of ethers of
dialkylamino-alkylthiophosphinic acid are lethal when man's skin is exposed to
approximately 2 mg of it” – the earliest known unclassified reference to “V”
agents such as VX.[129] This was most likely an attempt by the
Soviets to encourage Western participants in Pugwash to let their guard down
regarding classified information.
A document was created to record the meeting’s findings and
recommendations; Kaplan’s later recollection, according to Robinson, was that
“Glass coördinated the draft, the main components of which were submitted by
Theodor Rosebury (USA), Lwoff and himself [Glass].”[130]
The statement recognized the difficulties inherent in
international control of chemical and biological weapons, that, “however
difficult the international control of atomic weapons may be, the international
control of biological and chemical weapons by any system of inspection seems
incomparably more difficult.” The listed
reasons were that the specific weapons or combinations of weapons could not be
foreseen, that CBWs can be selected and prepared in ordinary laboratories and
other ordinary-looking facilities, and that means of dispersal are so diverse
that a ban on dispersal methods is impossible.[131]
Ultimately, the conferees concluded that limitations on CBWs
could be brought about most effectively by ending secrecy. “Free and frank evaluation of all scientific
and technical developments is essential to a degree of mutual trust necessary
to resolve the acute tensions that now plague the world.
“The most hopeful approach to international regulation
therefore seems to comprise (a) a general agreement to prohibit the use of such
weapons, and (b) the renunciation of official secrecy and security controls
over microbiological, toxicological, pharmaceutical and chemical-biological
research.”
How would such limitations be enforced? By the creation of a U.N. Special Commission
on CBWs, akin to the existing U.N. Scientific Committee on the Effects of
Atomic Radiation. “The very existence of
such a Commission might in time arouse the conscience of the individual
scientists of all nations, the only ultimately effective safeguard against
violations.”
Did conferees simply brush off such concerns as the
likelihood that an end to secrecy in science would eliminate most scientific progress,
or that publicizing the results of CBW research would ensure the proliferation
of chemical and biological weapons?
Detailed records of the discussions at the Fifth Conference are not
known to exist, so such questions may never be answered.
In a memoir, Martin Kaplan wrote of the Fifth Conference:
“The meeting in Pugwash was the first international gathering of scientists to
assess CBW in depth, and its report was valuable in that it alerted and
informed the general scientific community.”[132]
Immediately following the Fifth Conference, on
The sixth Pugwash meeting was held in
(Wiesner was soon to become President Kennedy’s science
advisor.[136] At the Pugwash meeting, he presenting a paper
on the arguments for total disarmament.[137])
Sohn expressed the view that the Soviet scientists were so
desperate for peace for three reasons:
(1) A reaction to their losses from
World War II. “A remark made to me by
one of the Russian conferees seems pertinent: ‘When the war started there were
fifteen persons in my immediate family; only four of them survived the
war. I cannot understand how people can
talk calmly about the possibility of another World War and calculate the
probable numbers of victims and survivors.
This is inhuman!’” (It is interesting to note that Sohn expressed not
one hint of skepticism about the Russian’s story, though there was absolutely
no reason to believe the Russian was telling the truth.)
(2) The idea that the Soviets had an
abhorrence of nuclear war. Sohn wrote
that that attitude has developed “now that the Russians have their own nuclear
weapons . . . No longer can the Soviets hope to ‘win’ a war; even a ‘victory’
would turn most of Russian into radioactive rubble.”
(3) The idea that the Soviets believe
war is inevitable with the U.S., not due to conscious planning but due to
accident or misunderstanding, escalation from non-nuclear conflict, or even
fraud (a third party committing a “catalytic” attack that appears to be from
the other superpower).
Sohn reiterated: “It seems to me that the Russian scientists
are sincerely interested in peace and disarmament.”[138]
Walt Rostow, in his address to the Sixth Conference,
declared: “Trust is easier to develop between individual men who can talk and
eat and drink together and look into each other’s eyes.”[139]
THE ROLE OF PUGWASH IS
QUESTIONED
In 1960, Cyrus Eaton won the Lenin Peace Prize and said in a
statement that “Such recognition of a capitalist provides strong new evidence
of what I am sure is the sincere interest of the Soviet people and their
government in peace for all mankind.”[140] After receiving the prize, Eaton called for
the shutdown of Radio Free Europe and the Voice of America[141]
and declared that the
As might be inferred from Dodd’s comments, not everyone
believed in the Pugwash idea.
In 1961, a staff analysis by the Senate Internal Security Committee
found that, “Among the Soviet scientists who attended the Pugwash conferences
were high-ranking, disciplined representatives of the Communist Party of the
The SISC staff also found that, “Exploiting the natural
desire of scientists for international cooperation and exchange of information,
the Soviet delegation to the Pugwash Conferences sought to impose upon American
scientist-delegates a form of international discipline superior to the
obligations of American scientists to their own Government. Strong efforts were made at the Conferences
to enforce unanimity of opinion [except perhaps at the November-December 1960
conference in
The committee staff claimed that “A veil of secrecy
surrounded the proceedings of the Pugwash Conferences. The full proceedings have never been made
public in the
The report suggested an astonishing naïveté on the part of
the scientist-delegates from the U.S. “In general the American scientists who
participated in the Pugwash Conferences had no clear understanding of the
nature of the international Communist conspiracy as it operates in the field of
science, or of the relationship between the Soviet Academy of Sciences and the
individual members of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union and to the Soviet
government.”[145]
Still, the conferences continued to gain in status. Schlafly and Ward reported that, “Although
the first five conferences were totally divorced from any official sanction by
the U.S. Government, the Sixth, in 1960, had informal approval, and the Pugwash
conferences subsequent to the Sixth have had express approval and endorsement.”[146]
Indeed, attendance at Pugwash meetings became a status symbol
in science and academia. By the time of
the Eighth Conference, in
By the Tenth International Pugwash Symposium (“Impact of New
Technologies on the Arms Race”) in 1962, D. G. Hoag, director of the Apollo
Guidance and Navigation Program, was allowed to deliver a talk detailing the
future of ballistic missile guidance.[148]
During the 11th Conference, in
(For more on the roles of Málek and Marcovich, see below.)
The Málek/Raska paper and the working group that was assigned
to study it served as the inspiration for serious consideration of the CBW
issue at the 13th Conference the next year.
Pugwash was not the only science-themed political
organization to take a close look at CBWs during this period. For example, in the spring of 1964, the
Federation of American Scientists called for a no-first-use policy on CBW, for
an end to the development of new chemical and biological weapons, and for an
end to all mass production of BWs. FAS
also called for an international agreement prohibiting the use and development
of CBWs.[150] Allegations regarding the use of anti-crop
agents and defoliants in
Opposition to the U.S. CBW program (and, on the part of some
activists, to all CBWs) continued to build with Pugwash’s 13th
Conference, held in
The group concluded that “The continued development of
biological weapons and their introduction into the arsenals of nations would
have a seriously destabilizing effect by increasing the number of nations
possessing major mass destructive capabilities.”
Robinson wrote that an important presumption underlay the
group’s work, that “With the outlook for controlling biological weapons more
promising than it had appeared in 1959, the moment had come to consider the
details of possible control systems that could be agreed internationally; since
governments seemed to be doing nothing at all in this area, Pugwash should now
advance its efforts on CBW by itself studying the practicalities of possible
ways forward. In other words, Pugwash
should now move beyond what it had previously been doing, which essentially was
providing occasion for like-minded individuals familiar with sciences from
which CBW might draw to come together in order to voice concerns about that
prospect, and to share ideas about desirable remedies. Pugwash should, in addition, now embark upon
actual policy research.”[155]
REAL EXPERTS ON
BIOLOGICAL WEAPONS
As it turned out, Rotblat was more correct than he probably
knew regarding the “authoritative knowledge” of the conferees in
Douglass and Livingstone wrote: “In
Málek, like Rotblat, was one of the founding six members of
the Governing Board of SIPRI (the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute),
the Swedish government’s “peace” research group.[158] Not surprisingly, given Málek’s involvement,
the pursuit of “peace” regarding biological weapons was a major focus of SIPRI
in the years to come. In fact, over
time, SIPRI would take over most of the CBW activities of Pugwash.
As noted below, Málek was a speaker at the Bernal Library’s
1968 conference on chemical and biological weapons, a key event in the lead-up
to Nixon’s 1969 renunciation of BWs.
Another member of the study group was Victor Zhdanov, whom
Western journalists sometimes called “Vladimir” Zhdanov. He had gained international fame as the
leader, beginning in 1958, of the World Health Organization effort to eliminate
smallpox in the wild – an effort that took on a whole new meaning after the
Cold War, when it was revealed that Zhdanov was the chair of the Soviet Union’s
Interagency Science and Technology Council on Molecular Biology and Genetics,
the committee that designed the Soviet biological weapons system.
Mikhail Dubinin of the U.S.S.R. was also a member of the
group. Some of the
In all, the group included 19 members from the Soviet bloc;
nine from the
The CBW group, along with the study group on European
security that was established at the same time, were the first such Pugwash
groups set up for in-depth study of particular issues. Robinson wrote, “What led Pugwash to accord
such special treatment to BW? Two factors seem to have been influential. One
was the sense among some Pugwashites, which had already found expression at the
Fifth Conference, that BW weapons might become a form of WMD altogether more
accessible than nuclear weapons. So, while there might well be value in
regarding nuclear arms control as essentially a bilateral matter, and a fit
topic, therefore, for the new US-Soviet arms control study group, the same was
not obviously true for BW. . . .
“The second factor was the benefit that might be gained from
establishing a forum in which the views of physicists on arms control, which
then mostly meant nuclear arms control, did not necessarily dominate the
consideration of BW. Physicists tended,
it seemed then, towards approaches to security and arms control more suited to
bilateral than to multilateral application: a mechanistic type of outlook that
did not readily accommodate the more chaotic aspects of the natural world. One
may read with some astonishment today the conclusion of Working Group 1 at the
Ninth Conference (Cambridge, UK, August 1962): ‘It was agreed that the
procedures envisaged for the elimination of nuclear weapons and the means of
delivery would also be adequate for the elimination of biological and chemical
weapons of mass destruction’. If this
was the direction in which Pugwash had been heading on CBW arms control prior
to the
The next year, Meselson submitted a paper on “A proposal to
inhibit the development of biological weapons” for the 14th
Conference,
The concluding statement of the 14th Conference
put forth the nonproliferation theme that would often be heard in future
debates on biological weapons:
“The dangers to world security posed by all classes of
biological and chemical weapons are closely inter-related. Both in public opinion and in military
practice it does not appear possible to maintain any lasting distinction
between incapacitating and lethal weapons, or between biological and chemical
warfare. The great variety of possible
agents forms a continuous spectrum, starting from those that are temporarily
incapacitating and ending with highly lethal ones. If the restraints on the
practice of any kind of biological or chemical warfare are broken down, the
entire spectrum of these weapons may come into use.”[163]
That argument, especially favored by SIPRI, would help
stigmatize the
Largely as a result of the stigmatization campaign, chemical
weapons were added to the study group’s mandate in 1967. As a result, a paper on the subject was
drafted by the study group and sent to the Secretary-General of the United
Nations, to be included with the research used by the Committee of Experts.
Another consequence of the BW/CBW working group’s activities
was, according to Robinson, the exposure of Henry Kissinger to the idea of
BW/CBW arms control. At a May 1967
conference in
After the formal establishment of SIPRI in July 1966 – with
Rotblat and Málek as two of the six members of its governing board, with
generous funding from the Swedish government, and with biological weapons as
one of the central elements of its “peace” program – Pugwash BW-related
activity overlapped increasingly with SIPRI’s work. As part of a project to show the feasibility
of a BW treaty, a series of exercises was created to demonstrate the
effectiveness of BW verification; another project involved the achievement of
rapid detection and identification of microbes.
The projects were begun by Pugwash, but soon taken over by SIPRI.
The final Pugwash meeting before the Nixon renunciation was
the 19th Conference, in
The final statement reported on the progress of the two major
Pugwash/SIPRI projects, the “BW inspection experiment” which “yielded fruitful
results,” and the system for rapid detection and identification of BW agents,
which was “still in its early stages” and “potentially very useful.”
The final statement also put forth the opinion that the
report of the U.N. Committee of Experts, along with (purportedly) technical
reports from WHO and SIPRI, would lay the groundwork for a CBW ban; that
allowing the use of riot-control agents would weaken the Geneva Protocol and an
subsequent ban; and that “efforts must be made to ban development, production,
stockpiling on home or foreign territories, and transfer of technical expertise
on weapons development between nations.
Since biological weapons are not now used, it may be possible to outlaw
them completely, but separating biological from chemical weapons might outweigh
the advantages of this partial measure.”
[165]
The reader should note that the statement reflected the
simplistic “arms control” ideology of many Pugwash conferees, that, “Since
biological weapons are not now used, it may be possible to outlaw them
completely . . . ” If it is true that
one side in a conflict develops weapons only in response to the development (or
reasonable expectation of the development) of those weapons by the other side,
that statement makes sense. In the years
to come, Soviet behavior under the Biological Weapons Convention would show how
wrong the idea was.[166]
CHAPTER FOUR
Arms control and the race with a single runner
As the 1950s ended and the 1960s rolled around, the mood
among policymakers in the
On March 14, 1960, the Western nations participating in the
ten-nation disarmament conference in Geneva issued a proposal in which they
set, as their “ultimate goal,” a “secure, free and peaceful world in which
there shall be general disarmament under effective international control and
agreed procedures for the settlement of disputes in accordance with the
principles of the United Nations Charter.”
They proposed, as “measures . . . regarded as necessary for achieving
the ultimate goal,” the “[p]rohibition of production of nuclear, chemical,
biological and other weapons of mass destruction,” and “[f]urther reduction of
existing stocks” of such weapons.
Inspection and control procedures would be established under a proposed
“International Disarmament Organization.”[168]
The Soviets, on
THE ‘PEACE’ AGENCY
Between those two events, in April, President Eisenhower
moved to establish a disarmament agency.
Senator Hubert Humphrey (D-Minnesota), candidate for the Democratic
nomination for president, noted at the time that he had proposed such an agency
two years before.[170]
Adlai Stevenson, the 1952 and 1956 Democratic nominee for
president, proposed the creation of a peace and disarmament agency during a
1960 address to the Textile Workers Union of America. At the time, Stevenson was considered a
possible stop-Kennedy presidential candidate at the upcoming Democratic
national convention. The new agency
would be part of the State Department.
In his speech, Stevenson urged the Western alliance to concentrate on
things that can be changed rather than “things we cannot hope to change in
Senator John F. Kennedy, speaking later the same meeting,
criticized the Eisenhower administration for having “permitted the power and
the strength of the
In June 1960, the Federation of American Scientists, a
science-themed political organization that grew out of the so-called “atomic
scientists’ movement,” called for the creation of a new agency to conduct
research on “possible ways to inspect and control the reduction of
armaments.” FAS noted: “To make possible
effective disarmament we must solve difficult and challenging problems in the
physical sciences, engineering, psychology, medicine, law, and economics. We must mobilize the best minds we can find. We must set them to work free of the
antagonistic environment of agencies devoted to designing or using
weapons.. This can best be done in a new
agency with the primary purpose of conducting this research for arms control.”[173]
Most of the early proposals were for an agency that would do
research in such areas as conflict resolution and treaty compliance
verification. The idea seemed to be to
create a peace-centered counterpart to what Eisenhower, in his farewell address
the next year, would call the military-industrial complex.
Eisenhower’s April 1960 proposal led, in September 1960, to
the creation of the U.S. Disarmament Administration, within the State
Department and headed by an official with a rank at or near the Assistant
Secretary level. The staff of more than
50 (20-25 of them professionals) would be drawn from the Departments of State
and Defense and the Atomic Energy Commission.
However, “The administration has been looking in vain for a prominent
person to take the top disarmament job, expected to pay above $20,000 [roughly
$127,000 in 2006 dollars] a year and be subject to Senate confirmation.”[174]
Meanwhile, the Democratic Party’s platform for the 1960
election stated: “A primary task is to develop responsible proposals that will
help break the deadlock on arms control. . . . This requires a national peace
agency for disarmament planning and research to muster the scientific
ingenuity, coordination, continuity, and seriousness of purpose which are now
lacking in our arms control efforts.
“The national peace agency would develop the technical and
scientific data necessary for serious disarmament negotiations, would conduct research
in cooperation with the Defense Department and [AEC] on methods of inspection
and monitoring arms control agreements, particularly agreements to control
nuclear testing, and would provide continuous technical advice to our
disarmament negotiators.”[175]
A core document in the development of arms control theory
came with an issue of Daedalus,
journal of the
In June 1961, President Kennedy proposed the creation of the
U.S. Disarmament Agency for World Peace and Security – what became the Arms
Control and Disarmament Agency. The
agency was to expand on the U.S. Disarmament Administration set up under
President Eisenhower. Under the Kennedy
proposal, the staff was to grow from 80-85 persons under the existing
Disarmament Administration to 200-250 in the first year of the new agency.
The Kennedy proposal was immediately endorsed by Senator
Hubert Humphrey (D-Minnesota) and Representative Robert Kastenmeier (D-Wisconsin),
who had been pressing for such an agency.[177]
The agency came to be referred to as the “peace agency”
during the debate over its creation.
The Wall Street Journal,
in an editorial, noted the danger of such an agency: that it would increase
bureaucratic pressure for agreements that might not be in the best interests of
the
“But the fundamental flaw in the Administration’s scheme is
the assumption that past
“This is manifestly untrue.
While weapons technology and hence disarmament planning grow more
complex, no
“The truth is, the Communists are interested only in
disarming their intended victims. The
most brazen imperialists in history ask ‘total and complete’ disarmament first,
and talk of safeguards later. So long as
the Communists and their ambitions remained unchanged, so long must free men
keep their heads clear.”[178]
The measure creating ACDA was signed into law on
The Federation of American Scientists, in its October 1961
newsletter, advised that “The Agency is now seeking scientists and specialists
in military analysis to fill positions with salaries up to $19,000 a year,”
about $125,000 in 2007 dollars.[179] In its November 1961 newsletter, the FAS
claimed some of the credit for the creation of ACDA. FAS Chairman John S. Toll wrote: “I believe
that our National Office was particularly effective in this intensive effort
and that the series of breakfast briefings which were held for Senators,
Congressmen, and members of their staffs with expert speakers from the
scientific and disarmament fields were especially of considerable importance in
the successful passage of this important legislation.”[180]
Often, when a government agency or department is created, it
is seen as the property to people of a certain background or mindset. The Social Security Administration, created under
President Franklin Roosevelt, was the embodiment of a political movement among
social workers such as Frances Perkins, who became FDR’s labor secretary, and
many activists from that movement went to work at the agency. The U.S. Department of Education, created
under President Jimmy Carter, was seen by some observers as the unofficial
property of the National Education Association, which had given its first
presidential campaign endorsement to Carter, and other teachers’ unions, and
many of its initial staffers came from teachers’ unions. The Department of Veterans Affairs, created
in the Reagan administration, was seen as having a similar relationship to
veterans’ organizations.
In that sense, the arms control movement was embodied in
ACDA. It attracted to its ranks many
young people who joined specifically to promote that cause, such as Richard J.
Barnet, who worked at ACDA as an aide to John J. McCloy. (McCloy was Kennedy’s
disarmament advisor and the principal drafter of the act creating ACDA.)[181] Barnet would later become co-founder and
co-director of the Institute for Policy Studies, a
DR. MESELSON GOES TO
Another person who came to
Alison B. Bass wrote in Technology
Review that Meselson was offered the ACDA job “unexpectedly.”
“‘Everyone in
“At first Meselson was
[like Dyson] assigned to study nuclear weapons, but he soon asked to be
reassigned to an area he knew something about – biological and chemical
weapons.” (Presumably, by “knew
something about,” Bass meant that Meselson knew something about chemistry and
biology, not that he knew about CWs and BWs.)
“After receiving top security clearance, Meselson began reading all the
classified and declassified material he could find on the subject.
“During his research that summer, Meselson came across Army
Field Manual 3-10 – the document that almost singlehandedly convinced him that
the world was better off without biological weapons, even as deterrents. ‘This manual contained actual operating-type
guidance for how to deliver biological agents over hundreds of kilometers to
kill vast populations,’ Meselson says.
‘And it wasn't even classified.’
“Meselson couldn't believe that high-ranking army officials
would allow the open publication of a manual that would easily convince other
nations that the
In The Scientist,
Peg Brickley reported that, during Meselson’s brief time at ACDA, “A government
official who conducted the young Meselson on his first tour of
Shortly after Meselson’s visit to
ACDA – a
government agency that was intended as the embodiment of an ideology – provided
scientist-activists such as Meselson a doorway into
The issue
that would bring them front-and-center in the CBW debate was the Vietnam
War. In Chapter Five, I examine the
effect of the war.
But, first, let us examine the ideology that was at the heart
of ACDA – that is, the ideology of arms control.
A GRAND EXPERIMENT
The
Thus, in September 1967, Defense Secretary Robert S. McNamara
declared with respect to the U.S.-U.S.S.R. relationship: “What is essential to
understand here is that the
William R. Van Cleave, founder of the Defense and Strategic
Studies department at
Typical of arms control thinking in the middle of the Cold
War was the Woods Hole Summer Study of 1962, commissioned by the Arms Control
and Disarmament Agency. The study
assumed that violations of arms control agreements would usually be
inadvertent. Thus, it suggested that
parties to arms control agreements would seek transparency – that is, the
ability of one side to determine easily the validity of an allegation of
violation – as a mutual goal. As Woods
Hole 1962 participant William R. Harris wrote in the mid-1980s: “The historical
record was at odds with this Woods Hole assumption, even in 1962. The last quarter-century of Soviet arms
control behavior indicates both that most violations are not inadvertent and
that violators recurringly lack incentive to provide the clearest picture
possible of the violation in its military environment.”[191]
Alva Myrdal, founder of the arms control organization SIPRI,
declared in 1974 that “the overriding assumption must be that any government
that has negotiated a disarmament (or nonarmament) agreement . . . will enter
as a party to the agreement with no intention of breaking it or of
cheating. The historical record speaks
for the validity of this assumption. It
is doubtful, in fact, that there has ever been an instance of a clandestine
violation in the arms field . . . ”[192]
With regard to the Biological Weapons Convention, the 1975
international agreement banning biological weapons, Richard Spertzel, former
head of BW inspections for the U.N. Special Commission on Iraq (UNSCOM), said
it was simply assumed that countries would comply. “I think it was highly anticipated that other
countries would indeed welcome such a treaty and probably comply with it – a
high degree of naïveté, certainly, in retrospect,” he said.[193]
The refusal to even consider the idea of cheating made it
possible to think of arms control agreements as essentially
self-verifying. There was, one might
say, no downside to an arms control agreement.
William R. Van Cleave wrote in 1984, “Many use a simple test for success
– the mere conclusion of formal arms control agreements, regardless of their
content and consequences.”[194]
William R. Graham noted, “Those who can be persuaded that
arms control transcends being an instrument of national security and diplomacy
are candidates for accepting inequitable agreements in the pursuit of arms control
as a goal unto itself, rather than a means to achieve
Just as the action-reaction of an arms race could lead to
disaster, arms control could lead to peace, according to experts. Donald Brennan wrote that, “If the habit of
cooperation can be established in the field of armament policy, it may well
prove ‘catching’ in other areas . . . [and] facilitate the achievement of some
political solutions, which in turn would facilitate further measures of
armament cooperation, and so on.”[196]
Van Cleave commented: “Eventually, this more optimistic,
mirror-image view came to dominate the arms control community, both in academia
and government. As it did, expectations
grew and arms control assumed greater importance, especially in the wake of the
Cuban missile crisis and with the development in the
Over time,
Once the idea of an action-reaction arms race was planted in
the minds of
John Lenczowski wrote:
“Much of Soviet propaganda . . . promotes the idea that the ‘arms race’
is the principal source of suspicion and tension between the two sides. If we accept this notion, then we can come to
accept the possibility that our own behavior – our own efforts to defend
ourselves – actually contributes to those tensions. And once we accept this, we put ourselves in
the position of searching for things we can do unilaterally to reduce those
tensions.”[201]
Michael Ledeen noted that, “By the time of the Vietnam
generation and Watergate, many had come to believe that Communist behavior, and
in particular the behavior of the Soviet Union, could be explained primarily,
if not entirely, in terms of the legitimate fears Communists had of the United
States and its nefarious plans for world domination. In the field of strategic weapons, the
fashionable position of the late ’60s and ’70s concluded that the entire arms
race had been brought about by American initiatives, and that the Soviet Union,
justifiably terrified by our nuclear arsenal, was merely struggling to keep
pace.”[202]
(Emphasis in the original.)
In response to President Reagan’s 1983 speech to the National
Association of Evangelicals in which he blamed the Soviets for the rising level
of armaments, New York Times
columnist Anthony Lewis wrote: “One may regard the Soviet system as a vicious
tyranny and still understand that it has not been solely responsible for the
nuclear arms race. The terrible irony of
that race is that the
The idea that there was an action-reactions arms race for
which the
In Type B deception, the more closely one observes, the more
likely one is to be fooled, as when Hitler convinced himself (with Allied help)
that the Normandy invasion was a carefully planned deception and refused, day
after day, to let himself be tricked by it.
Under SALT, the Soviets persuaded the Americans that they
shared
Likewise, with regard to biological weapons, the Soviets
persuaded
The lingering effect of the U.S.-is-always-at-fault idea can
be seen in a press released from a PBS station about a documentary on the U.S.
biological weapons program: “While Nixon's declaration ended America 's
offensive bioweapons programs, military leaders and researchers had opened a door
that could never be shut. ‘They've bequeathed on a world this knowledge and we
now have to control it and contain it and make sure the biological weapons are
never used,’ cautions historian Brian Balmer.”[205] The press release came some eight years after
Ken Alibek went public revealing the extent of the Soviet BW program, and some
15 years after Boris Yeltsin admitted to the existence of the program.
Back in 1969, to those who believed in the “arms race” idea,
- James
Russell Wiggins, a managing editor of The
Washington Post and President Johnson’s ambassador to the United
Nations, stressed the importance of outlawing biological weapons before
they proliferated widely. “When we
have a situation in which no country in the world is far into this
dreadful traffic, it would be easier to stop it at the start – to use
Churchill's phrase, ‘to smother the baby in the cradle’ – than it would be
to wait ten or twenty years hence when military figures will have made a
large investment of prestige and money in laboratory development and field
trials in these weapons.”[206]
- In a
speech to the National Academy of Sciences Ivan Bennett, chairman of the
PSAC panel that examined chemical and biological weapons, said that the idea
of a BW ban presented a great opportunity for mankind. “If we separate the B from the C in CBW,
we have an opportunity to ban, for the first time, the very existence of a weapon. [Emphasis in the original.] . . . The
journey toward the goal of general and complete disarmament will be long
and hard. It is high time that we
took this first step, no matter how small it might seem.”[207]
Describing the three approaches to arms control and
disarmament, Philip Towle wrote: “The disarmers regard weapons per se as the cause of warfare and seek
to abolish them under the process known as GCD [general and complete
disarmament]; the arms control lobby seeks stabilising measures which, very
often, means equalising the forces of potential enemies, whilst the ‘humanitarians’
support attempts to limit the use of weapons and so the destructiveness of
warfare.”[208]
By abolishing
After Nixon’s renunciation of biological weapons, the
The Soviet Union’s raison
d'être was the destabilization, toppling, and replacement of capitalist
governments, so the Soviets found humor as well as strategic advantage in
Nixon’s belief that they were seeking a stable international order. Arkady Shevchenko, the highest-ranking Soviet
to defect during the Cold War, told the Daily
Mail: “My most revealing experience came when I realized that our military
chiefs were just laughing their heads off over disarmament. While the talks were going on they were
promoting a massive rearmament programme.
The start of détente was accompanied by the creation of the most ominous
war machine.
“One of the great fallacies of détente was the idea that, if
the
Even Helmut Sonnenfeldt, a top
Kissinger aide and an architect of détente, acknowledged that, in arms control
negotiations, the Soviets did not have the same motivation as U.S.
policymakers. “Another difference between
When it came to biological weapons, the Soviets and
Of course, not everyone was oblivious to the idea of
cheating. Fred Iklé wrote, in the
classic Foreign Affairs article
“After Detection – What?”: “It has been
argued that all countries will be deterred from violating a major arms-control
agreement in present circumstances because to do so would set off an
unrestricted arms race that would eventually lead to disaster for the guilty as
well as the innocent. But this is an
assumption which may not be shared by a country set on violating the
agreement. Its leaders may reason that
the very prospect of an unrestricted arms race might itself inhibit the injured
party from reacting to the violation.
And in fact the injured party might feel it safer to write off the
violation as a loss rather than risk new dangers by a policy of rearmament –
especially if he now finds himself in a weaker military position as a result of
having complied with the agreement.”[214]
ORIGIN OF ARMS RACE
THEORY
The concept of an action-reaction arms race is of relatively
recent origin.
From the 1890s until 1914, the Great Powers of Europe (
The idea was also developed in the work of Lewis Fry
Richardson, a mathematician/physicist and Quaker pacifist. The developer of models for weather
prediction – including models for atmospheric dispersion critical to Biodefense
science –
Roberta Wohlstetter, the famed explainer of the Pearl Harbor
intelligence failure, explained Richardson’s concept of the arms race this way:
Like rumors of a bank’s insolvency, which lead to real insolvency, the arms
race can result from a self-fulfilling prediction; a prime minister or defense
minister of the fictional Jedesland who wanted only to defend his country, but
was misinterpreted as being interested in aggression, and so frightened his
neighbor and was himself frightened into an arms buildup leading to war.[216]
In 1932, the British Foreign Secretary, Sir John Simon, told
the League of Nations Disarmament Conference in 1932 that “an immense change
has come over the judgment of the world.
The proposition that the peace of the world is to be secured by
preparing for war is no longer believed by anybody, for recent history
manifestly disproves it. A high level of
armaments is no substitute for security.
At best, it only creates the illusion of security in one quarter while
at the same time aggravating the sense of insecurity in another.” Philip Towle
wrote of Simon’s remarks that “Simon expressed the ideas of the majority of his
countrymen who found it difficult to understand French ‘intransigence’ over
disarmament. They believed that every
reduction in French armaments would make peace much more secure because they
accepted the view that the First World War had been caused by the arms race.”[217]
But, Wohlstetter noted, the action-reaction arms race model
did not describe the behavior of Adolph Hitler: “In fact, in the 1930s Hitler
was busy talking like the Minister of Jedesland in Richardson’s theory, making
exactly the noises that the British wanted to hear, while his behaviour was
signaling the opposite – that the governments of some countries at any rate had something in mind other than
self-defence. While the fashionable political and sociological theories
concentrated on self-fulfilling
prophecies, the actual practice (reinforced perhaps by the sociological
theories) illustrated the use of what John Venn called ‘suicidal
prophecies’. Hitler, when trusted, did
not become trustworthy. He took
advantage of British trust, complacency, and guilt.
“Similarly, recent history suggests that the unilateral
restraints embodied in our informal practices in advance of an agreement, in
our lax agreements themselves in SALT, and in our lax interpretation of these
agreements, encourage the Russians to believe that they can gain an advantage
through the continued expansion of their defence effort.”[218]
In fact, the greatest apparent arms race of the 1930s was
between
Nor did
Bruno Tertrais, a former official in the French defense
ministry, wrote that, “After World War I, scholars and politicians were tempted
to label the extraordinary military buildup that developed between 1870 and
1914 as a major cause, if not the major cause, of the conflict. Subsequent
historical studies, however, have shed considerable doubt on this theory. Moreover, arms racing may in fact have
positive aspects. NATO's 1979 decision to deploy Pershing-2 and ground-launched
cruise missiles (GLCMs) in response to the Soviet Union's deployment of SS-20s
and Backfire bombers, which undoubtedly was part of an action-reaction process,
made the ‘zero option’ and the INF Treaty possible.”[220]
Why doesn’t the
action-reaction model work?
One explanation was offered by Uri Ra’anan in the book Intelligence Policy and National Security:
There is a fundamental fallacy
involved in this approach, which, for want of a better term, we may call the
‘hidden portion of the iceberg’ factor. “Action/reaction”
might constitute a viable model, particularly in the area of security affairs,
only if the “visible parts” (that is production and deployment) alone were of
significance. It would make sense to
utilize this particular metaphor if, upon sighting an adversary’s deployment,
once could “react” by counter-deploying instantly. In the real world, however, there is a small
problem known as “Research and Development” involving another “detail” called “lead
time,” which may cover a period of anywhere from five to ten years or more
between the moment at which a certain technological development first becomes
theoretically feasible and the day on which the appropriate item then comes off
the assembly line and achieves “visibility.”
A party that would be “reacting” merely to the actions of its adversary, that is, the new developments “on the
other side” that could be detected,
would ensure simply that it was lagging behind by a significant number of
years. A realistic planner, therefore,
and there is no reason whatever to deny the Soviet leadership that sobriquet,
does not want to “react” to developments that can already be seen on someone
else’s turf, but, rather, is liable to give the ‘go ahead’ soon after a certain
technology first becomes theoretically available.[221]
Ra’anan added that “we have reason for thinking that Soviet
leaders do some ‘mirror-imaging’ of their own, that is they assume, apparently,
that the logical way of acting is to take it for granted that, if technology
renders a certain development feasible, then the appropriate steps are bound to
be taken. They believe, it seems, that
the adversary will behave in precisely the same manner; consequently, they
‘react’ not to actions ‘on the other
side,’ as they become visible, but rather to the assumption that ‘if it is feasible for us, it is feasible for them,
and if it can be done, then they will do it.’ This is a form of ‘action/reaction,’ if you
like, but certainly not the kind to which so much of Western thinking about the
Keith B. Payne noted in The
Washington Quarterly that the action-reaction theory ignores such basic
factors as:
- Competing
foreign policy goals and defense requirements,
- Inter-
and intraservice rivalries,
- Bureaucratic
politics,
- The
specific character and style of political and social systems,
- Electoral
politics,
- Resource
availability or limitations,
- Organizational
momentum, and
- Technological
innovation/limitation.[223]
Perhaps the problem with the action-reaction arms race
concept, as we see from the Soviets’ willful and complete violation of the
Biological Weapons Convention, is that sometimes the arms race isn’t really a
race. The Soviets created a massive
program for waging biological war without regard to whether the
As Harold Brown, President Carter's
defense secretary, concluded in 1979, “When we build, they build; when we stop
building, they nevertheless continue to build.”[224]
Is it an arms race if only one side
is running?
In a 2001 article in the Bulletin
of the Atomic Scientists, Stephen Schwartz claimed that the action-reaction
model was reflected “at every key juncture in the Soviet-American competition.”[225] Despite
the failure of the biological Cold War to turn out as action-reaction arms
control theory predicted – and despite the fact that biological weapons, banned
at the time when experts believed them to be infeasible as weapons, presented
the perfect test case for their theories – there is no evidence that arms
control advocates have reexamined their theories.
That is not surprising.
Leon Festinger et al., in When
Prophecy Fails, analyzed cases in which endtimes predictions failed. He found that the most fervent believers
often took the failure of the prediction as evidence that their intervention –
e.g., their prayers – had been successful.
They became even more confirmed in their beliefs. A large number of proselytizing groups began
with a prediction/prophecy that failed.[226]
SERIOUS DENIAL
Consider the response of the Council for a Livable World to
the revelation of the Soviets’ massive biological weapons program, conducted in
direct violation of the Biological Weapons Convention. (The council was one of the
scientist-activist groups that grew out of the atomic scientists’ movement. In the 1960s, Matthew Meselson served as a
CLW spokesman[227] and he
is, at this writing, listed as a member of its board.[228] Today, CLW is the sponsor of the Center for
Arms Control and Non-Proliferation – formerly the Council for a Livable World
Education Fund[229]
– a leading proponent of a form of arms control ideology. )
In 2001 – nine years after Boris Yeltsin admitted that the
Soviets violated the BWC, and two years after Ken Alibek went public with the
details – Douglas Feith, a former Defense Department official who had taken the
lead during the 1980s in exposing the Soviet program, was nominated for Under
Secretary of Defense for Policy. CLW opposed Feith’s nomination in part because
“While at the Reagan Pentagon, Feith authored a controversial report claiming
the
Biological Weapons Convention
The New York Times: “Mr. Feith, in
testimony last month before the House Select Committee on Intelligence, said
that the
According to Feith’s report: “They
(Soviets) have transferred biological warfare to their clients in
Associated Press: “Feith's report
calls the BW ban ‘worthless.’” (
“The prevailing judgment of years ago
that BW is not a militarily significant weapon is now quite unsustainable.”
(Massachusetts Institute of Technology Technology Review, April 1987)[231]
Thus, it is clear that CLW considered Feith’s correct
analysis related to Soviet BWC violations and the collapse of the BWC with
regard to the
Consider a comment about the weaponization of smallpox by
Thomas Schelling, an heir to Lewis Fry Richardson in the application of
mathematics to the arms race. In 2007,
nine years after the public revelation of the massive weaponization of smallpox
by the
We spoke, also, about
bioweapons. “Three years ago,” Tom
explains, “there was a lot of interest in, and concern about, the use of
smallpox as a weapon. I was involved in
a meeting that included a number of bioweapons experts, and after considerable
discussion, I asked how long it would take for a smallpox epidemic deliberately
started in the
One is reminded of the legend of the
mathematician who proved that bumblebees cannot fly. Regarding that tale, Science News once noted, “The real issue isn't that scientists can
be wrong. The real issue is that there's
a crucial difference between a ‘thing’ and a mathematical model of the
‘thing.’”[233]
CHAPTER FIVE
Vietnam, CS, DM, Agent Orange, and the anti-CBW campaign
In Vietnam, where North Vietnamese/Soviet-backed insurgents –
the Viet Cong – were attempting to overthrow the South Vietnamese government,
the U.S. made extensive use of two types of chemicals in warfare: defoliation
agents to increase visibility in jungle areas (for example, to expose enemy
re-supply efforts) and to deny food to the enemy; and certain types of
incapacitating gases called riot-control gases (including tear gases), to quell
disturbances and to flush Viet Cong out of tunnels or bunkers and out of places
where they used civilians as human shields.
An incapacitating gas has a high ratio of Lethal Dose to
Incapacitating Dose (or of lethal concentration to incapacitating
concentration), so that it can be used on groups of people with confidence that
it will not cause fatalities. Generally,
for a chemical weapon to be considered an incapacitant, the ratio of median
lethal concentration (LCt50, which kills 50% of those exposed) to median
incapacitating concentration (ICt50) must be 100:1 – in contrast to, for
example, nerve gases which typically have a ratio of 10:1. However, the difference between a lethal gas
and a nonlethal, incapacitating gas is wholly a matter of degree. A gas classified as nonlethal will, at a
certain level of exposure, kill a person.
(The same could be said for, say, water.) Because of the difficulty in drawing a fine
line between lethal and incapacitating gases, and due to the Geneva Protocol’s
prohibition on the use in war of “asphyxiating, poisonous or other gases,” the
use of incapacitating gases has been controversial. Even when the
In April 1964, the Joint Chiefs of Staff issued a field
manual stating that “commanders are currently authorized to use certain
chemical agents such as flame, incendiaries, smoke, riot control agents and
defoliants.”[235]
Most of the herbicides used by the
The major riot-control gases used by the
The use of such “chemical weapons” in
(Interestingly, a few months later, the Times reversed its position, after riot-control gas was used in an
incident near Quinhon, resulting in the freeing of 400 hostages and the capture
of 17 Viet Cong without casualty. “If
the Government prohibits the use of tear gas, it will thereby condemn to
certain death or injury many more Americans and Vietnamese than absolute
necessities of war demand.”[239])
In February 1966, an advertisement in
The New York Times declared that the
The war in
Our government has ignored this.
It has directed its peace feelers to the
The ad was signed by scores of
academics, including such famous ones as Matthew Meselson, Victor Sidel, George
Wald of Harvard, and Salvador Luria and Philip Morrison of MIT. Other signers included Stanley Milgram, the
social psychologist known for the “six degrees of separation” concept, Martin
Peretz, future editor-in-chief of The New
Republic, and Lester Thurow, a prominent proponent of more centralized government
control of the economy.[240]
The fact that many leading academics shared a false view of
the Vietnam War[241]
is relevant to the BW renunciation issue for two reasons: it shows the degree
to which scientists/academics of the time were susceptible to anti-U.S.
deception by the Soviet bloc, and it provides context to the later debate over
the use of chemicals by the U.S. in the Vietnam War.
THE 1963-66 CBW REVIEW
On
The ACDA paper “recognizes that first priority must continue
to be placed on the prevention of nuclear war, and that efforts to control CB
weapons should not hinder or delay our efforts to halt the spread of nuclear
weapons.”[245]
The paper continued: “The term ‘CB Weapons of Mass
Destruction’ refers only to lethal chemical and biological weapons,” excluding
“non-poisonous tear gases” such as CN and CS and weapons that temporarily
incapacitate without residual injury.
Smoke, flame, and incendiary agents were also excluded from the category
of CBWMDs. “The
“Although the US should continue to adhere to its declared
‘no-first-use’ policy on CB weapons of mass destruction, it should not so bind
itself by international agreement, unless such action by the US would assistant
materially in obtaining adherence by other nations to a more comprehensive
agreement, such as a CB non-proliferation agreement, which the US may wish to
support. . . .
“Other, more far-reaching agreements looking towards the
eventual elimination of chemical or biological weapons of mass destruction from
the arsenals of all nations should be sought when adequate means of
verification are available to protect national security.”[246] Of course, the requirement for adequate
verification in any such agreement was abandoned after the Nixon renunciation.
On
That year,
Other CBW-related events around that time:
- At
the end of Summer 1966, Matthew Meselson and colleagues began a petition
drive calling for a review of
- The
campaign to ban universities from doing CBW work was underway; The New Republic reported in its
October 1, 1966 issue that
“Universities have been drawn into the [CBW] work by the lure of
Pentagon money, though just the other day the University of Pennsylvania
courageously decided that the ignominy was not worth the subsidy.[249] By the end of the decade, the campaign
would spread to a number of elite universities.
- In
1966, State Senator Jerome L. Wilson (D-Manhattan) ran for Congress,
campaigning on a platform that included calling on President Johnson to
issue a “declaration of intent never to use chemical or biological
weapons.” A newspaper ad presenting
his platform and endorsing his candidacy was signed by dozens of scientists
and physicians.[250]
Nobel laureate Joshua Lederberg wrote an op-ed for The Washington Post,
- “Its
development is closest to medical research, therefore conveys the most
intense perversions of the human aims of science.
- “It
is the most dubious of military weapons.
- “Its
effects in field use are most unpredictable, with respect to civilian
casualties, and even retroactive on the user.
- “The
large scale deployment of infectious agents is a potential threat against
the whole species: mutant forms of viruses could well develop that would
spread over the earth's population for a new Black Death. Chemical weapons, however potent, at least
do not produce equally or more virulent offspring!”
“The future of the species is very much bound up with the
control of these weapons. Their use must
be regulated by the most thoughtful reconsideration of
In October 1966, Senator Clifford Case (R-New Jersey) noted
that, because “Any agreement we may reach for the control of nuclear weapons
might serve to enhance the importance of bacteriological weapons,” BWs should
be controlled concurrently with nuclear weapons. He proposed a BW nonproliferation agreement
as “an important first step in this direction [of nuclear-and-BW arms control]
and a constructive precedent for other areas of arms control.”[252]
At the United Nations, on
At every turn, the CBW issue was linked to the Vietnam
War. Often, it became a surrogate for
the war – an issue on which the
On
Because the
“The risk associated with massive use of biological weapons
is essentially impossible to predict. In
many applications there is the possibility of creating a new focus of epidemic
infection which might constitute a continuing hazard. In addition, we have scanty experience with
the ecological consequences of disturbing the natural biological equilibrium of
any area by the introduction of substantial quantities of viable, infectious
organisms. Finally, there is at least a
theoretical possibility that the sue of biological agents on a large scale may
result in mutations producing new strains of unusual virulence or even a new
form of the disease for which treatment is not available.
“At the same time, we have been presented with no scenarios,
nor have we thought of any ourselves, in which the military value seems
significant,” Hornig wrote.[257]
The fact that the PSAC could imagine no scenarios – none –
for the significant use of BWs is hard to believe. If true, it reflected a breathtaking lack of
imagination, and an inability or refusal to communicate with BW experts (who
could have provided a number of scenarios), that arguably invalidated the
PSAC’s judgment on this matter.
Ultimately, the recommendation of President Johnson’s PSAC in 1966 would
be reflected, in almost identical language, in the recommendation of the PSAC
subcommittee that made its recommendation to President Nixon in 1969.
THE MESELSON PETITION
In August 1966, Matthew Meselson,
John T. Edsall, and their colleagues, with the support of the Federation of
American Scientists, began a petition campaign against
“The point about employing tear gas
in conjunction with fragmentation bombs is that only last October, the use of
tear gas against the Viet Cong was solemnly defended – by Defense Department
officials – as a humanitarian, life-sparing tactic. It explained that while it was probably very
cruel to ‘winkle’ the Viet Cong out of underground bunkers and tunnels with
high explosives – for the bunkers and tunnels are usually occupied by women and
children, as well as guerrilla fighters – tear gas sprayed from helicopters
could do the job just as well and without killing a soul. The aim, in October 1965, was to calm
Americans and others who were expressing indignation at the Pentagon’s recourse
to gas. The Defense Department officials
cannily made no reference to the tactic of employing fragmentation bombs
against men, women, and children ‘flushed’ or ‘winkled’ out of bunkers and
tunnels. That is what is now being done. Chemicals are also being used in
“In
When the letter was initially sent to
the President with the first 22 signatures, an assistant secretary at the State
Department wrote: “Civilians or non-combatants are warned of such action
(destruction of food crops) in advance.
They are asked to leave the area and are provided food and good
treatment by the Government of Vietnam in resettlement areas.”[259]
The Harvard Crimson noted: ”At least two Nobel Prize winners are among
the signers of the [Meselson-Edsall] letter, which will probably be sent to the
White House in January. All of the
signatories have Ph.D.’s or M.D.’s, and over 100 are members of the National
Academy of Sciences. It is perhaps the
most impressive collective expression of scientists' feelings since physicists
lobbied in 1946 to keep control of atomic energy out of the hands of the
military.”
Meselson said, “I am amazed with the response to our letter to President
Johnson.” Despite the fact that only
about 3,000 copies were mailed out (2,500 of them to the FAS), some 5,000
signatures were collected. Meselson,
Edsall, Paul Doty, and Irwin C. Gunsalus delivered the petition to the White
House. [260]
In conjunction with the delivery of
the petition, the 105,000-member American Association for the Advancement of
Science passed a resolution of concern over the long-term consequences of CB
warfare.[261]
The petition stated: “The employment
of any one CB (chemical-biological) weapon weakens the barriers to the use of
others.
“No lasting distinction seems
feasible between incapacitating and lethal weapons or between chemical and
biological warfare. The great variety of
possible agents forms a continuous spectrum from the temporarily incapacitating
to the highly lethal. If restraints on
the use of one kind of CB weapons are broken down, the use of others will be
encouraged.”[262]
The petition urged an end to the use
of “chemical-biological” weapons in
And – in one of the steps that led to
the
(In 1966, the American Association for
the Advancement of Science establishing a committee to examine purported
environmental degradation, including “the long-range consequences of the use of
biological and chemical agents which modify the environment.”[265] The committee’s principal concern was the
On
In 1967, Secretary of State Dean Rusk raised the CBW issue
with Defense Secretary Robert McNamara, and the matter was referred to the
Joint Chiefs of Staff. [268] Eventually,
the CBW question was referred to the Office of Systems Analysis, where,
according to Forrest Russel Frank, analyst Han Swyter examined the issue.[269] Later, in 1969, Swyter put forth his analysis
at a CBW symposium conducted by the National Academy of Sciences, and it
appeared as a nine-and-a-half-page article in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
In the analysis, as it appeared in Proceedings, Swyter concerned himself mostly with chemical
weapons. Incapacitating BWs were dismissed
in less than a page, with the argument that the dangers – escalation (because
an incapacitating BW cannot be distinguished immediately from a lethal BW),
justification (setting a precedent for BW use), and proliferation – would far
outweigh any small benefit from their use.
Swyter dismissed lethal BWs even more quickly:
Lethal Biologicals. – These are population-killing weapons.
In situations in which our national objective would be to kill other
countries’ populations, lethal biological could be used.
If we want to kill population, we can
now do that with our strategic nuclear weapons – our B-52s, Minutemen, and
Polaris. We keep the nuclear capability
whether or not we have lethal biological capability. A lethal biological capability would be in
addition to our nuclear capability rather than a substitute for it.
Therefore, we do not need a lethal
biological capability.[270] (Emphasis
in the original.)
The Johnson administration’s CBW policy discussions,
involving the State Department and ACDA with the Pentagon, continued.
At one point, according to Seymour
Hersh, “a pro-Pentagon Navy captain was removed from the State Department’s
study team.”[271]
Late in the Johnson administration, Meselson worked to
promote
In his dissertation, Frank credited three factors with
raising awareness of the BW issue during this period: Attempts by the
President’s Science Advisory Committee to dissuade the U.S. Army from testing
BW agents and vectors in a central Pacific island chain; the effort by the
Joint Chiefs of Staff’s Joint Planning Staff to ascertain a clear policy on
BWs; and the barrage of criticism regarding chemical use in Vietnam, which
obliged U.S. officials to prepare diplomatic defenses. Nevertheless, the President’s inner circle
devoted little if any time to the CBW issue.[273]
However,
it was an incident at and around a remote outpost in
Ironically,
the incident had nothing directly to do with biological weapons.
Figure 1: Map of the Dugway area.
CHAPTER SIX
A mighty wind: Dugway and six thousand dead sheep
The single event that played the greatest role in causing the
The text involved an agent called VX which, like other nerve agents,
interferes with the operation of the nervous system.
Here’s how: Acetylcholine is a neurotransmitter – that is, it
transmits signals from one nerve ending to the next. In simple terms, acetylcholine serves as an
“on” switch for nerves, and the enzyme cholinesterase neutralizes it, serving
as an “off” switch. Nerve agents such as
sarin (GB), soman (GD), and VX inhibit the operation of cholinesterase, leaving
nerves stuck in the “on” position.
Victims of nerve gas, unable to control their bodies, usually go into
convulsions and die from asphyxiation.
Nerve agents are usually called “nerve gases,” but they are
not gases; they are liquids delivered in an aerosol spray.
They are classified as “nonpersistent” (they are volatile,
relatively quick to evaporate, and unlikely to remain long where sprayed) or
“persistent” (they might remain in an area at deadly concentrations for as much
as a week or two). Sarin, for example,
is classified as nonpersistent, while VX is persistent.
Indeed, VX is viscous, has the consistency of motor oil, and
falls to the ground quickly. The
volatility of VX – measured by the approximate amount of agent (in milligrams)
that one cubic meter of air can hold at 25°C (77°F) – is 10. (That compares to 22,000 for sarin and 1,000,000
for hydrogen cyanide.) Needless to say,
VX doesn’t travel very far in the open air.[274]
Colorless and odorless, the “gas” form of VX is made up of
airborne particles that settle on the ground and are slow to evaporate. Because of its large particle size, it is
not absorbed through the lungs but through the skin. (In contrast, sarin has the consistency of
water and is designed for respiratory absorption.[275]) VX’s LD50 for humans – the dose that has a
50% chance of killing an exposed person – is ten milligrams via skin exposure
for a 154-pound man.[276]
THE MIDDLE OF NOWHERE
The test took place at Dugway Proving Ground, in
It was a routine test.
According to CW expert Albert J. Mauroni, DPG had conducted 170 nerve
agent spray trials since 1953, in addition to hundreds of mustard gas and
biological agent spray trials. Extensive
testing with stimulants was done before any testing with a real nerve agent,
and even then the tanks contained, in addition to the nerve agent, a chemical
dye as a marker.[280]
At
The pilot then pulled up, to about 1500 feet, to jettison the
tanks. A small amount of agent continued
to dribble out of one of the tanks after the target was sprayed, during the
five seconds before the tanks were ejected.[282]
As John C. Waugh reported in The Christian Science Monitor, “A weak weather front was moving in
on the desert. Scattered clouds were
scuddling [sic] across toward the northeast.
A 20-mile-an-hour breeze was whipping out of the southwest. Nothing unusual.”[283]
It began to rain.
Other activities involving CW agents were conducted that day
at DPG, including an artillery demonstration involving sarin (GB) that was
conducted some 15-35 miles away from Skull Valley and the disposal of 160
gallons of VX in an open burning pit about 27 miles away from Skull Valley.[284] But only the aerial spray test was later
associated with what happened next.
The next day, Environment
magazine later reported, “shepherds from the Hatch Ranch in
Philip M. Boffey in Science
wrote that the sheep “acted dazed, walked in an uncoordinated manner with their
heads tilted off to one side, urinated frequently, and, when frightened or
pushed, often sank to the ground and lay there, kicking the air, unable to get
up.”[286]
The Christian Science Monitor reported: “The next day [after the
test] was March 14. Up in the rolling
stone-and-sage-covered hills of White Rock on the edge of
“In the hours and days that followed more than 6,000 sheep
died.”[287]
The New York Times reported that the sheep began
collapsing and dying two days after the test, not the next day.[288]
The nearest affected sheep were in Skull Valley, 27 miles
away from the test sire and over the mountains, while the farthest affected
sheep were in Rush Valley 45 miles from the test site, over two mountain ranges
but near a pass through the second range.
On the second day after the test, ranchers called
veterinarians for help. “The
veterinarians had never observed symptoms like this before and were unable to
diagnose the illness or to help the sick animals,” according to Environment magazine.[289]
By Sunday, March 17, four days after the test, Philip Boffey
reported in Science, “the principal
rancher involved and his veterinarian concluded they were up against something
they couldn’t handle and called for help from local universities.”[290]
“Toole County Agent Ernest O. Biggs said more than 3,000 head
had been counted dead about mid-Monday,” the Deseret News noted. “Cy
Jensen, district manager for the BLM [Bureau of Land Management], sad he had
heard more than 5,000 sheep were dead by this morning [Tuesday].
“Scientists report a similar epidemic in
“However, officials said they saw no traces of such poison in
the
The New York Times reported: “A toxicologist from the
National Animal Disease Center at Ames, Iowa, arrived in Utah today [March 20,
a week after the test] to help other scientists seeking to find what is killing
thousands of sheep in western Utah’s semidesert Skull Valley.
“Dr. Hillman Nelson arrived in
“Officials said the deaths were apparently caused by some
kind of poison affecting the animals’ nervous system.
“The area is 20 to 30 miles from the Army’s Dugway Proving
Ground, where biological and chemical warfare tests are conducted. But an Army spokesman said the installation
‘definitely is not responsible.’
“Some 3,000 sheep have reportedly died since last Thursday,
all on the
On Thursday, March 21, eight days after the test, the office
of Senator Frank Moss (D-Utah) released a document, marked “For Official Use
Only,” that the senator had been given by the Army. It described the CW-related activities at
Dugway on March 13 –that “non-persistent” gas was fired in 155 millimeter
shells, 160 gallons of “nerve agent” was disposed of in a pit, and 320 gallons
of a “persistent gas” was spread from an airplane. According to Albert J. Mauroni, “Suspicion
immediately fell upon the Army’s tests.
Newspapers began running stories that the open-air spray trials were now
the number one suspect in the sheep deaths.”[293]
Interestingly, Seymour Hersh later suggested that the release
of the document was accidental. “How
long the army would have gone without telling the ranchers of the nerve gas
tests is problematical; when the facts became known, it was by accident. On Thursday, March 21, the Pentagon responded
to a request for more information from Senator Frank E. Moss, Utah Democrat, by
sending a fact sheet to his office marked ‘For Official Use Only,’ an informal
security classification intended to prevent public release. A young press aide in Moss’s office promptly
made the fact sheep public; the Army’s attempt hours later to retrieve the
document was too late.”[294] Hersh did not explain how he could possibly
have known whether the release was an “accident” or a deliberate leak.
In the same article, Hersh noted that the Army cancelled all
open-air spray tests at Dugway and “spent the next three weeks issuing denials
that nerve gas from Dugway had anything to do with the death of the sheep –
even in the face of medical reports directly linking them to organic phosphate
compounds (nerve gas is one such).” The
non sequitur is glaring: Even if the sheep died from exposure to
organophosphates, nerve gas (or, specifically, VX) “is one such” and not the
only such compound – for example, common pesticides of the day were also
organophosphates -- and Dugway testing was not the only possible source of
nerve gas.[295]
The New York Times reported:
The sheep were in two bands, tended
by Basque herdsmen, employed by the
The sheep were almost all ewes 40
days from lambing and 10 days from being sheared of the 12 to 15 pounds of wool
that each carries at winter’s end. . . .
Several hundred sheep from one band
were locate by helicopter today [March 21, eight days after the test] clustered
around a pinnacle of rock jutting from a mountain meadow to the west of
Most of them were dead, their
carcasses scattered among snow patches and beneath the low-growing cedar
trees. Others scratched at the ground to
try to get to get up as the dried tumbleweed blown by the wash from the blades
frightened them. Their hooves had dug
trenches in earlier futile efforts.”[296]
THE INVESTIGATION
BECOMES POLITICAL
According to Albert J. Mauroni, “an Army intelligence
officer, a captain assigned to Dugway, initiated his own investigation. He discovered that Deseret Livestock Company
ranchers had hired two spray planes to spray insecticide over lands where
alfalfa was grown, about two to five miles north of the White Rocks sheep. He had obtained one pilot’s name and the
aircraft number and located two empty spray tanks. Eyewitnesses in the area were not sure
whether the spraying had been conducted on March 13, 14, or 15, but it was in
the right time frame.”[297] But when Dugway’s commander, Colonel James
Watts, mentioned the investigation to Governor Calvin L. Rampton (D), the
governor became infuriated.
According to C. Grant Ash, Rampton said, in effect, “You
people at Dugway killed those sheep and I will not stand by and let you involve
the innocent ranchers and citizens of
Rampton made calls to officials in
(Five days after Rampton confronted
Later on the day of the Rampton-Watts confrontation, March
21, “ten sheep were reported sick at the neighboring Skull Valley Indian
Reservation and a dozen or more sheep ill at the Russell Herd in
By the next day, Friday, March 22, nine days after the test,
the issue had become politicized, with
By the time of Rampton’s comments, there was something of a
mob scene at Skull Valley as, in the words of Philip M. Boffey and D.S.
Greenberg of Science magazine,
“various other scientists came rushing to this arid valley about 60 miles
southwest of Salt Lake City to assist in the investigation.”[304] According to Boffey, those investigating
the incident included, within less than two weeks, “specialists” from Dugway,
the University of Utah, Utah State University at Logan, the U.S. Department of
Agriculture, and various other state and federal agencies, plus “experts” from
the Army’s Edgewood (Maryland) Arsenal, the Public Health Service’s National
Communicable Disease Center in Atlanta, the Agriculture Department’s National
Animal Disease Laboratory in Ames, Iowa, and a military contractor. “At this point, virtually no one has a
complete picture of all the scientific tests that have been run and are being
run,” Boffey noted.[305]
They needn’t have bothered with the stepped-up investigation:
The day after Governor Rampton announced his opinion, even as the new
investigators were arriving, the head of the Rampton-appointed investigating
team declared that “We are as positive as medical science can be the army tests
caused the deaths. We’re very lucky no
people were killed. As far as we’re
concerned, the cases are closed.’ The
head investigator, Dr. D.A. Osguthorpe said that “sufficient tests” had been
completed to hold the Army responsible.
Osguthorpe said, “We have narrowed the cause of death to an
organic phosphate compound – the kind that is a component of nerve gas. Since the Army has admitted conducting nerve
gas tests the day before the sheep began dying, that would seem to clear the
matter up.”
His comments were contradicted by an Army spokesman who said
that “no definite cause of death” had been established and that the set of
symptoms found in the dying animals “simply doesn’t match those in animals
affected by toxic nerve gases.”[306] In fact, according to Mauroni, test sheep
deliberately exposed to VX showed labored breathing, convulsions, and excessive
salivation – symptoms not seen in the
During the March 23-24 weekend’s helicopter surveillance runs
to document living and ambulatory sheep in the area, a major from Dugway
encountered a rancher who, according to Mauroni, “was engaged with a crew of
men killing sheep. Many were still
alive, and about a third were healthy enough to run as the helicopter swooped
over them. For the purposes of the
brief, they estimated there were about 15,000 sheep in the immediate affected
area, and between 5,000 and 7,000 had taken ill.”[308]
THE ARMY CONCEDES
By Monday, March 25, 12 days after the test, United Press
International reported:
The Army conceded for the first time
. . . that its nerve gas possibly might
have killed some 6000
Brig. Gen. William W. Stone of the
Army Materiel Command said there was increasing evidence that a chemical such
as used in nerve gas killed the sheep, but that no traces of it could be found
in the grazing area, near the Army’s Dugway proving grounds in western
“We fully recognize, with this
occurring right on our doorstep and probably involving a chemical similar to
materials that we have been testing, that we are highly suspect,” Stone told
members of Congress from Utah.
The same chemical, Stone said, was
found in insecticides, but there was no evidence that insecticides had been
used in the area.
While there was increasing evidence
that an anticholinesterase chemical such as is used by the Army was involved,
Stone said, there was no evidence “to tell us the actual chemical compound or
to help us pinpoint the source and how it got to the sheep and not to humans.”[309]
Interestingly, Stone said that there was no evidence of
insecticide use in the area, even though the intelligence officer had found evidence
of such use. As noted above, on March
26, the day after Stone’s comment, ranchers would admit to aerial spraying of
insecticide.
News stories continued to indicate that evidence was mounting
against the Army. Victor Cohn wrote in The Washington Post about evidence that,
he wrongly suggested, supported the Dugway-did-it theory. The new “facts that seem to point to nerve
gas as the probable killer” were disclosed by “[Senator] Moss and [Brig. Gen.]
Stone, facing reporters,” Cohn wrote, with no hint that the sheep could have
been exposed to nerve gas from a source other than the Army test. He reported that “Five healthy sheep, hauled
to Skull Valley March 19, showed similar sickness symptoms within six or seven
days” and “Seventy more range sheep just beyond Skull Valley have shown ‘very
light symptoms’ in the past few days.
‘It means there’s something still there in the forage, the plants the
sheep eat,’ Stone said.”[310] That was strange, because any VX that reached
Skull Valley would have been in extremely small particles – the large, heavy
particles having precipitated immediately – and even a persistent agent such as
VX would have mostly disappeared by the time the new sheep arrived, much less
when they began to get sick (it was six days until they arrived, plus up to six
or seven days for them to exhibit symptoms).
And the fact that sheep were getting “very light symptoms” 17 to 19 days
after the test was equally peculiar.
Cohn also wrote that “All these sheep – the 6400, the Dugway
test sheep and the newly ill – show depressed levels of the enzyme
cholinesterase in their blood. This has
been called ‘the most specific test’ of nerve gas action” – brushing aside the
fact a number of substances, including some common pesticides, lower the level
of cholinesterase.
NOT WHAT HAPPENED, BUT HOW IT HAPPENED
The emphasis in news stories began to shift, from the
question of what happened to the sheep to the question of when the Army would
admit that it was at fault. Boffey, in Science, wrote, “Utah sheep ranchers
suspect the Army will try to ‘cover up’ if it discovers that nerve agents did
indeed kill the sheep, but Army officials insist they are eager to have outside
scientists participate in the investigating and help solve the mystery. The Army says it has granted clearance and
access to all relevant information to at least two
Muckraking journalists Drew Pearson and Jack Anderson entered
the fray by raising the question: If such a test can kill thousands of sheep,
how can we know humans are safe? “The
incident of the 6000 dead sheep in western
“This column has learned, for example, that the veterinarians
who examined the dead sheep have complained of strange symptoms
themselves. The Basque sheepherder who
has been tending the ill-fated flock also suffered from nausea, headaches,
dissiness [sic] and diarrhea.
The Dugway incident “has caused an urgent reappraisal of the
safeguards at other chemical and biological warfare centers. For it is known hat the Army is experimenting
with paralyzing, odorless gases and deadly mutant microbes in more populated
places than the sagebrush country of western
“There are no known antidotes for some of the gases and germs
that have been developed. At the Pine
Bluff Laboratories, for example, bacterial strains have been developed that
could cause a national disaster. . . . The question remains whether the next
seepage could leave dead people instead of sheep.”
Pearson and Anderson reported: “In the case of the sheep, the
Agriculture Department sent two veterinarians from the
“Not long afterward, both veterinarians came down with the
same symptoms that had afflicted the sheepherder. This startling development was immediately
hushed up by the Federal officials in charge of the investigation. Dr. E.E. Solomon, the Agriculture
Department’s director of animal health, spoke on the phone to his chief
veterinarian in
“Meanwhile, Brig. Gen. William W. Stone of the Army Materiel
Command acknowledged to the
Thus, the story of the Dugway sheep began to expand. If the Army was incorrect or lying about the
nerve gas test’s effect on sheep, maybe it was wrong about the effect on
humans. (See the end of this chapter
for a recent follow-up involving a man named Ray Peck.)
Less than 50 people, including Basque sheepherders and about
30 American Indians, lived in the
In response to reports such as those in the Pearson/Anderson
column, and specifically to a warning by a local doctor, the Pentagon announced
that Army and the U.S. Public Health Service examinations “have revealed no
effect on any of the people tested in the Skull Valley area of Utah,” that Army
doctors “thoroughly tested and examined” DPG employees living in Skull Valley
“to determine if they had in any way been affected by whatever killed the
sheep” while the PHS tested other residents of the area.”
The local doctor was Dr. Kelly Gubler, chief of staff at
The “massive human disaster” quote was picked up by both AP
and UPI and appeared in hundreds of newspapers, including in The New York Times on April 13 and 14.[318]
The Chicago Tribune
reported that Gubler said doctors had treated humans “with infection and
nervous disorders which ‘made me wonder about Dugway.’”[319]
THE CONCLUSION IS FINAL
On April 12, 30 days after the test, the Public Health
Service released a report suggesting that the sheep had been exposed to large
amounts of a substance “identical” to VX that had been supplied to the
On May 9, the Federation of American Scientists cited “the
inadvertent destruction of 6400 sheep near the Dugway Proving Ground” as it
called for an end to
“It is foolish for a rich nation with the strongest deterrent
on earth to encourage other nations to develop cheap weapons that might
neutralize our power or destroy our people,” the FAS claimed in a statement
released to the press. The statement
also asserted: “Neither our acts nor our statements should increase the
plausibility of chemical and biological warfare. Inevitable reports of the development of
these weapons will quietly incite, encourage and justify actions by others not
now engaged in such development.
FAS said it was unlikely the
“Nor will the
At the time, FAS claimed about 2,500 members.[321]
By June, the idea that the sheep were killed by the Dugway
test of VX had passed into legend, and the great distance from the testing site
to the dead sheep was seen not as evidence that something else killed the
sheep, but as evidence of the very great danger of CBW testing. The Dugway
sheep had become the late ’60s and early ’70s’ counterpart to Frankenstein’s
Monster; the very mention served as a warning about the danger of technology
gone amok, of Things Mankind Was Not Meant To Know. And the fact that the
In a June 19, 1968 Wall
Street Journal review of Seymour Hersh’s on CBW, Frederick Taylor noted the
comment of Brigadier General J.H. Rothschild, former director of U.S. chemical
warfare research, on psychochemicals: “Some military leaders feel that we should
not consider using these materials because we do not know exactly what will
happen and no clearcut results can be predicted. But imagine where science would be today if
the reaction to trying anything new had been, ‘Let’s not try it until we know
what the results will be.’”
Ranchers claimed a loss of 6,249 sheep – 4,372 that were
killed directly by the nerve gas and 1,877 that were disabled and had to be
destroyed. The meat and pelts, presumed
to be contaminated, could not be sold. A
claim of $376,685 was sent to the Secretary of the Army, and Senator Wallace F.
Bennett (R), facing reelection, said he would do whatever he could to get the
money included in legislation during that session of Congress.[323]
On July 10, Bennett announced that the Army claims service
had approved, and forwarded to the Secretary of the Army for confirmation, a
claim of $376,685 (roughly $2.2 million in today’s dollars) by the
Mauroni explained: “The Army had decided to admit that Dugway
Proving Ground tests had probably killed the sheep, and that the government
would compensate the ranchers for their losses.
Whether there was adequate evidence supporting the claim was
immaterial. The instructions were to
complete the investigation, as quickly as possible, admit involvement, and
return to a normal testing routine as rapidly as circumstances would allow.”[326]
According to C. Grant Ash, scientific director of
According to Mauroni, “As the Deseret Test Center personnel
saw it, much of the investigation was political, not scientific. The desire to identify what had gone wrong
was abandoned in favor of public demands, local political gain, and simple
greed, combined with poor judgment on the part of the Army leadership. Although the Army had accepted the blame,
there had been no conclusive evidence that it was nerve gas that killed these
sheep, and more than enough evidence that it was a rush to judgment.”[328]
HERSH SUMS IT UP
On August 25, The New
York Times published an article by Seymour Hersh based on his new
book. A large photograph accompanying
the article showed dead sheep with the caption, “Sheep killed in a nerve-gas
test that went awry near an Army C.B.W. research center in
The Hersh article began:
The Dugway Proving Grounds, main
weapons-testing center for
Until this spring, most Americans had
never heard of the proving grounds, although Dugway has been testing chemical
and biological weapons since World War II.
The base’s obscurity ended in March.
At
The winds were blowing from the west
that day, with gusts reaching 35 miles an hour.
Testing in strong winds was nothing new to the Army researchers; since
the early nineteen-fifties millions of dollars had been spent on meteorological
equipment and gauges at Dugway, and the scientists had long been able to predict
accurately the dispersal of the killer gases – or so they thought.
On Thursday the sheep began to die in
Skull and
A week after the secret test flight,
the
How long the army would have gone
without telling the ranchers of the nerve gas tests is problematical; when the
facts became known, it was by accident.
On Thursday, March 21, the Pentagon responded to a request for more information
from Senator Frank E. Moss, Utah Democrat, by sending a fact sheet to his
office marked “For Official Use Only,” an informal security classification
intended to prevent public release. A
young press aide in Moss’s office promptly made the fact sheep public; the
Army’s attempt hours later to retrieve the document was too late. [329]
Hersh did not explain how he could possibly have known
whether the release was an “accident” or a deliberate leak.
Hersh noted that the Army cancelled all open-air spray tests
at Dugway and “spent the next three weeks issuing denials that nerve gas from
Dugway had anything to do with the death of the sheep – even in the face of
medical reports directly linking them to organic phosphate compounds (nerve gas
is one such).” The non sequitur is
glaring: Even if the sheep died from exposure to such compounds, nerve gas (or,
specifically, VX) “is one such” and not the only such compound, and Dugway
testing was not the only possible source of nerve gas.
“The military’s performance in the Dugway affair,” Hersh
wrote, “was consistent with its long-standing avoidance of public discussion of
the controversial chemical and biological warfare program.”[330]
THE IMPACT OF THE NEWS
MEDIA
The news media played a critical role in the Dugway incident
– one of creating confusion over what really happened and of promoting the
Dugway-did-it theory to the exclusion of other theories.
To this day, it is widely reported that a malfunction
occurred during the Dugway test, but there is no mention of such a malfunction
either in the Stone Report (the official “Report of Investigation Concerning
Sheep Deaths in Skull Valley, Utah”)[331]
or in the 1993 follow-up memorandum by C. Grant Ash.[332]
A possible source for
the idea of a malfunction is a story by Philip M. Boffey in Science, a publication of the American
Association for the Advancement of Science.
Boffey wrote: “The Army has
consistently refused to say whether anything went wrong during the test, and
Colonel James H. Watts, Dugway’s commanding officer at the time of the
incident, has been quoted as denying rumors of a malfunction. But three sources who participated in the
investigation – namely D.A. Osguthorpe, a veterinarian who acted as consultant
to the Utah Department of Agriculture, G.D. Carlyle Thompson, director of the
Utah State Division of Health, and Surgeon General [William H.] Stewart – all
confirmed to Science that there was, indeed, a malfunction. The malfunction resulted in the agent being
released at a much higher altitude than anticipated.”[333]
The rumor of a malfunction may have been based on a
misunderstanding of the nature of the spray tanks, which released the agent
under pressure, so that, as the test progressed, the pressure eased and the
release trailed off. In any event, the alleged
malfunction became an oft-repeated part of the story, explaining why the test
was different from the hundreds of similar tests that had been conducted
earlier and fitting the prevailing view at the time among opinion elites that
the Army was incompetent.
Another source for the “malfunction” idea is an article in
the January-February 1969 issue of Environment. The article credited Boffey with the idea
that one or both tanks failed to drop.
The article, “The Wind from Dugway,” was written by the publication’s
editor, a chemistry professor, and a professor of geophysics and geophysical
engineering. According to the article,
“a story by Philip Boffey in the News and Comment section of the December 21
issue of Science reports that there
was a malfunction of the ejection mechanism.
One or both tanks failed to drop. . . The Science account was read to Dr. G.D. Carlyle Thompson, Utah State
Director of Health. He agreed that it
was substantially correct.”[334] In fact, Boffey’s article in Science didn’t mention any tanks that
failed to drop.
The Environment
article was like most of the articles and books that examined the technical
aspects of the story; it was an effort
to explain how the Army test killed
the sheep, not whether the test
killed the sheep. Given that key
information, such as the amount of VX necessary to kill a sheep, was
unavailable to the public at the time, and given the conflicting evidence, it
is hard to see how anyone could have concluded with certainty that the sheep
were killed as a result of the Army test, yet the media, with almost no
exceptions, reached such a definite judgment.
With the exception of one article in The Christian Science Monitor[335],
which raised serious questions, one paragraph in Science, and one in The New
York Times[336],
which expressed skepticism in a passing comment, the national media appear
never to have seriously considered the possibility that something else killed
the sheep.
The Christian Science
Monitor article, by John C. Waugh, asked a number of questions:
The test on March 13 was
routine. The conditions were
normal. The agent rarely before, in a
hundred tests, had drifted more than two miles from the test grid – and never
beyond the boundaries of the 850,000-acre proving ground.
How could it suddenly have drifted 27
miles that day and killed sheep? If it
did, why wasn’t there evidence in the snow, in the plants, in the soil, or in
the sheep themselves?
But if the test didn’t do it, why
were 6,400 sheep dead in
And why only the sheep in the narrow
swatch that runs from Granite Peak into
And why had no veterinarian in the
area ever seen symptoms like these before in dying sheep?”[337]
The article in Science,
by Philip M. Boffey and D.S. Greenberg, noted:
Despite the suspicion pointed at
Dugway, the case has many puzzling aspects.
Army scientists say the symptoms shown by the afflicted sheep do not
resemble symptoms associated with the nerve gases they were testing. The symptoms shown by the sheep are
contraction of the pupils, foaming at the mouth and nose, muscular vibration
and muscular convulsions, and rapid, short breathing. The scientists also assert that, at the time
Dugway was testing the nerve agents, the wind was blowing toward the
north-northeast rather than east or east-northeast in the direction of the
sheep, although the following day some west-to-east squalls apparently did blow
first over Dugway and then over the sheep.
Moreover, horses, dogs, cattle, and men who were either with the sheep
or close to them were not affected. One
theory – so far completely unsubstantiated – is that a toxic substance may have
been carried on snow, a source of water for sheep but apparently not for the
other animals or men.”[338]
The prevailing view in the media was so strong that skeptics
may have muted themselves. Even the
March 31 Times article – which, with
regard to the Dugway-did-it theory, noted simply that “there were puzzling
elements, such as the fact that no other animals or men in the area were
affected” – seemed to suggest that it didn’t matter: “Whether or not nerve gas was to blame, the incident raised the
question whether an accidental release of nerve gas, either in a test or in a
shipment, might not some day affect a large number of people rather than
sheep.”[339] Whether the Dugway-did-it theory was true
didn’t matter to the headline writer who labeled the story: “The Deadly Peril
When Nerve Gas Escapes.”
The locals took a more reasoned approach. As Boffey reported in Science, “the people of
Not all the local media acted responsibly. A week after the sheep began to get sick,
Arthur Kent, a local TV anchorman[343]
who was an Army reservist, called Brigadier General Appel to alert him that his
boss had instructed him to attack the Army chemical weapons tests at Dugway as
the cause of the sheep deaths. According
to
Still, on the whole, the local media acted more responsibly
than the national media. There are a
number of possible explanations for this.
DPG and related facilities were a pillar of the local economy, which may
have made local reporters and editors more sympathetic to alternative
explanations, and it certainly made local advertisers more sympathetic to
explanations that would absolve Dugway of blame. The local media knew more about DPG and were
less likely to see DPG personnel as rubes, militarists, or mad scientists. DPG personnel, one can assume, read the local
papers every day and moved quickly to correct any reporting errors that put
them in a bad light. With regard to the
national media, they had far less influence.
Even if DPG personnel read the coverage in the national papers
(probably, for most of them, on a much-delayed basis, in a time before the
WorldWide Web), complainers seeking corrections in the national media would
have been seen as special pleaders and would have been mostly ignored.
The national media not only accepted as proven fact the
Dugway-did-it theory, but accused the Army of covering up its
responsibility. That made any denial or
hint of uncertainty on the part of the Army regarding its responsibility look
like a continuation of the cover-up. The
Army was put in the position of a falsely convicted criminal who, in order to
get parole, must apologize for a crime he never committed. The Army was required to accept responsibility.
Typical of the slipshod reporting on the Dugway sheep
incident was that of Irving S. Bengelsdorf, science reporter for the Los Angeles Times, who reported in
October 1968 that –
[C]hemical weapons were given a grim,
if accidental, public demonstration last March when 6,400 sheep died near the
U.S. Army’s Dugway Proving Grounds in
The symptoms of nerve gas poisoning,
according to the U.S. Army Technical Manual TM-3-215, are “running nose,
tightness of chest, dimness of vision, pinpointing of eye pupils, difficulty in
breathing, drooling, excessive sweating, nausea, vomiting, cramps, involuntary
defecation and urination, twitching, jerking, staggering, headache, confusion,
drowsiness, coma, convulsion, cessation of breathing, death.’
These were the symptoms exhibited by
the sheep following the release at dusk on
The next day, the sheep grazing in
Since the list of symptoms provided by Bengelsdorf ranged
from “running nose” to “death,” it would be nearly impossible for any person or
sheep to be considered sick without exhibiting at least one of those
symptoms. In fact, the sheep’s signs of
illness did not match the classical signs of nerve agent poisoning. And, as far as I have been able to determine,
Bengelsdorf is the only reporter, commentator, or investigator who thought that
the test of the GB artillery shell played a role in the incident.
Bengelsdorf went on to win DuPont and Westinghouse awards for
reporting that included his CBW story, and he was one of the first two
journalists inducted into the Pugwash group.
PROBLEMS WITH THE
PREVAILING THEORY
Even as politics forced the Army into a false confession, the
news media made no serious attempt to determine what really happened. Some, accepting the Dugway-did-it theory,
blamed the incident simply on freak weather conditions that somehow lifted a
cloud of nerve “gas” into the air and deposited it on the sheep. After all, if it can rain frogs, why not VX?
But in spray tests, VX averaged a particle size of 100
microns and covered an area two to three miles downwind from the spray
line. Some smaller particles in the
50-100 micron range, making up less than six percent of the spray, may have
drifted farther, as far as 15 miles. As
CW expert Albert J. Mauroni noted, “To the best of the DPG scientists’
analyses, the downwind spray should never have left the federal grounds.”[346] A worst-case would have had some two percent
of the spray, about six of the 320 gallons, in particles small enough to have
drifted more than 15 miles. By that
point, the agent would have been spread over an area of more than 200 square
miles, and would had many more miles to go before reaching the sheep.
The meteorological conditions at the
time of release were somewhat different from other tests in that the agent was
released into a southwest wind about the same time that a weak frontal system
was approaching from the north and at release time had reached
I have conducted tests using smoke in
order to observe what happens as two air masses collided with each other. Somewhat surprising was the result. We assumed that the colder, denser air would
push the lighter air to one side or slip clearly under the lighter air mass. What happened was that the two air masses
seemed to penetrate each other causing a great deal of turbulence which tore
the smoke cloud apart and the smoke was rapidly dissipated. This is likely the scenario of what happened
to the agent cloud
When Governor Rampton declared his opinion that the VX test
killed the sheep, Mauroni wrote, the Governor was suggesting “that somehow an
agent cloud had held together for 35 (
Jonathan Tucker, in War
of Nerves: Chemical Warfare from World War I to Al Qaeda, said the
explanation for the fact that the sheep, and only the sheep, were affected
“turned out to be that other mammalian species, such as cattle, horses, and
humans, have second form of cholinesterase (called butyrl-cholinesterase [sic:
butyrylcholinesterase]) that circulates in their blood serum. This reservoir of the enzyme absorbs and
sequesters some of the nerve agent that enters the body, limiting its harmful
effects on the cholinesterase in the nervous system. Sheep in contrast, have almost no
butyrl-cholinesterase in their blood.
Without this natural buffering mechanism, they are exquisitively
sensitive to nerve agents and can be injured or killed by less than a milligram
of VX, far below the lethal dose in other animals or humans. The sheep grazing in
Still, the reported oral LD50 for sheep is .006
milligrams/kilogram of body weight.[350] That means the total amount of VX in the test
– counting all 320 gallons – amounted to approximately four billion median
lethal doses for sheep weighing, say, 50 kilograms each. If only two gallons of the 320 gallons got
outside the test area, that leaves less than 25.5 million lethal doses – spread
out, according to Meselson, over roughly 200 square miles (5.6 billion square
feet).
Now, imagine that not a single molecule of the agent
precipitated on its zigzag route to the area, even as it passed over the
mountains, or fell to the side as the particles separated chaotically, or
remained airborne once the wind moved past the area inhabited by the
sheep. Imagine that the agent was
released in a magically sealed room of 5.6 billion square feet. In that case, the average sheep would have
had to consume every available molecule of the agent in an area of 219 square
feet – a seemingly impossible feat.
(And keep in mind that sheep that were brought to the site
would have been sickened by what was left of the agent at least 17-19 days
later. Or perhaps longer:
The problem with the atmospheric dispersion aspect of the
Dugway-did-it theory is that, the more physical factors one considers, the less
plausible the theory appears.
Based on the available records, it is impossible to determine
the exact number of sheep killed outright and the number of those that were
sickened and “had to be destroyed” (even though survivors of VX usually recover
entirely). But suppose that 3,000 sheep
were killed. That means that 3,000 sheep
had to be exposed at the level of LD100, or 6,000 sheep had to be exposed at
the level of LD50, or all 15,000 sheep had to be exposed at the level of LD20,
or some similar combination of factors had to occur. The
greater the concentration of agent to which each sheep was exposed, the smaller
the number of sheep that could have been exposed at that level – and the
greater the number of sheep, the smaller
the concentration. It is plausible,
given the uncertainties of atmospheric dispersion, that as a result of the
Dugway test 15,000 sheep might have been exposed at the level of LD.01 (the
amount sufficient to kill one in ten thousand), resulting in one or two
deaths. It is plausible that a handful
of sheep might have been exposed at the median lethal dose, LD50, resulting in
a half-handful of sheep deaths. But it
does not seem plausible, given the distance, that 6,000 sheep were exposed to
LD50 – even if it a sheep, as Tucker claimed, “can be killed or injured by less
than a milligram of VX.”
For all the talk about a single drop of this or that agent
killing hundreds of people, the fact is that the aerial distribution of an
agent is not very efficient. On
In a real-world example, the Japanese cult Aum Shinrikyo used
three liters of sarin to kill seven people in a 1994 open-air attack and 24
liters (at 25% purity) to kill 12 people in a 1995 subway attack.[353]
My examination of the atmospheric dispersion aspect of the
Dugway-did-it theory is admittedly a simplistic one. As far as I can determine, no one has created
a sophisticated atmospheric dispersion model of this case – that’s a task I
will leave to some other dissertation-writer – and until such a model is
created, any examination is bound to be simplistic.
But problems regarding agent quantity and atmospheric
dispersion are not the only problems with the Dugway-did-it theory. Another problem is that the sheep did not
display the known signs of VX poisoning, and that sheep deliberately exposed to
VX did not show the signs exhibited in the
THEORIES
So what killed the sheep?
Here are some possibilities:
• The sheep died from exposure to
pesticide. Albert Mauroni, in his book America’s Struggle with Chemical-Biological
Warfare, hypothesized that ranchers
planned to spray crops a few miles from the sheep, using cheap pesticides that
are effective but of indeterminate purity and quality. Because they were spraying impermissibly
close to the sheep, they were spraying without permits. An accident occurred. The sheep, which were uninsured, got
exposed. Veterinary care didn’t
help. The ranchers knew of the Dugway
testing, so they hauled a few sheep to other locations, mixing them in with
unexposed sheep, to shift attention away from themselves and toward the
testing.
• The sheep were killed as a result
of CBW activity at Dugway, but not as a result of one of the three CW-related
activities to which the Army admitted.
Perhaps some other kind of testing was being done; perhaps CW-related
activity was occurring outside the perimeters of DPG; perhaps chemical agents
were being transported by air, and an accident occurred near the sheep. But if there was a cover-up, why would the
Army make admissions regarding the other activities? Why wouldn’t the Army have simply clamped a
lid on the entire matter and paid the ranchers a premium for their silence? The known facts about the Dugway sheep incident
strongly suggest that Army officials believed
they were probably innocent.
• The sheep kill was sabotage – part
of a clandestine effort to bring about restrictions on testing at Dugway or to
expose and discredit the entire U.S. CBW program. “Two Russian saboteurs with Russian agent and
equipped with nothing more than what they could acquire on the local American
market could pull off the entire sheep episode,” Ash, scientific director of
AFTERMATH OF THE DUGWAY
INCIDENT
If there was a plan
to hurt the U.S. CBW program, it worked.
As Joseph D. Douglass Jr. wrote: The sheep became a cause célèbre used against
the
There had been some opposition to the U.S. CBW program for years,
but the Dugway incident came just as “peace” (anti-U.S. military) organizations
and publications were focusing on the issue, spurred by the
Less than three weeks before the sheep’s’ deaths, London’s
Bernal Peace Library, created to honor the Marxist scientist-activist J.D.
Bernal, hosted its first conference, the Conference on Chemical and Biological
Warfare, with the participation of some U.S. scientists who were considered CBW
experts. (At least three of them would
later brief the President’s Science Advisory Committee subcommittee considering
CBW policy under President Nixon.) When
the sheep died, one of the Bernal conference participants, Robin Clarke, editor
of Science Journal, had just
published his book We All Fall Down: the
Prospect of Chemical and Biological Warfare, which, The New York Times would declare later, “helped incite
international protest” over CBW.[356] Seymour Hersh was finishing his exposé of
the U.S. CBW program; it would be published less than three months after the sheep’s’
deaths, followed in August by Hersh’s adaptation of the book into a New York Times article incorporating
information about the sheep. [357]
Also in August, a group of scientists at the
Before the sheep’s’ deaths, anti-CBW protests had forced the
American Society of Microbiology to poll its members on whether the society
should continue advising Fort Detrick, and a few weeks after the sheep’s’
deaths, ASM ended its advisory role.[359] At the University of Pennsylvania, two years
of student protests would lead, a few weeks after the sheep’s’ deaths, to
cancellation of secret CBW research projects worth an annual $845,000 (almost
$5 million in today’s dollars).[360]
The Dugway sheep incident eventually galvanized elite opinion
against the testing of chemical and biological weapons – “eventually,” because
it took many months for the full effect.
CBS News, on the newsmagazine “60 Minutes,” aired reports on the U.S.
CBW program by Mike Wallace on October 8 and
THE INCIDENT BECOMES
PART OF THE DEBATE AND PART OF THE CULTURE
The Dugway incident gained traction as a political issue only
after NBC News aired its report on the U.S. CBW program, focusing on Dugway and
the dead sheep. The report aired on the
newsmagazine “First Tuesday,”
With the NBC report, the sheep kill had finally attracted the
attention of politicians and commentators.
The incident led to fierce attacks on the U.S. CBW program by editorialists
and other commentators, to a flood of news articles that were thinly disguised
anti-CBW commentaries, and to congressional hearings that revealed information
about the program that was highly classified or should have been. Bess Myerson, a Miss
The incident entered the popular culture, lending an air of
credibility to Michael Crichton’s novel The
Andromeda Strain (which was written before the incident) and the movie
adaptation (which was produced after the incident), and serving as the
inspiration for countless works of fiction, including Stephen King’s
breakthrough novel The Stand, the
George C. Scott/Martin Sheen movie “Rage” (in which the government covers up a
nerve gas accident that kills a man’s teenage son), and episodes of one of
television’s biggest hits, “Hawaii Five-O,” including “Three Dead Cows at
Makapuu,” parts one and two.[363]
By March 1969, the Dugway sheep incident was serving as
shorthand for the dangers of CBW research.
In The New York Times, Jane E.
Brody wrote: “On
Later that month, in a “Voice of Youth” op-ed in the Chicago Tribune, high school student
John Pecotte wrote: “The very thought of waging a chemical or biological war
triggers a morbid sense of horror in the minds of men. The lethal chemical weapon, nerve gas, got
its major publicity when more than 6,000 sheep were killed, because 320 gallons
of the sprayed gas drifted 30 to 45 miles outside the designated testing
ground.” Note the exaggerated quantity.[365]
In April, The Wall
Street Journal noted in an editorial: “Even more than with advanced nuclear
weapons, it’s likely the effectiveness of chemical and biological weapons of
mass destruction must remain in the realm of the hypothetical. For the testing of such weapons could prove
far more hazardous than nuclear testing; indeed, a minor test in
On
Later in the hearing, Meselson said, “It appears that VX or
an agent closely related to it was responsible for the accidental killing of
approximately 6,000 sheep near the Dugway proving ground in
On
Under the headline “Army Admits Its Nerve Gas Killed 6,000 Sheep,”
the Times story began: “Under
Congressional prodding, the Army admitted for the first time today that its
nerve gas killed 6,000 sheep in Utah more than 14 months ago.”
Breathlessly, the story continued:
The admission was wrung from three
Army officials, a shred at a time, during half a day of hard and angry
questioning by members of the House Subcommittee on Conservation and Natural
Resources.
The Army men also explained how the incident
had happened through the malfunction of a spraying device on an airplane.
After they left the hearing, Dr.
William M. Stewart, the Surgeon General of the Public Health Service, conceded
with seeming reluctance that a threat to life, including human, still existed
at the same test site, despite tightened security measures.
Two or three members of the
subcommittee went into the hearing, which began yesterday, persuaded that the
Army had resorted to “a pattern of deception,” as Representative Guy Vander
Jagt, Republican of Michigan, said at one point.
Representative Henry S. Reuss,
Democrat of Wisconsin, the subcommittee chairman, put the Army men on notice,
from the moment he swore them in as witnesses that their credibility was on
trial.
“Do you swear to tell the truth, the
whole truth, and nothing but the truth?” he asked. His eyebrows shot up, and his voice was loud
and hard when he pronounced the word “nothing.” [369]
The Times noted
that the Army had repeatedly denied responsibility for the sheep kill, even
though it compensated the ranchers.
Since the subcommittee members were
already convinced that the Army had caused the deaths, they spent most of the
hearing today examining the army’s handling of the incident, particularly its
public and semipublic denials of responsibility.
The Army spokesmen confirmed, after
much verbal jousting, that the public information officer at Dugway had not
told the truth when he told reporters last March that Dugway had done no
testing that could have caused the sheep to die.
General Stone said the Army had
‘finally and definitely’ identified the poison in the sheep as nerve gas in
mid-May last year. [370]
Reuss then got K.C. Emerson, acting Deputy Assistant
Secretary of the Army for research and development, to admit that it was
“conceivable” that a future test might expose travelers along Highway 40 to
nerve gas.[371]
In August 1969, Charles Goodell (R-New York) warned, as
quoted in the Congressional Record:
“[L]et us suppose that VX again escaped from a testing site. Suppose instead of drifting to a field of
sheep, the nerve gas drifted to a city or town of people. The deadly nerve gas VX is colorless and
odorless. The protection required
against its very rapid fatal effect is a gas mask and protective clothing. First
aid suggested is atropine. What chances
under these circumstances would our people have of surviving?”[372]
Ultimately, the Dugway incident was a major factor in
stigmatizing the U.S. CBW as foolhardy, as a threat to humanity itself. It helped raise the political price of
continuing the program to a point beyond that which the political marketplace
could bear. It led to journalistic
exposés, congressional hearings, and ultimately to Nixon’s renunciation of
biological weapons – a decision which was, to a great extent, a jettisoning of
the BW program in an attempt to save the CW program, which was thought to be of
far greater military significance.
In a 1978 article, two top experts on CBW, Amoretta M. Hoeber
and Joseph D. Douglass Jr., wrote that, “Triggered in part by the Dugway sheep
incident of 1968, the
In 1981. Dale van Atta, an associate of Jack Anderson, wrote
that the Dugway mishap occurred when “something went wrong” and “A feckless
bree4ze unmoored a cloud of lethal gas and floated it out of the compound and
over a stretch of barren countryside, leaving 6000 sheep dead in its wake.
“When the Army admitted to what had happened, a nationwide
outburst of protest shocked President Richard Nixon into putting a hold on the
entire
SOVIET ROLE?
If the Dugway sheep incident had not occurred, it would have
been necessary to invent it. Given that
the cause of the sheep’s deaths was never determined, and that it seemed to
closely mimic the effects of a nerve gas accident, it is possible that it was, in
fact, invented – either by protesters seeking to highlight and exaggerate the
danger of CBW testing or by the party that received the greatest benefit from
the incident. The party that benefited
the most was, of course, the
Given the presumed Soviet penetration of the U.S. CBW
program, the Soviets probably possessed VX.
They certainly had the VX isomer VR, for which a pilot production
facility was built in
VR was developed in the 1950s roughly parallel to the
Given that it is an isomer of VX – that is, it has the same
chemical formula but a different molecular structure – VR may have been
reverse-engineered from VX. Vil
Mirzayanov, a physical chemist and senior researcher in the Soviet nerve gas program
who became a whistleblower shortly after the Cold War – exposing the Novichok
program – told David Wise that the Soviet version of VX, called Agent 33, and
binary chemical weapons were “developed in response to American programs and
Soviet intelligence.” He said that, in
the early 1960s, the Soviets obtained VX from the
The idea that a Dugway CBW test might go wrong and hurt
civilians had certainly occurred to CBW critics. Robin Clarke, in his exposé We All Fall Down: The Prospect of Biological
and Chemical Warfare, noted:
“The idea is that to test a biological weapon satisfactorily
will involve detonating the weapon, releasing the biological material over a
wide area on a proving-ground – such as the American one in
The hypothetical situation described by Clarke is not
identical to the one that actually occurred at Dugway – almost simultaneously
with the publication of his book – but it is close: an agent being tested at
Dugway gets loose and threatens civilians.
Clarke even noted that Pugwash had been studying the problem! Of course, representatives of the Soviets and
the Soviet bloc were heavily involved in Pugwash, so they would have been
involved in any such study.
In addition, David Wise, in Cassidy’s Run, reported an incident that could have served as the
inspiration for the Dugway sheep kill.
On
“As the chief engineer at the plant, a nonethnic Russian, and
a Jew, he was an obvious target. Nor was
it easy for Libman to prove that pollution from the nerve-gas plant had not
somehow contributed to the fish kill.
Libman might also have been blamed because
“On
Perhaps the officials at Dugway should have considered
themselves lucky.
THE USEFUL INCIDENT
Thus, we are left with these possible explanations for the
Dugway/sheep controversy:
1) The U.S. Army covered up the cause
of the sheep kill (until exposed by other elements of the
2) The ranchers covered up the cause
of the sheep kill.
3) The Soviets or anti-DPG activists
covered up the cause of the sheep kill.
4) Someone else covered up the cause
of the sheep kill.
5) No one covered up the cause of the
sheep kill.
In the late 1960s and 1970s, the U.S. Army was so unpopular
that the answer just had to be #1,
the evidence notwithstanding. In the
1980s, those who presented themselves to the public as biological weapons
experts would simply assume that the
To use the Dugway incident as a tool to shut down the U.S.
CBW, there was no requirement that the Dugway-did-it theory be plausible. Indeed, its lack of plausibility made it more effective as a propaganda weapon.
If the Dugway/sheep scenario had been plausible – if the test
were thought to have killed, say, five sheep on a mountain ten miles from the
test site – the event probably would have had little effect on the public
debate. The lesson for the public might
have been: Just stay more than ten miles
away, and you’re safe. But 6,400
sheep dying 27 to 80 miles away – that was spectacular! If that really happened, a slight change in
wind direction on
As Seymour Hersh noted in an August 1968 New York Times article, “Inevitably, the arguments against chemical
and biological weapons have a strong emotional overtone; the subject is almost
too horrible for rational debate.”[381]
If the Dugway/sheep scenario had been plausible, the Army
probably would have accepted responsibility in a timely manner. Instead, the Army waited for evidence to be
gathered, until it had to be ordered to take the blame, and the Army’s
“foot-dragging” was seen as an attempt to hide what really happened. And if the Army would cover up something so
“obvious” as the “fact” that the sheep were killed by the nerve gas test, what else might the Army – indeed, the entire
military-industrial complex – be covering up?
Perhaps someone had waited long enough for a real accident to
discredit the U.S. CBW program. Perhaps
they took matters into their own hands.
At this date, it may be impossible to determine what really
happened in the vicinity of
-----------------------------------------
NOTE ON DR. OSGUTHORPE
One person, more than any other, had the most influence on
making the Dugway-did-it theory the accepted wisdom.
Dr. D.A. Osguthorpe was mentioned most frequently as the
source for Army-incriminating information; he was apparently the go-to person
for anti-Army quotes; and his multiple conflicts of interest went unnoted in
news accounts. Those conflicts included
Osguthorpe’s appointment as a personal representative of Governor Rampton, who
had already demanded that the Army take responsibility, and his being a
land-owner in the area himself through Osguthorpe and Sons Livestock
Company. According to C. Grant Ash,
Osguthorpe had a herd of sheep in the south end of
Ash wrote, regarding Osguthorpe’s possible bias and alleged
tendency to exaggerate: “He was not a
bad guy! I think he was trying to do a
good job, but he was no scientist.”[383]
While investigators said that they had found 15 dead rabbits,
rodents, birds, and other small wild animals – a number that was within the
normal range – Osguthorpe claimed to have found one jack rabbit that showed
signs of incoordination and twitching.[384]
As time went on, Osguthorpe’s accounts became more elaborate
and, it appears, less accurate. Fourteen
months after the Dugway incident, he testified about it at a hearing, chaired
by Henry Reuss (D-Wisconsin), of the Conservation and Natural Resources
Subcommittee of the House Government Operations Committee. He mentioned a “gate” that failed to close
and that caused the release of VX at higher altitudes than the Army had
planned. He claimed, based on his study
of weather reports, that the cloud of nerve gas was caught by wind that carried
it north over Highway 40, then carried it southeast over the highway, and that
a rainstorm at 11 p.m. washed it down onto the sheep (at which point the nerve
agent would have been aloft for five and a half hours).
According to the New York
Times account of the hearing, “Dr. Osguthorpe said he asked the authorities
at Dugway, when he first found the dying sheep, whether they had been testing a
chemical agent that could have caused the disaster. He said they told him that they tested no such
agents since the previous July.
“Representative Guy Vander Jagt, Republican of Michigan,
asked Dr. Osguthorpe whether he could have saved some of the sheep if he had
not been, as he said with the barest hint of a smile, ‘misled.’ Dr. Osguthorpe said he could have.”[385]
On
On July 31, 1969, Representative McCarthy called for the U.S.
government “to offer definitive proof” that BW activities at Fort Detrick were
not responsible for the deaths, reported by local farmer John H. Hall, of more
than 80 cows in the previous six and a half years. Another 150 cows became sterile or had to be
destroyed, Hall claimed. Autopsies had
been inconclusive. At the same hearing
at which McCarthy made his statement, Osguthorpe testified that a mysterious
disease had appeared among newborn calves in the Dugway area, and his “theory
is that this is a toxin, a biological agent” from Dugway.[387]
Osguthorpe surfaced in the news again more than two years
after President Nixon’s renunciation of biological weapons.
The New York Times reported in April 1971 that,
“Despite President Nixon’s repudiation of germ warfare 16 months ago, there are
indications that Army research is going on much as it did before. . . .
“A government official connected with the program, who isn’t
a scientist, says the roadsides near Dugway ‘are just covered with carcasses of
rodents.’ And several people say that a
number of wild animals in the area have been found to be infected with the
plague: plague germs are a standard component of the biological warfare
arsenal. . . .
“The 1968 incident, for which the Army belatedly admitted
responsibility, came when nerve gas escaped in the wind during a test and took
the lives of 6,400 sheep. Memories of
that incident were revived earlier this year [1971] when 1,200 sheep died in
another area near Dugway. But state and
government veterinarians explained that this time the sheep died from eating
the poisonous halogeton weed, which grows freely in Utah.
“A close look at this latest sheep kill, however, shows signs
of a mystery as puzzling as that surrounding the chemical and biological
program itself. One element: The Salt
Lake City veterinarian who served as special representative to the governor of
Utah after the first sheep kill flatly states halogeton wasn’t the cause in the
latest case. Dr. D.A. Osguthorpe, who
for this latest kill was called in by the ranchers to do autopsies on the
sheep, declares that ‘the typical symptoms of halogeton were not present.’ Dr. Osguthorpe says he still hasn’t been able
to determine the cause.”
Another scientist told the Times that the sheep were the victims of halogeton, but that the
halogeton leaves were “eight times more toxic than you usually find under those
conditions,” for reasons that “we just don’t understand.”
The Times report
continued: “At least one scientist, who testified at congressional hearings on
chemical and biological warfare, is willing to offer a possible
explanation. Clarence C. Gordon, a
professor of botany at the University of Montana, says that halogeton comes up
year after year and that ‘there could have been something from Dugway (testing)
that has accumulated (in the soil) over the years that could have caused part
of that buildup.’”[388]
Sesser, Stanford N., “Germs as Weapons: Critics Charge Army
Is Continuing Research On Biological Warfare,” The New York Times,
-----------------------------------------
EPILOGUE TO THE DUGWAY
INCIDENT: RAY PECK & CO.
The Dugway incident continues to affect attitudes toward the
Army and its CBW program. All sorts of
ailments and calamities are blamed on the Dugway test and on nuclear testing by
people who refer to themselves as “downwinders.”
• In 1993, Lee Davidson, Washington correspondent for the Deseret News, reported on unacknowledged
victims of the Army’s incompetence: Ray Peck and his family. The headline: “Like Sheep to the Slaughter?”
Ray Peck remembers the wintry morning
of March 14, 1968, in Skull Valley as crisp and beautiful. “It was so pretty. I couldn’t resist eating a handful of the new
snow.”
Then he saw the dead birds. In the distance, a dying rabbit
struggled. “It was weird, but I just went
to work,” Peck says. He, like the
animals, had been outside the previous night when a notorious Army nerve-agent
accident proceeded invisibly. Soon,
6,000 sheep near his home would die. A
helicopter from the Army’s nearby Dugway Proving Ground would land in his yard
and disgorge officials who Peck says collected dead wildlife and performed
blood tests on the frightened family.
Scientists
say nerve agent VX from an Army jet killed the sheep, probably through contact
with droplets on plants and snow – like the snow Peck ate.
The
article was based in part on documents the reporter claimed to have obtained
under the Freedom of Information Act.[389]
At great
length – 3,425 words – the article went on to detail how “Peck and his family
were possibly” – possibly – “exposed to small levels of VX in 1968,” that they
became sick, and that their illnesses “may” be symptoms of low-level VX
exposure.
“Scientific
reports say some others who were also exposed to VX in Army tests have reported
similar illnesses – but scientists say insufficient evidence exists to prove a
connection. But they cannot disprove it
either,” Davidson wrote.
Symptoms
reportedly suffered by Peck – who, the evening of the test, was “precisely
between” the two sheep herds that were mainly affected – included headaches,
numbness and burning from his left hip to his knee, and what Peck called “bouts
of paranoia.” The paranoia, he said,
affected his ability to work on cars or in the upholstery business.
In
addition, after the incident, members of his family also experienced
headaches. His wife suffered three
problem pregnancies, two of which ended in miscarriage, and two daughters who
were children at the time of the incident suffered miscarriages and stillbirths.
“Since
leaving employment at Dugway, Peck has worked around hazardous chemicals –
including cyanide – at other jobs. But
he said his health problems began at the time of the sheep kill. . . . He said
he first decided to pursue the matter after reading information from the
Downwinders watchdog group about effects of military tests on others – and even
contacted some lawyers about his options.”
A spokesman for Downwinders – a group seeking to show that people were
seriously harmed by various types of government testing – said that “We’ve had
many people in Tooele County come to us complaining they think Army tests made
them sick. We’ve found some interesting
leukemia clusters.”
Davidson
noted that, many years after the sheep died, the incident continued to be a
matter of controversy. “The 25-year-old
incident affects a new issue today: the planned burning of chemical arms at
Tooele Army Depot.”[390] The article noted that the Army was required
to destroy, in the incineration process, only 999,999/1,000,000ths
of the agent, and that, if VX in “miniscule” amounts can cause such serious
longterm illness, no release is safe.
Indeed, that is true, if a few molecules of VX can cause
longterm health problems including headaches, numbness, miscarriages and
stillbirths, and leukemia, along with bouts
of paranoia.
• Eight
years later, Davidson returned to the Ray Peck story, in an article co-written
with another staff writer and entitled “Toxic Utah: A land littered with
poisons /
“The Cold
War was hot in
“The
government chose the remote, low-population state for secretive weapons tests
that bombarded it with nerve gas, germ weaponry and radioactive fallout.” Among the casualties was “Ray Peck’s family
in
“In recent
years, Peck also suffered skin cancer and heart problems. ‘I wonder if the tests had something to do
with that,’ he said in December [2000].”[391]
• In 2004,
the Salt Lake Tribune reported that,
In
March 1968, Alan Vorwaller was a first-grader at a Tooele elementary school,
playing in the snow during recess. The
same day about 6,000 sheep from two herds were found dead in neighboring
Thirty-two
years later, Vorwaller's hip was so riddled with tumors that it simply snapped,
[his widow Bonnie] Adamsson-Vorwaller said.
“It's the exposure in
“The
doctors don't know which poisons caused it,” she conceded. “But it follows
something called the Hiroshima-Nagasaki pattern where, 20 to 30 years later,
you get cancer. Before he died, his doctor asked him, ‘Where were you 30 years
ago?’ . . .
Beverly
White, a former state legislator from Tooele, says residents are leery of
discussing the health hazards that exist in the west desert. It's part of the
“conspiracy of silence,” she noted.
White
represents 250 former Dugway workers who suffer from cancer, multiple
sclerosis, and heart and lung ailments.
They have unsuccessfully sought compensation from the federal
government.
“I
believe every bit of it,” White said of Adamsson-Vorwaller's allegations. “It
happens all the time.”[392]
CHAPTER
SEVEN
The interlude after Dugway
On
A June 19, 1968 review of Hersh’s CBW book in The Wall Street Journal attacked the
idea of CBW, with the author, Frederick Taylor, noting, “The Federation of
American Scientists has urged that all CBW work be ended, arguing that the
chief victims of such warfare would be civilians. But the prospect of such a halt seems
remote. As long as CBW advocates can, on
the one hand, threaten that the Russians will get ahead of us (what the
Russians are doing in CBW is classified not only by them but by us) while, on
the other hand, herald the prospect of ‘war without death’ through the use of
some new chemical that’s always just around the corner, the fearful business
will continue.”[394]
At the summer 1968 session of the UN-sponsored Eighteen
Nation Disarmament Committee (ENDC), negotiators worked on a prohibition of
both chemical weapons and biological weapons, but progress was held up due to a
number of issues, including the difficulty of verification and the sensitivity
of the U.S. government on CW issues due to its use of irritants and defoliants
in Vietnam.
A breakthrough came in the summer of 1968, when the British
suggested separating the two types of weapons.
British Minister of State Frederick W. Mulley proposed the
separation. Mulley said, “The problems
involved in seeking to go beyond the Geneva Protocol seem greater, and
international opinion less clear, in the field of chemical weapons than in tat
of biological weapons. The former have
already been used in war with terrible effect.
The latter have never been used but they are generally regarded with
even greater abhorrence, if that be possible.
“It seems, therefore, that one answer may be to make a
distinction between chemical and biological weapons in our approach to the
problems involved. I would like to
suggest that we should try to go beyond the Geneva Protocol for both chemical
and biological warfare, but I think it may be easier first to tackle agents of
biological warfare which would be beyond the Geneva Protocol and actually ban
the production and possession of agents of biological warfare.”[395]
On August 6, the British submitted a working paper calling
for a Convention for the Prohibition of Microbiological Methods of Warfare.[396] The Washington Post reported, regarding
Mulley, “He admitted that it was impossible to devise a foolproof method for
checking into the production of microbiological agents, and said the proposed
pact would have to take into account that such agents also are needed for
peaceful uses.”[397]
The Wall Street Journal’s nine-line report on the British
proposal contained this comment: “The
Finally, the ENDC at its summer session recommended that the
UN Secretary-General appoint a “group of experts” to study the effects of CBW
use.[400]
Unlike chemical weapons, biological weapons were seen by
world leaders as weapons that might be controlled before they became common. In addition, BWs were considered to be of
limited military utility, making it more likely that governments would agree to
an outright ban.
Forest Russel Frank, in his 1974 dissertation, reported that,
in the summer of 1968, an interagency group in the
Paul G. Conway, in his 1972 dissertation, recounted an
interview with Seymour Hersh about events between midsummer 1968 and January
1969. “By midsummer, just as some
criticism of CBW was beginning to flare, Hersh found that departmental
differences were narrowed to a few points, all negotiable. In the waning months of the Johnson administration,
high-ranking officials in all of the agencies involved finally agreed that a
flat ban on some unnecessary options might be politically profitable –
especially in light of increasing interest in proliferating CBW activities. The ‘consensus’ was then documented and
distributed to agency leaders for a formal approval.”[402]
On October 8 and
On
In a front-page article in The Washington Post, based on an interview with Watson, his views
on CBW were explored. According to the Post, Watson said that he served on a
PSAC CBW subcommittee from 1961 to 1964 – a panel tasked “to look at Defense
Department recommendations” on chemical and biological weapons. “We were not people thinking up devices,” he
said. “We met a certain number of times,
but after Kennedy died it was very seldom.
I really don’t know if the committee went out of existence or not, but
after a while I was never asked back.”
The reason: “I clearly was not sympathetic.”
Watson said, “I cannot think of any situation where BWs use
would help the military,” either militarily or politically. “They can do things in other ways.”
The Post reporter
added: “Secrecy requirements, he said, prevent him from saying just why he
thinks such weapons would be technically impractical.”
Watson said the “complete secrecy” surrounding such weapons
“is ridiculous. It’s more than the
secrecy around nuclear weapons. So we’re
unable to discuss whether they make military sense, which we should be
discussing.”
He called for
By late in the year, agreement had been reached among
Another account of these developments appeared in The New York Times. Seymour Hersh reported that, in January 1969,
“a major intra-department [sic: interdepartmental] meeting was convened at
which high officials of all agencies agreed to a flat ban on the first-use of
C.B.W. agents in combat, with exceptions made for the herbicides and
riot-control agents now being employed in South Vietnam. The agreement was put into limbo by the new
Republican Administration, anxious to develop its own policies on defense
issues. But the Pentagon agreement –
even if tentative – to a first-use ban indicates the military’s hope that the
protests against C.B.W. will not culminate in an international agreement
outlawing the use of all chemicals and all biologicals in war. The success of herbicides and riot-control
agents in
On
With a new national security team
in place, the CBW review would take a different direction – this time, through
the National Security Council.
CHAPTER
EIGHT
Completely new mistakes: Kissinger, Nixon, and the NSC
Once, asked whether the Nixon administration would repeat the
mistakes of predecessors, Henry Kissinger said, “We will make our own mistakes
in our own way and they will be completely new mistakes.” [410] Richard Nixon and Henry Kissinger reorganized
the National Security Council apparatus in order to reduce the power of the
bureaucracy, and ended up empowering
those least qualified to make decisions on issues such as CBW.
The National Security Council is considered the President’s
principal forum for national security policy and foreign policy and his or her
principal source for advice on those matters.
In addition, it is the main body responsible for coordinating national
security policy and foreign policy among various government agencies.[411]
The NSC was created by the National Security Act of 1947,
which re-organized the national security apparatus in the wake of World War II,
creating the Department of Defense, the Central Intelligence Agency, and other
bodies. In 1949, the NSC became part of
the Executive Office of the President.
Initially, the council’s members included the president, the
vice president, the secretaries of state and defense, and, as designated by the
president, other secretaries and under secretaries of executive and military
departments. The administrator of the
NSC was its executive director – a position that, in the Eisenhower
administration, became that of assistant to the president for national security
affairs (National Security Advisor).
Over time, the term “National Security Council” has come to refer often
to the roughly 200 members of the NSC staff. The president, the secretaries of state and
defense, and, in recent administrations, the vice president, along with top
officials such as the Director of National Intelligence (previously, the
Director of Central Intelligence), are known as the “principals
committee.” Preparatory work is often
done by the principals’ deputies, working as the “deputies committee.”
Throughout the history of the NSC, its structure and
influence have varied, depending on the personalities and
organizational/management styles of the various presidents and their
advisors.
Currently, the President chairs NSC meetings, and other
regular attendees, both statutory and non-statutory, are the Vice President,
the Secretaries of State, Defense, and Treasury, and the National Security
Advisor (Assistant to the President for National Security Affairs), with the
Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff as military advisor and the Director of
National Intelligence as intelligence advisor.
The White House Chief of Staff, Counsel to the President, and Economic
Policy Advisor are invited to attend any NSC meeting, and the Attorney General
and Director of the Office of Management and Budget are invited to attend
meetings pertaining to their responsibilities.
The heads of other executive departments and agencies, as well as other
senior officials, are invited to attend meetings of the NSC when appropriate.[412]
As noted, the role of the NSC has shifted depending on the
occupant of the Oval Office.
President Truman was impatient with “on the one hand, but on
the other hand” type advice; he once reputedly asked in frustration, “Can’t
somebody bring me a one-handed economist?”[413] Although his NSC was dominated by the State
Department, Truman saw it as a body that could provide him with clear advice
without limiting his options. In a 1948
letter to NSC members, Truman described the council as a “channel for
collective advice and information” that would leave the president free “to consult
with other members of his official family” and ultimately “to determine such
policy and enforce it.”[414]
John Prados wrote: “In many ways the bread-and-butter work of
the National Security Council was the production of policy papers. These were not mere hortatory statements of
intent; rather, the NSC papers became the real expression of policy from which
diplomatic and other initiatives followed.”[415]
For example, “In March 1948, President Truman approved the
basic policy stated in NSC-7 [the seventh NSC paper], which provided that the
‘defeat of the forces of Soviet-directed world communism is vital to the
security of the
Eisenhower, in a campaign speech, said that Truman’s NSC was
moribund. After Eisenhower’s election,
during the presidential transition, Townsend Hoopes, who would be LBJ’s
secretary of the Air Force, suggested in a paper that the president should have
a strong national security advisor with an expert staff set up like “a little
State Department.”[417] To a career military officer like Eisenhower,
there was an attraction to the idea of a strong, competent assistant
coordinating policy. The NSC's Executive
Secretary became an assistant to the President, although he was careful not to
be seen as usurping the authority of Secretary of State John Foster Dulles.[418]
In eight years, Eisenhower’s National Security Council held
346 regular meetings. On average, the
meetings ran two and a half hours, and more than 90 percent of the meetings
were attended by President Eisenhower.[419]
Democrats, however, were skeptical about the Eisenhower
system. During an
When John Kennedy became president, he looked first to the
State Department for leadership on national security and foreign policy, but
soon came to understand that the department did not have sufficient authority
over other departments. Kennedy, who
preferred ad hoc groups for policy
formulation, abandoned the Eisenhower model with respect to frequent meetings
chaired by the president, but kept the idea of a strong national security
advisor, and erased the distinction Eisenhower had made between operations and
policymaking.
Thus, as Amy B. Zegart wrote, “In relatively short order –
between 1947 and 1963 – Presidents Truman, Eisenhower, and Kennedy laid the
foundations for a White House-centered, modern NSC system. Gone was State Department dominance in
foreign policy making. Gone was the
preeminence of the formal National Security Council. Instead, the system that emerged was one in
which the president’s own appointed NSC staff – led by the special assistant to
the president for national security affairs – managed the policy process,
analyzed political options, and offered policy advice with only the president’s
interests in mind.”[421] Kennedy merged the jobs of national security
adviser and staff secretary – “in essence, placing overall responsibility for both long-term foreign policy
formulation and daily foreign policy management with a single individual,”
Zegart wrote.[422] The Kennedy system combined the coordination
of interagency decisionmaking and providing staff assistance to the
president.
Gone was the idea of the NSC staff serving as neutral
coordinators of the policy process, as bureaucrats in the ideal sense. Under Kennedy’s National Security Advisor,
McGeorge Bundy, the NSC staff became the president’s principal staff for making
foreign policy and providing him with advice on such matters. Bundy’s office was moved from the Old
Executive Office Building to the West Wing.[423]
John Prados wrote that it was “an era in which the NSC staff began to gain power at the expense
of the National Security Council. . .
. Bundy accomplished one essential change that made everything else possible:
He transformed the NSC staff from servants of the presidency to those of the
President.”[424] (Emphasis
in the original.)
When he became president, Lyndon Johnson continued the
process of downplaying the NSC proper while keeping the NSC staff for
policymaking and advice. However, by
1966, he gave the secretary of state much of the responsibility for
interdepartmental coordination, and relied increasingly on friends and – it was
reported – on the Tuesday Lunch group, which usually consisted of the
secretaries of state and defense, the CIA director, the JCS chairman, the
National Security Advisor, and the press secretary.[425] (Melvin Small wrote that Johnson aide George
Reedy, Johnson’s press secretary in 1964-65, exaggerated the role of the
Tuesday Lunch group so that the news media would think the White House was well-organized. Small quotes H.R. Haldeman, who served as
Nixon’s chief of staff, as saying that Johnson told Nixon the lunch was,
indeed, for the media.)[426]
NIXON ON THE DEFENSIVE
When Nixon elected president, he faced a daunting political
challenge. He had been elected with
slightly more than 43 percent of the popular vote, thanks to a split within the
Democratic Party between Vice President Hubert Humphrey and former Alabama
Governor George Wallace. He was the first
elected president to take office without his party in control of at least one
house of Congress. And his victory was
based in large part on the hope that he would end the Vietnam War quickly,
which, it was soon clear, he would not be able to do.
That meant Nixon would be seeking reelection as a minority
president representing a minority party, with the Vietnam issue, an asset in
1968, a probable liability by 1972. (In
fact, demonstrations against U.S. involvement in the Vietnam War would soon
shut down hundreds of college campuses and Washington, D.C. itself, and
threaten the physical security of the White House. Between January 1, 1969 and April 15, 1970,
there were over 8,000 bombings and bomb threats in the U.S., including at
college campuses suck as Pomona and San Francisco State. During the 1968-69 academic year, over 4,000
people were arrested for committing violence on campuses, and roughly 7,200
were arrested in the 1969-70 academic year.[427])
If, as he is often depicted, Nixon considered himself
embattled and surrounded by enemies, it was an understandable reaction.
At the same time, Nixon had grand dreams for what he hoped to
accomplish in foreign policy. He had
come so close to the presidency before – eight years as Eisenhower’s vice
president, including time when Eisenhower was seriously ill, following by the
1960 election, in which Nixon arguably won the popular vote – and he didn’t
want to blow the opportunity that was now his, to go down in history as a
peacemaker. All he needed was the right
man to help him formulate and carry out a strategy that would remake the world.
Henry Kissinger was a political science professor at Harvard
and a longtime associate of the Council on Foreign Relations, and
had been an advisor to the Eisenhower, Kennedy, and Johnson
administrations. As a consultant to JFK,
he had, in the words of his associate David Rothkopf, “ruffled feathers by
pushing to keep his secret papers in his office at Harvard.”[428] Kissinger was the author of well-received
books on nuclear strategy and international affairs, one of which was a
Book-of-the-Month Club selection, and he was famous enough by 1964 that he is
considered, along with Herman Kahn, Edward Teller, and Werner von Braun, one of
the possible inspirations for the character “Dr. Strangelove” in Stanley Kubrick’s
film of that year.[429]
Kissinger was one of the few political moderates associated
with the Pugwash conferences, although he avoided voting on Pugwash
resolutions.[430] Kissinger also made critical career contacts
as a member of the “Joint U.S.-U.S.S.R. Study Group on Disarmament,” which was
set up by Pugwash conferees, with a grant from the Ford Foundation, to bring
together academics from the two superpowers.[431] The group’s members included Paul Doty (who
would later be a close advisor of Kissinger during the NSC CBW review), Donald
Brennan (a rare moderate in this circle), George Kistiakowsky, J.P. Ruina, F.A.
Long (assistant director for science at ACDA until mid-1963), and Jerome
Wiesner – plus Kissinger, of course. [432]
His reputation for back-channel diplomacy owes much to his
encounter at a 1967 Pugwash conference with Herbert Marcovich, a biologist with
the Pasteur Institute in Paris.
Marcovich mentioned that he had a friend, Raymond Aubrac, an official of
the UN Food and Agriculture Organization, who personally knew Ho Chi Minh. As John Prados recounted, “With the knowledge
and endorsement of the Soviet participant in the Pugwash exchange, Kissinger
suggested it might be useful for Aubrac and Marcovich to visit
NIXON AND KISSINGER AT
THE HOTEL PIERRE
Nixon’s relationship with Kissinger began with a meeting at
the Hotel Pierre in New York City, where the transition team worked. Richard Allen had been Nixon’s foreign policy
advisor during the campaign, but at 33 he was considered too young for the
corresponding job with the new president.
Allen was also considered too conservative. (Allen would get the job later – at a much
lower level of influence – in the Reagan administration.) To head Nixon’s NSC, Allen suggested
Kissinger, who had worked for New York Governor Nelson Rockefeller, the liberal
whom Nixon had defeated for the Republican nomination.[434]
Kissinger’s biographer Roger Morris wrote: “At the Pierre,
Kissinger recommended and Nixon readily adopted (provided it could be
maneuvered past his other senior foreign affairs advisers without
confrontation) a formal new system of decisionmaking for the National Security
Council (NSC). The system would install
Kissinger firmly atop the bureaucratic structure, with decisive control over
both the formulation and conduct of policy, and thus de facto power greater than the de
jure constitutional authority of the Secretaries of States and Defense.”[435]
Beginning at the Pierre, Nixon and Kissinger forged a
relationship that remains one of the most remarkable in U.S. political
history. Foreign policy in the Nixon
administration was a virtual two-man show and, as Mort Abromowitz, a longtime
diplomat, said later: “Henry and Nixon conspired to do virtually everything.”[436]
David Rothkopf wrote that “Nixon and Kissinger cannot fully
be seen as separate characters. They
were to a large extent two parts of a whole, complementing each other,
augmenting each other, often infuriating each other, and in the end creating
together the smallest, most powerful most brilliant, and sometimes – thanks
largely to the paranoid and ‘strange’ Richard Nixon – most dysfunctional inner
circle of all those that shaped and implemented the international policies of
the world’s most powerful nation.”[437]
Over the course of the Nixon administration, Nixon and
Kissinger sought to reduce the defense burden with such policies as the Nixon
Doctrine, obliging allies to take responsibility for more of their own defense,
particularly allies in the Third World,[438]
and, in 1970-72, secret negotiations and eventually normalization of relations
with Communist China, which in turn allowed a shift in U.S. military strategy
to a “one-and-a-half-war” concept (in which the U.S. would have the capability
to fight, simultaneously, one major war and one regional conflict).[439]
But the most controversial strategic concept associated with
Nixon and Kissinger was that of détente.
Roger Morris wrote: “Kissinger’s general diplomatic vision of
détente was as clear and premeditated as Nixon’s political instincts on the
subject. The shape and negotiating
techniques of a post-cold war settlement between America and Russia were
central themes in his later writings on U.S. policy and already implicit in 1957
in A World Restored. Détente, with all its operational
contradictions and fundamental logic after 1972, reflected his concept of a
great two-power condominium, joined together by a framework of personal
contacts and formal agreements, which might mitigate rivalries and lead even to
collaboration on common problems. But
that vision would have remained an academic theory without his matching
appreciation of the real bureaucratic obstacles and opportunities.”[440] Note the term “post-cold war,” which was
indeed how supporters of détente referred to the new era.
Lauren Holland of the University of Utah wrote: “Détente
sought to prevent military conflict by expanding the linkages between East and
West in order to create a sense of a common fate. Détente, which was central to the Nixon
Doctrine, also dictated a reduction in nuclear arms and in tensions with the
Soviets and signaled recognition that Communist states had legitimate security
interests that they had a right to protect (although the containment concept
was not totally abandoned).”[441]
(The latter idea – the recognition that Communist states had
legitimate security interests that they had a right to protect – was reflected
in the so-called Sonnenfeldt Doctrine, named after Kissinger aide Helmut
Sonnenfeldt. The idea was taken by many,
including presidential candidate Ronald Reagan in 1976, as the abandonment of
the people of the Communist world to their fate.)
Through arms control agreements and through economic
assistance and subsidized trade, Nixon and Kissinger sought to give the Soviets
a stake in a stable international order.
And, as Mark Riebling noted in Wedge:
The Secret War Between the FBI and the CIA, “the policy of détente . . . as
Henry Kissinger would say, began by rejecting the notion that Soviet strategy
necessarily followed a long-range plan.”[442]
In the view of many observers, détente was a dangerous
policy, associated with arms control agreements that the Soviets systematically
violated,[443] and
with economic aid that helped prop up the Soviet regime while draining U.S.
resources.[444] General William Odom, director of the
National Security Agency during the Reagan administration, said: “I turned down
a job on [Kissinger’s] NSC during my last months in the American embassy in
Zbigniew Brzezinski, who served as Jimmy Carter’s National
Security Advisor, characterized Kissinger’s view as “Spenglerian,” a reference
to Oswald Spengler, author of Decline of
the West. Spengler believed that the West would soon follow the great
civilizations of
David Rothkopf, who served as managing director of Kissinger
Associates, wrote that “Kissinger of course did not articulate or adopt quite
such as apocalyptic view” as Spengler’s.
“Rather, his theories and his actions suggest that he and Nixon were
uncertain of how long
In a 1997 article in The
National Interest, Neil McInnes wrote that “Kissinger himself has said that
he conducted policy ‘with a premonition of catastrophe.’ He has admitted to ‘a perverse fascination’
with Spengler’s historic pessimism, but says he rejected Spengler’s notion of
the inevitability of decay; indeed, he had said as much in his 1950 Harvard
thesis. Nevertheless, critics have
claimed to detect a fatalistic defeatism in his policies, something which
flowed from a belief that American civilization had passed its high point, like
so many before it, and had to accommodate the rising forces represented by the
USSR, ‘Sparta to our Athens.’ This
became, briefly, a political issue in the 1970s, when retired Admiral Elmo
Zumwalt said Kissinger told him such things; Ronald Reagan declared that the
Sparta/Athens = USSR/USA analogy was a lapse of faith that was making Kissinger
too keen to cut a deal with Moscow.
Kissinger said his views were being distorted and misrepresented, and
from what we know of his sympathy with the Kantian view of moral freedom, we
can believe him. But at least one of his biographers maintains there is a
‘kernel of truth’ in the suggestion that the former Secretary of State was a case
of Spenglerian pessimism.”[448]
Rothkopf: “The argument that America was in decline, or at
least the argument that America was at a potential disadvantage in the
competition with the Soviet Union, was founded on the narrow focus on strategic
arms and arms control issues that had priority during the height of the Cold
War. . . . Even historians like Paul Kennedy (The Rise and Fall of Great Powers) have decried the impulse among
contemporary strategists – among whom he cites Kissinger – to ‘all too often
have equated weapons-system policy and military posture with ‘Grand Strategy.’”[449]
Roger Morris, who served on the NSC staff under Johnson and
Nixon, explained in 1977 that détente was based on Kissinger’s idea of realism
– policy based on realistic perceptions, such as the idea that the
“He accepted the Russian and Chinese revolutions as
irreducible, if unpleasant, facts of world politics.”[450]
In the years to come, such so-called realism would appear
shortsighted, leading James Schlesinger, a former DCI and Secretary of Defense,
to comment that the term “realistic foreign policy” is used “sometimes
derisively.”[451]
In the years to come, the policies of Nixon and Kissinger
would reflect “the retraction of American power and the passing of the
interventionist urges of the 1960s,” Morris wrote.[452]
CURBING THE BUREAUCRATS
To put these policies in effect, Nixon and Kissinger sought
to prevent members of the bureaucracy from doing what they usually do, which is
to control the process by limiting the boss’s options. Instead, the NSC would narrow down the
responsible choices and present them to the president. James Schlesinger said Nixon learned “what I
call the façade from Eisenhower. He knew
that Ike was in charge and he, Dick Nixon, wanted to be in charge in the same
way. . . . [H]e used the set of procedures that he and Henry developed to push
over his ideas rather than to listen to anyone else’s. And Henry, well, he did all the preparation
of the memorandum that would go on top of the NSSM, and my guess is that the
memorandum was never shown to anyone other than Nixon. And so Nixon used Henry as a way to make and
then deliver decisions with Henry taking a good deal of the guff from the
bureaucracy for decisions that Nixon himself had made.”[453]
According to Rothkopf, the plan “concentrated unprecedented
power in the hands of the national security advisor and his team at the NSC and
. . . ensured that the White House would drive national security policy” while
“creating the illusion of a commitment to the interagency process.”[454]
Nixon and Kissinger moved quickly to install the new
system. As John Prados noted, “In
testimony he had published jointly with strategic thinker Bernard Brodie in
1968, Kissinger told interlocutors that a new President, in the areas in which
he wanted to effect changes, had to do so within the first four months, and had
to ‘give enough of a shake to the bureaucracy to demonstrate that he means
it.’”[455]
At the announcement of Kissinger’s selection, Nixon said in
an aside that “Dr. Kissinger is setting up at the present time a very exciting
new procedure for seeing to it that the President of the
Along with former Eisenhower aide Andrew Goodpaster, Nixon
and Kissinger worked on the new system that would use the NSC and the
interagency process to develop foreign policy.
They created (in Goodpaster’s words) “a system that would draw from
Eisenhower but which would not narrow down options to a single line of
policy. Nixon always wanted to have
several lines of policy evaluated.”[457]
Morton Halperin, a Kissinger aide who had been an arms
control specialist in Robert McNamara’s Defense Department, laid out the new
foreign policy structure in an 18-page memo.[458]
There were eight major interagency groups, plus
interdepartmental groups dealing with particular regions. Most were chaired by Kissinger, or had to
direct their papers to those that were.
Interagency committees would analyze issues in National Security Study
Memoranda (NSSMs), while policy decisions would be set forth in National Security
Decision Memoranda (NSDMs).[459]
As described by John Newhouse, “The NSSM rigorously assigns
bureaucracy a task, most often a study assessing various policy options. Once the study is completed and accepted, the
President chooses; at this point, a NSDM is prepared. It formularizes his decision and tells the government
what is to be done.”[460]
There would be a dozen NSSMs in the first ten days of the
Nixon administration, 55 by
Within a couple of years, Kissinger would enlarge the number
of professionals on his staff from 12 to 80.[464] It was 28 in February 1969, as large as
Eisenhower’s entire NSC staff in 1960, administrative personnel included. By September the total staff was 114 persons,
more than twice as an as during the Kennedy-Johnson era.[465]
The primacy, to Nixon, of the NSC staffers was made clear
during Nixon’s first and only meeting with them, when he expressed contempt for
the “impossible fags” over at the State Department.[466] Winston Lord, a Kissinger aide who would
later head the Council on Foreign Relations, said that Nixon “wanted to
control” foreign policy and “distrusted the bureaucracy, particularly the State
Department, figuring they were a bunch of thoughtless bureaucrats or left-wing
Democrats or both.”[467]
Kissinger later wrote that Nixon had “very little confidence
in the State Department. Its personnel
had no loyalty to him. . . . He felt it imperative to exclude the CIA from the
formulation of policy; it was staffed by Ivy League liberals who behind the
façade of analytical objectivity were usually pushing their own preferences.”[468]
Kissinger even sought to isolate the NSC staff from the White
House, going so far as to take away the White House Mess privilege they had had
under Kissinger’s predecessor.[469]
But if the intention was to shut out the bureaucrats such as
the State Department’s “impossible fags,” as Nixon called them, or to shut the
NSC away from the base political influence of the rest of the White House, the
empowerment and isolation of the NSC staff also shut out the military, which
was, at that point, as unpopular as it had ever been among opinion elites. The military shut-out, exemplified by the NSC
CBW review, was so extreme that, in September 1970, the Joint Chiefs of Staff
put a spy on Kissinger’s staff! Seymour
Hersh wrote: “During the Nixon years, a
scandal erupted when it was discovered that a military aide to national
security adviser Henry Kissinger was leaking documents to the joint chiefs
because even they did not know what was going on in American foreign policy.”[470] It became known as the “Radford affair” or
the “Moorer-Radford affair,” referring to the aide, Yeoman Charles E. Radford,
a secretary-stenographer who secretly copied White House documents and provided
them to the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and to the chairman of the JCS, Admiral
Thomas Moorer.[471]
In the beginning of the Nixon administration, Newhouse wrote,
“It rapidly became clear that Kissinger and his staff had seized control of
national security policy and that Kissinger dominated his staff. He alone dealt with the President. He assigned staff members their tasks, but
told them no more than they needed to know.
Questions began to pose themselves.
The system had obvious merit: Presidents should have broad freedom of
choice, since they normally bear the responsibility for decisions; yet, could
one man, for all his gifts, establish presidential options by dominating the
security system of the world’s greatest power?
Is the role of a modern Metternich or Tallyrand really available in an
age when history is made overnight and some states deploy nuclear weapons? Any system, however solid its intellectual
underpinnings, is only as good as the men, or man, running it.
“In short, people wondered whether so concentrated a system
was workable. The risk of overloading
was self-evident. Some issues, it was
feared, would be lost or buried owing to the limits on the time and endurance
of a handful of people and, ultimately, on the one man with access to the
President. There was also the risk that
the normal function of the agencies in advising the President would be
compromised, if not altogether lost.”[472]
Various writers have suggested that Kissinger, in effect, did
to Nixon precisely what Nixon feared the bureaucrats would do to him: Kissinger
was narrowing down choices to the ones he favored, before they ever reached
Nixon’s desk.
- Newhouse:
Kissinger “shapes Nixon’s options by defining the questions to which
bureaucracy must respond.”[473]
- Deception
experts J. Bowyer Bell and Barton Whaley: “It has been said that Kissinger
used to present Nixon with three options, each carefully weighted so that
one was clearly bad, another was obviously better, and the third – the one
Kissinger wanted all along – was likely to be perceived by the President
as best.”[474]
And specifically with regard to the decision Nixon would make
on biological weapons:
- Morris:
“Passing the NSSM through the Review Group with compliments to the
bureaucracy for their thoughtful work on a complex issue, he quietly
ordered the options rewritten by his own staff to make plain to the
President that he had before him that rarity of American statesmanship – a
unilateral step in disarmament without military sacrifice or significant
Pentagon opposition.”[475]
Concerning the CBW review of 1969, Roger Morris wrote: “The
early NSC studies not only changed in general terms the official outlook on
issues like the Sino-Soviet rivalry; included within the obligatory options
presented in each review were sometimes specific operational decisions that
bureaucracies did not usually afford presidents, and that presidents did not
take without some immunity from bureaucratic reprisal. The administration’s 1969 initiative to curb
chemical-biological weapons (CBW) was a revealing example of how Kissinger and
the new system breached that institutional and political inertia. Few issues had so embodied the unequal
struggle between rational public policy and the fetishistic politics of national
security. Since the 1950s, the Pentagon
had spent billions in secret funds to develop and refine lethal or
incapacitating chemicals and grotesque bacterial strains. Though there were increasing doubts among
scientists and military intelligence that such technology was practically
manageable as a weapon either for the
“Typically, the programs continued mainly because they were
there, claimants for a defense budget in which to renounce the need for one
established force might only invite unwanted questions about others.”
Morris wrote that, according to Nixon, the CBW topic was
taboo during the Eisenhower years. “To
Kennedy and Johnson, who by then might have unearthed evidence that the CBW
program was dubious at best, the question presented the distasteful prospect of
one more clash with the joint chiefs, already doubting presidential manhood in
the endless squabble over how far to escalate in Vietnam.”[476]
In
contrast, Nixon wasn’t going to let a bunch of bureaucrats set CBW policy for
his administration. He was going to show
everyone who was boss.
CHAPTER NINE
The NSC review (part one)
In the world surrounding the Nixon administration, a storm
was gathering over the U.S. CBW program.
As noted in Chapter Six, on February 4, 1969, roughly eight
months after the Dugway sheep incident and two weeks after Nixon took office,
NBC News broadcast an edition of its newsmagazine, “First Tuesday,” that had a
great impact on the debate over CBW.
In addition to focusing on Dugway, showing dead sheep being
bulldozed into pits, the NBC report showed laboratory experiments on rabbits
and mice, explored the transportation of CW agents in freight cars, and noted
that the Smithsonian Institution had received more than $2.5 million over six
years to investigate the migratory pattern of birds on a small island, Baker
Island, 1,700 miles southwest of Hawaii.
Former Senator Joseph Clark (D-Pennsylvania) claimed that, “under the
screening of the Smithsonian Institution in a bird-banding project, they were looking
for a relatively safe place to conduct chemical and biological warfare
testing.”[477] The Senate Foreign Relations Committee staff
had received a letter on March 11, 1968 from Egbert W. Pfeiffer, a zoology
professor at the University of Montana, who said he “learned from an absolutely
reliable source who can not be identified that the purpose of the project . . .
is to attempt to locate an island in the Pacific on which pathogens can be
tested without the danger of being spread to other islands by migratory birds.”[478] The
Washington Post noted that Pfeiffer was a “longtime foe of germ warfare
research.” (In fact, he was a leading
critic, on behalf of the Society for Social Responsibility in Science, of
In the hour-long report, NBC stated that the
Hersh may have had a low opinion of the NBC report, but
Representative Richard D. McCarthy (D-New York) credited the broadcast with
stirring his interest in CBW: “My concern about
“Shocked by what she saw about
McCarthy’s efforts, more than those of any other elected
official, brought CBW into the public eye.
Meselson, interviewed by Paul G. Conway for his dissertation, said of
McCarthy, “it was like God tapped this guy to publicize this one single issue.”[482]
McCarthy arranged for a congressional briefing on CBWs, to be
conducted by the Department of Defense.
McCarthy insisted that the briefing be at least partially unclassified,
and it was. After the
According to Paul G. Conway, who interviewed Hersh for his
1972 dissertation, “Throughout the winter, McCarthy relied heavily on Hersh,
who based himself in the
On March 4, the day of the congressional CBW briefing
requested by McCarthy, scientist-activists at the Massachusetts Institute of
Technology and some 30 other colleges and universities protested the
sponsorship of research by the
Some scientists consider their
activity [i.e., their involvement in the protest] to be a “strike;” by this
they signify a vote of no-confidence in the ability of the Government to make
wise and humane use of scientific and technical knowledge. They are temporarily withholding their
services in the manner of a French general strike.
Implicit is the possibility of
greater non-cooperation if the Government continues to develop and deploy such
weapons as ABM, MIRV, SCAD, and CBW, while neglecting pressing social and
environmental concerns.
Some of these scientists are also
protesting the involvement of their universities in defense projects or their
overdependence on Department of Defense funding mechanisms.
Others consider their action as a
research stoppage . . . a personal commitment toward reforming a set of
Government policies that have resulted in the growing power and influence of
the military-industrial complex.[486]
The Union of Concerned Scientists, a prominent organization
of political activists, was an outgrowth of the “March 4 Movement.”[487]
Among the supporters of the day of non-research were
prominent members of the scientists/“peace” movement, including Meselson,
physicists Hans Bethe and Herbert York, biologist George Wald, and linguist
Noam Chomsky, along with Senator George McGovern (D-South Dakota), who would be
the Democratic nominee for president in 1972.[488]
According to The Nation,
biological warfare was one of Wald’s concerns.
“Dr. Wald lashed out at the draft, biological warfare, and Sen. Richard
Russell’s statement that if we have to start over again with another Adam and
Eve, he wanted them to be Americans.
‘Criminal insanity,’ Wald called it.
The MIT linguist Noam Chomsky urged the audience to ‘keep knocking down
the technical justifications for programs like ABM,’ warning at the same time
that if resistance ever got off the ground, the government might take action
against what it would term an illegal conspiracy.”[489]
McCARTHY’S WIFE
On March 5, The New
York Times reported, in its lead paragraph in the story on the McCarthy
briefing: “Because a Congressman’s wife [i.e., Mrs. McCarthy] was upset after
watching a television program, the Army disclosed today [March 4] that the
Pentagon was spending $350-million annually to develop and produce chemical and
biological weapons. . . .
“After watching a recent National Broadcasting Company show
on chemical and biological warfare, Mr. McCarthy’s wife asked him what he knew
about the subject. Mr. McCarthy replied,
‘Nothing,’ and proceeded to arrange for the briefing” held March 4. The
headline on the Times report was “Pentagon Bares Cost of Germ Warfare Study.”[490] Reflecting a very different approach to the
same story, The Washington Post lead
its version: “Russia has seven to eight times the chemical and biological
warfare capability of the Free World, Brig. Gen. James A. Hebbeler, director of
the Army[’]s CBR and Nuclear Operations, was quoted as telling a closed
Congressional briefing yesterday.” The
headline on the Post story was “Soviet
Leads in Chemical Warfare.”[491]
On March 23, The
Washington Post carried a front-page “News Analysis” entitled “Doubts Rise
on Hill Over Arms Needs” that focused mainly on the proposed Anti-Ballistic
Missile system and on
On March 25, six Roman Catholic priests, a nun, and two
others broke into the Washington, D.C. offices of Dow Chemical Company, pouring
what they said was human blood on equipment and furniture and throwing files
out the window. They accused Dow, which
manufactured chemicals for military use in
On April 9, violence broke out at Stanford over CBW and
related issues. Approximately 150
students seized the Applied Electronics Laboratory at Stanford and held it for
more than a week, demanding an end to classified research and research on CBW
and counterinsurgency, and with a stated goal of ending all Defense Department
research at Stanford. At a
post-occupation rally, about 1,500 of Stanford’s 11,000 students said they
would support such actions in the future if the trustees did not “respond
positively.”
The violence worked.
On April 27, the Los Angeles Times
reported that, “Under intense pressure from students and faculty,
“The university and its sister institution, the Stanford
Research Institute, for some time have been substantially involved in
classified and military-related research. . . .
About one-fourth of the university’s government sponsored research funds
and about half of SRI’s total budget come from the Defense Department.”
The Stanford Board of Trustees prohibited SRI from accepting
new contracts in CBW research, pending a reexamination of the institute’s
relationship with the university. A
student-faculty committee had recommended that Stanford divest itself of SRI,
and that SRI be prohibited from engaging in CBW counter-insurgency research or
any “military research primarily and directly related to the war in
(See below a June 2, 1969 report regarding efforts to stop
defense-related research at M.I.T.)
On April 29, The Wall
Street Journal noted in an editorial that “the Pentagon justifies the
weapons [CBW] by explaining that the
In this light it is reasonable to ask
(though impossible to answer without more technical knowledge) if the
development and stockpiling of similar weapons as a deterrent is the only
possible response to Soviet development of chemical and biological
weapons. Surely, an appropriate
defensive move might lie in developing antidotes and immunizations as
well. Or if deterrence is necessary, why
cannot the deterrent be the fact that a biological attack can be met with a
nuclear reply?” That would not be the
last time that it would be advanced, as a serious proposition, that such
weapons were not needed for deterrence because the
Prudence obviously dictates some
degree of investigation into weaponry of apparent interest to an enemy. But it is also prudent to give serious
examination to the Pentagon’s plans to see if a costly and harrowing
chemical-biological arms race can be avoided. [496]
Ultimately, of course, the
That day, House Minority Leader Gerald Ford, addressing the
ABM and other weapons systems, wondered how far anti-military forces would
go. “Where are they going to stop? Do they want to unilaterally disarm
April 30 was a critical day in the history of the U.S. CBW
program. It was the day that a memo from
Secretary of Defense Laird would seem to have led to a new review of CBW policy,
and it was the day that Matthew Meselson briefed key members of the U.S. Senate
on chemical and biological weapons.
THE LAIRD MEMO
Remember that, by late in the year 1968, agreement had been
reached among
(Later, according to a New
York Times story, Laird, in reviewing his first ten months as Defense
Secretary, listed as one of his accomplishments the “new policy on chemical and
biological warfare, which resulted after he initiated the first National
Security Council review of these weapons ‘since 1958.’”[500])
Under the new Kissinger/Nixon process, the process for making
and implementing decisions was divided into National Security Study Memoranda
(NSSMs), which were intended to outline the pros and cons of various ideas and
set forth options for the President, and National Security Decision Memoranda
(NSDMs), which put forth the President’s decision and his instructions for
implementation. It was NSSM-59 that
would re-examine
LAIRD, MESELSON, OR
SOMEONE ELSE?
It appears that the review carried over from the previous
administration led to Laird’s memo to Kissinger, which in turn led to
NSSM-59. Nevertheless, various
individuals and agencies have sought to take or assign credit for the decision
to examine CBW policy, and the exact truth may never be known. Neither Nixon nor Kissinger wrote about the
matter or are known to have discussed it on the public record,[501]
and Forrest Russel Frank, in his 1974 dissertation, wrote that –
The task of accounting for the
origins . . . is especially interesting in light of the competing claims of
origination made by each major bureaucratic, Congressional, and “attentive
public” interest. At least one
representative of every major interest who participated in the NSSM study with
whom I spoke including the Departments of State and Defense, the Arms Control
and Disarmament Agency, the now defunct Office of Science and Technology, and
the National Security Council Staff claimed partial or complete credit for originating
the idea of the study.[502]
Frank added:
Many individuals outside the
government credit Dr. Matthew Meselson functioning in his multiple roles as a
personal friend of Dr. Kissinger, a consultant to the Arms Control and
Disarmament Agency on chemical and biological weapons control, and a lobbyist
representing the scientific community[503],
with the inclusion of chemical and biological weapons on the list of topics for
NSSMs. . . . Several persons who were never members of the executive branch
[including some who served on the President’s Science Advisory Committee – SJA]
credit Dr. Meselson for suggesting the study of chemical and biological weapons
directly to Dr. Kissinger. Meselson did
have direct access to Dr. Kissinger on the basis of a longtime friendship;
however, he refuses public comment on his relationship to Dr. Kissinger and
NSSM-59 beyond acknowledging that he forwarded position papers directly to Dr.
Kissinger upon Kissinger’s request. . . . Meselson’s contribution to the
origins of NSSM-59 was his ability to show that such a study would have
external political value in addition to internal bureaucratic value.[504]
In 2007, PBS reported that “A chance encounter with Meselson
at an airport led Kissinger to ask his old Harvard colleague to submit a
position paper on the subject of biological weapons.”[505] The suggestion, from that and other sources,
was that the Meselson-Kissinger encounter spurred the CBW review.
However, it appears that Kissinger had to be reminded later
of Meselson’s role in the process. For
example, a February 9, 1970 memorandum to Kissinger from Michael Guhin, who
coordinated NSSM-59 and the follow-up work on toxin weapons, noted that
Meselson “has sent you a few letters over the past months, several of which
contained background information and data on these subjects [the Geneva
Protocol, ‘irritant agents’ such as CS, and herbicides],” particularly Meselson’s
paper, “The U.S. and the Geneva Protocol.”[506] As noted above, it was another Harvard friend
of Kissinger, Paul Doty, who may have served as Kissinger’s principal outside
advisor on the topic of CBW.
For the idea of studying CBW policy, Frank wrote, “Others
credit the efforts of Congressmen Kastenmeier and McCarthy joined by Senators
Nelson and Goodell for creating a political climate that demanded executive
branch action on chemical and biological weapons policies and programs.”[507]
But the most likely catalyst was a memorandum from the
Secretary of Defense, Melvin Laird. On
“It would seem reasonable to have the subject brought before
the National Security Council at an early date.
I suggest the necessary studies and reviews be initiated immediately, to
facilitate early consideration by the NSC.”[508]
In his 1974 dissertation, Forrest Russel Frank noted that,
less than five years after Laird’s memo, his motivation was the subject of much
speculation. It was suggested that his
views were based on his concern about public health; that he wanted to free up
defense dollars for domestic spending; that he was responding to political
pressure from his old House colleague, Richard McCarthy; that he was looking
for an issue to concede to Congress in order to obtain support for ballistic
missile defense; or that he was responding to the perceived need of the Joint
Planning Staff for a clear BW policy.[509] In June 1969, Neil Sheehan reported in The New York Times that “some senior
military officials had encouraged Mr. Laird to request the study because they
thought the United States was not doing enough in the field of chemical and
biological warfare to counter Soviet activities in the area.”[510]
Mangold and Goldberg, in Plague
Wars, suggested that Laird, who had served 16 years on the defense
appropriations subcommittee, was concerned about spending. “He had been watching, with concern, as the
funding for the combined chemical and biological weapons programmes had risen
during the Kennedy and Johnson years.
“‘The Pentagon kept asking Congress for more money in the
1960s,’ Laird recalls. ‘They told us
they needed the increase because of the
In addition, there was politics. Vietnam war protesters could be deflected,
Laird thought, if there were an end of the use of chemicals in
(Roger Morris later wrote that some observers considered
Laird a political opportunist. “Just as [Secretary of State]
Some would assign to the NSC staff the responsibility for
spurring the creation of NSSM-59. At the
time, early in the Nixon administration, the staff included several Johnson
administration holdovers who would have known about previous efforts to obtain
a CBW policy. Frank wrote: “A draft set
of questions destined to become NSSM-59 was reportedly on Dr. Kissinger’s desk
awaiting final action” when Laird’s memorandum arrived.[514] Kissinger himself, at a
Halperin, working in the NSC offices
adjacent to the White House, viewed the Laird memo as somewhat
superfluous. NSC staffers were already
in the process of recommending a review and had, in fact, drafted a message to
that effect. Thus Halperin recalls there
were two simultaneous requests on Kissinger’s desk. “When Laird’s memo arrived, we redid the
package to include it.” . . .
NSSM 59 can easily be viewed as a
resuscitated CBW policy review initiated by politically sensitive Pentagon
leaders. Though it is necessary to
recognize the internal pressures within the federal bureaucracy that led to its
quick approval it seems clear from interview with NSC staffers that a review
would have been initiated even if Secretary Laird had not requested it. Strong external demands from scientists,
diplomats, and a handful of legislators had already been generated.[516]
Halperin would run the NSSM-59 process until he left the NSC
in September.[517]
According to Kissinger biographer Roger Morris, the CBW issue
arose randomly but presented Kissinger with some great opportunities --
opportunities that Kissinger recognized – to make a painless step toward
détente with the
That the Nixon administration
reviewed policy on chemical-biological weapons in May 1969 and changed it six
months later was the sum of random influences.
The issue arose in part because the British that summer planned to
introduce at the
THE NEW REVIEW BEGINS
On May 9, Kissinger responded to Laird, stating that he would
assign an NSSM on CBW.[519]
The study was commissioned on May 28.[520] It was assigned to the NSC’s
Political-Military Group, with a deadline of
To coordinate NSSM-59, Morton Halperin selected Michael A.
Guhin, described by Jonathan Tucker as “a junior NSC official right out of
graduate school.” (He had a 1967 PhD
from the London School of Economics and Political Science, which was founded in
1895 to promote socialism – although F.A. Hayek was later a professor there.) Guhin was selected, Halperin said later, because
“nobody else wanted to handle the CBW stuff.”[521]
Kissinger’s involvement would be minimal. “Understandably, perhaps, he viewed CBW as a
small part of the national security field,”
Work on the NSSM was divided among three Intergovernmental
Groups – representing the Intelligence Community, the military, and the
diplomatic community – plus a panel composed of some members of the President’s
Science Advisory Committee. The
Intelligence Community group would examine foreign CBW capabilities; the
military group would examine the President’s military options regarding CBWs
and the utility of the weapons; the diplomatic group would look at the possible
ratification of the Geneva Protocol and options for negotiating new agreements;
and the science group would focus on the technical aspects of the weapons.[523]
The process, Guhin said later, was “an attempt to utilize
existing organizational capabilities [while] integrating and coordinating their
efforts so conflicts [between the agencies] would be postponed until the last
possible moment – the National Security Council meeting.”[524] In retrospect, the problem with that process
is obvious: At the NSC meeting, the principals would have only a few minutes to
discuss and debate the key issues. The
important policy decisions would have been made already, and the results of the
meeting foreordained.
Once the three IG reports were completed, they would be
combined by the Interdepartmental Political-Military Group (IPMG), a standing
interagency committee made up of representatives from the Departments of State,
Defense, ACDA, and the Intelligence Community.
The summary report would then be submitted to the NSC Review Group, a
committee of officials at the deputy secretary level. It was chaired by Kissinger himself.[525]
A fourth report, on the science of CBW, was also
prepared. That report – by far the most
influential in the review – is dealt with in Chapter Eleven.
MESELSON AND THE
SENATORS
April 30 brought a key event in the history of the CBW issue
– a congressional hearing at which members of the Senate Foreign Relations
Committee were briefed by anti-CBW activist Matthew Meselson. The
Washington Post reported a day earlier that the hearing would feature “Dr.
Matthew S. Meselson of Harvard, a recognized authority on CBW activities.”[526]
Present at the Meselson hearing were Senators J. William
Fulbright (chairman), Mike Mansfield (D-Montana), Albert Gore Sr. (D-Tennessee),
Stuart Symington (D-Missouri), Thomas Dodd (D-Connecticut), Gale McGee
(D-Wyoming), George Aiken (R-Vermont), and Clifford Case (R-New Jersey).[527] Columnist
James J. Kilpatrick called the hearing “an elementary course in chemical and
biological warfare.”[528]
The attendees included no conservative members of Congress,
although McGee and Dodd were considered anti-communists. Representative McCarthy was also present at
the hearing.
Meselson testified that “My concern with the problems posed
by chemical and biological weapons stems from the summer of 1963 during most of
which I served full time as a consultant to the U.S. Arms Control and
Disarmament Agency in
“My assignment was to study arms control possibilities for
chemical and biological weapons. In
doing that I read both classified and unclassified material.”[529]
Meselson complained that U.S. CBW had not received “the
farsighted analysis it deserves. In
part, I feel that this is because our chemical and biological warfare programs
and policies have been largely shielded from public and especially congressional
scrutiny.”[530]
Senator Symington asked Meselson, “If the Soviets are
developing this type and character of chemical and biological warfare, which I
have followed myself, are you recommending that we do not develop any?” Meselson began to reply, “I will not
recommend any – ”when Fulbright interrupted, saying, “He is not recommending
anything. He is giving us a very basic
briefing on what we are dealing with. I
really called this hearing to inform an ignorant person. He just started to describe what we are
dealing with.”
Meselson: “I might interject that later on I will express the
view we should continue certain kinds of research in this area.” (That was a
reference to purely defensive research.)
Fulbright: “You don’t need to anticipate all the – ”
Dodd: “I just want to be sure I am right. As I understand, Dr. Meselson, what you are
telling us is that we can do something to get agreements that will help curb
the use of it [CBW]. Isn’t that so?”
Meselson: “I would hope so.”
Fulbright: “We draw the conclusions, Tom. He is here to tell us what we are dealing
with. The main purpose of the meeting is
to find out about it, not what to do about it.”[531]
Thus, the briefing by Meselson – an ardent anti-CBW activist
– was presented to a group of senators as something it was not: an objective
scientific view of the subject. “He is
not recommending anything . . . . We draw the conclusions, Tom.” But given that the senators knew little about
the subject, Meselson’s expression of “facts” was, if accepted, outcome-determinative
– that is, such views, if shared by policymakers, would lead inevitably to a
certain course of action. If it is
believed that BWs have no military value yet cost countless millions to
develop, test, produce, and deploy, and if the accidental release of U.S.-made
BW agents is a significant threat to the American people, and if a BW arms
control treaty would be verifiable, then such “facts” would lead most
legislators to conclude that the U.S. should get rid of its BWs and agree to a
ban.
In his 1969 testimony, Meselson acknowledged the need for
secrecy and the classification of information pertaining to BWs. “I would say that if our country felt that it
did need to reserve the right to use biological agents, then it would make some
sense to keep the names of those agents secret because otherwise the enemy
could prepare a better defense than if it were ignorant.”
Dodd: “I think our secrets are helpful to the other side and
harmful to us.”
Fulbright: “I think so, too. Secrecy keeps information from
our own people.”[532]
Fulbright asked about the possibility
of an anthrax attack involving a device exploded “over
Meselson: To do that would be even
more foolhardy than to attack the
Symington: “So?”
Meselson: “In those days we could
fire all the missiles we have at the
Symington: “How would you know they
had done it?”
Meselson: “Done what, Senator?”
Symington: “How would you know who
had fired it as more and more nations get the bomb?”
Meselson: “How would anyone know where any missile came
from? I don’t know the answer to that
question.”[533]
That exchange illustrated a theme that ran through anti-CBW
arguments of the era: that, if an enemy used such weapons against us, we could
simply use nuclear weapons to retaliate.
It also illustrated what some consider a fatal flaw in much arms control
theory – the assumption of bipolarity (as in the argument against Ballistic
Missile Defense) or, more broadly, the assumption that the source of an attack
would be obvious (a theory that the 2001 anthrax letters case appears to have disproved).
When Symington pointed out that
“Nobody would know if you fired one [a BW missile] from a submarine 500 miles
south of Hawaii,” and that a missile would “spread the germs around in an
explosion,” Meselson replied: “Let me put it this way: I certainly agree that
you might kill an enormous fraction of the population with a biological weapon.
“I also believe, however, that as
strategic weapons go, these are ridiculous weapons, ridiculous because they in
no way would reduce the ability of the country attacked to retaliate with
nuclear missiles, and they also might not work.
“You point out that if the
Symington pointed out that “Some
might attempt it on a relatively modest scale, take a tap at
Meselson: “As you go down the scale,
the opportunities for smaller scale offensive actions with BW becomes
realistic, but if you are talking about major strategic threats among nuclear
powers, I think biological weapons are useless and foolish. . . . There are a lot of things that one can say
about biological weapons. My view is
that they are nevertheless ridiculous weapons . . . I myself do not see any
sense for the
Meselson, whom Fulbright said earlier
was “not recommending anything,” said, “I would like to outline what I think a
good policy would be for the
Fulbright interrupted: “Before you
do, do you know anything about Soviet stockpiles of chemical or biological
weapons?”
Meselson: “I spent one day at the
Central Intelligence Agency quite a while ago trying to familiarize myself with
Soviet capabilities.”
Fulbright: “Yes.”
Meselson: “One must bear in mind two
things regarding intelligence estimates.
One is the difference between possible, probable, and confirmed
capability. If one receives, for
example, an estimate that the Soviets have so many pounds of nerve gas, one
must know whether this is a possible number of pounds, a probable number of
pounds, or a confirmed number of pounds.
This is very important.
“The second thing is that in the intelligence
community, of course, there are priorities.
There are certain things that we must obviously know with higher
priority than others. It is relevant that
finding out these things.”[536]
The second point was apparently a
reference to the question of whether the Soviets were technically capable of
developing CBWs such as the ones the
Regarding the first point – about the
Intelligence Community’s practice of rating the reliability of certain
estimates and projections –
Meselson was, in effect, criticizing
the IC for doing its job. As the world
has learned recently, there are few certainties – few “slam dunks” – in the
field of secret intelligence. Yet this
responsible practice was used against the IC.
As we shall see, the views of
Meselson and the anti-BW/anti-CBW activists were highly influential on the
Nixon administration, and helped lead to the unilateral renunciation of
biological weapons by the U.S. and, eventually, to the negotiation of an
unverifiable ban on BWs.
Throughout the hearing, Meselson
expressed an idealistic view of the BW issue.
“When compared with the recent history of other forms of warfare,” he
noted, “the record shows that the governments and peoples of the world have
come to practice and expect a degree of restraint against the use of chemical
and biological weapons not found for any other class of weapons, except nuclear
ones. The chief factor justifying that
restraint is the same for both nuclear and CB warfare – apprehension that, once
begun, it would open up an unfamiliar and highly unpredictable dimension of
warfare that might lead to the extermination of very large numbers of troops
and civilians, especially one’s own.”[538] One could argue to the contrary that,
regarding nuclear and chemical weapons, the chief restraining factor was fear
of retaliation in kind, and that, regarding BWs, technology had not yet reached
the level of standardization needed for the creation of effective weapons.
In a prepared statement that was
entered into the hearing record, Meselson argued that even the use of
purportedly humane CBWs made no sense, even though “The argument has shown
considerable appeal both for thoughtless zealots who wish to advance the
practice of CBW in any form and also for people who genuinely hope to make war
less savage. . . . In any case, if tear gas or similar agents should prove at
all effective when first used both sides would introduce protective devices and
tactics, making subsequent use of such agents much less effective. Thus, except when they are first introduced,
non-lethal chemical weapons are unlikely to have much effect except to set the
stage for more deadly CBW operations.”[539] But an enemy forced to fight in protective
gear or forced to change its battle plans to account for chemical attack may be
a far less effective enemy.
After the Meselson briefing, Senator Gaylord Nelson
(D-Wisconsin) declared that “We are in real danger of rendering portions of
this planet unfit for human habitation” and that, “Certainly we are now beset
with enough problems, without adding to them the specter of nerve gas drifting
into our cities and viruses leaking into the animal population, waiting to be
passed on to human beings.”[540]
When a redacted record of the hearing
was made public in June, the Los Angeles
Times published a story headlined, “Germ, Chemical Arms Foolish, Biologist
Says.” The story began: “Chemical and
biological weapons are ‘useless and foolish’ in the arsenals of nuclear powers,
a disarmament agency consultant told the Senate Foreign Relations Committee.
“Dr. Matthew S. Meselson, Harvard
biology professor, expressed his views at a closed committee hearing April 30.
. . .
“Meselson based his objection to CBW
devices almost entirely on practical grounds. . . .
“Of biological weapons, Meselson
said:
“‘If I were advising the President of
the United States and we were in a terrible crisis with an enemy and we had
nuclear weapons, as we will if such a crisis ever comes, I would advise him to
take all the papers on his desk concerning biological weapons and throw them
away.’”[541]
THE CBW ‘MENACE’ UNDER ATTACK
On
Also on May 3, The Washington Post joined the call for an end to secrecy regarding
the CBW program – a program that, the Post
suggested, was dangerous to Americans.
“Either out of ignorance or faith in the Defense Department or simple
horror, [most Americans] have made little effort to learn about CBW and to
regulate it,” the Post
editorialized. “The CBW complex, of
course, has displayed no similar hesitancy.
It has expanded its operations vigorously and has come to consider its
deadly work immune from the public scrutiny accorded other public matters. The result is that the
“It is a very dark affair and Rep.
Richard McCarthy (D-N.Y.) for one is determined to see it illumined.”[543]
On May 7, Washington Post columnist Laurence Stern noted, in a piece
headlined “Revelations on Chemical Arms Surface at a Crucial Time,” that there
had been “a series of grisly revelations” on the U.S. CBW stockpile, a “little
excursion into the thicket of the unthinkable” that included the CBW program’s
“well-documented susceptibility to accidents” including the Dugway sheep and
“3300 accidents at Fort Detrick . . . over a span of eight years.”[544] Since that’s more than one for each day of
the eight years, the definition of “accident” was presumably a loose one.
Representative McCarthy had learned,
from a former staff assistant to Senator Vance Hartke (D-Indiana)[545],
about a project that became known later as Operation CHASE, for “cut holes and
sink ’em.” The U.S. Army in 1969 planned
the transportation of obsolete, but still lethal, poison gas across the country
in railroad cars, to be dumped into the ocean.
The gas, from such facilities as the Rocky Mountain Arsenal near
On
Also in May, Senator Edward M. Kennedy (D-Massachusetts)
commissioned a Library of Congress study of CBW history, including international
negotiations.[549]
On May 8, The
Washington Post reported, based on a Hersh story in the radical magazine Ramparts (in turn based on a 1967
article in the journal Bacteriological
Reviews), that “birds and animals” (sic) in the Dugway-Salt Lake City area
had been discovered with antibodies for Venezuelan Equine Encephalomyelitis, a
BW pathogen.[550] After quoting CBW critics on the matter, the
article – in the 13th of its 18 paragraphs – mentioned the
possibility that the reported exposure of animals to VEE was natural: “The
article in Bacteriological Reviews. . . speculated that they [sic] might have
been introduced by migratory birds.”[551]
On May 12, The
Andromeda Strain was published. In
this science fiction thriller, a deadly disease of upper-atmospheric and
extraterrestrial origin is brought to earth by
On May 20, Representative Henry Reuss (D-Wisconsin) conducted
hearings of the Conservation and Natural Resources subcommittee, which
concluded that “open-air tests of VX nerve gas” caused “the death and injury to
more than 6000 sheep and contaminated thousands of acres of rangeland outside
the Proving Grounds for 7 months; Army officials impeded the investigations of
the sheep deaths” and “By such action, they prevented prompt medical action
which could have saved many sheep. . . . There is a permanent biological
contaminated testing area in Dugway Proving Ground.”[553]
Reuss, with a measure of glee, pointed out that an area in
the Wendover Air Force Range drop zone, but outside Dugway Proving Ground, was
– as designated on one military map – a “Permanent Bio Contaminated Area.” The contamination, presumably from an anthrax
test, was said to date from 1954 and was expected to continue another five to
ten years.[554]
On May 21, as noted in Chapter Six, Reuss and other members
of Congress pressured representatives of the Army to take responsibility for
the Dugway sheep kill of 1968. The story
was reported in The New York Times
with the headline “Army Admits Its Nerve Gas Killed 6,000 Sheep,” and, rightly
or wrongly, the Army’s guilt became part of history.[555]
On May 23, the Times
editorialized: “Pentagon policymakers are justifiably disturbed about the
deterioration of the military image in recent years. Now, it is evident, neither Congress nor
public opinion is automatically prepared to accept as necessarily true a
statement of alleged fact merely because a military spokesman voices it. The reasons for the present suspicion are
illustrated by the pattern of deception that has just been exposed at the
Dugway Proving Ground in
On May 26, The
Washington Post published an article by Hersh in which he claimed,
regarding the secrecy surrounding the U.S.CBW program: “Many CBW critics
believe the security is designed to keep information away from the American
public, and not an enemy.”[557]
On June 1, Hersh reported in The National
Catholic Reporter (issue dated June 4) that the Army had been shipping
“highly dangerous biological agents,” including anthrax, tularemia and Q fever,
across the country for four years.[558]
On June 2, a special committee at the Massachusetts Institute
of Technology recommended that the university retain its defense research
laboratories but attempt to shift the labs’ emphasis toward, as The New York Times put it, socially
oriented civilian projects. When the
recommendation was announced, M.I.T.’s president lifted a ban on the acceptance
of new classified projects. Interestingly,
leaders of the faculty/student effort to ban classified and war-related
research included famed professor Noam Chomsky and Jonathan P. Kabat, whom the Times said was “a graduate student in
biology who has been associated with radical students here.”[559] Kabat was the son of Elvin Kabat, co-author
with Theodor Rosebury of the seminal report on biological weapons, which was
discussed in Chapter Two.
In its June 9, 1969 issue, The Nation magazine noted “the problem of the 27,000 tons of
surplus nerve gas” and of its disposal, and the news that the Army “has been
finally forced to admit that the [Dugway sheep] slaughter actually happened and
that the public relations officers, and maybe some higher ups, were patriotic
liars when they tried to hide the facts.
The House Subcommittee on Conservation and Natural Resources, of which
Rep. Henry S. Reuss is chairman, is responsible for the Army’s embarrassment on
this issue.
“Outside the government, various groups are engaging in such
harassment – which can be summed up by saying that they expose the military’s
mistakes as they would anybody else’s and, by the same reasoning, object to
giving the services everything they demand.
Such groups also alarm the complacent citizenry by arguing that even if
not used in war, chemical and bacteriological weapons are subject to accidents
that cause deterioration of the environment and may kill people as well as
sheep. This is the view, for instance,
of Physicians for Social Responsibility, with some 1,000 members around the
country.”[560]
On June 18, Richard L. Strout of the Christian
Science Monitor, in his “T.R.B.” column for The New Republic magazine, satirized CBWs with an interview with
his “favorite mad scientist, Dr. Mene T. Upharsin,” who praised the
weapons. The fictional scientist
responded to the charge that he was made by saying, “Me, mad? You go read what the Pentagon’s doing on germ
warfare. I’m the sane one.”
Seriously, Strout declared that CBWs were even worse than the
proposed Anti-Ballistic Missile system, that “a study of what the Army’s CBW
can do makes the ABM pale by comparison.”
He added that “Until Rep. McCarthy got busy, CBW programs were largely
shielded from public and congressional scrutiny.” And he noted that “Harvard scientist Matthew
S. Meselson . . . wants the
In the Los Angeles
Times, the column was accompanied by a cartoon showing a military man in
bed, eyes wide open in the middle of the night, counting sheep skeletons as
they jumped over a fence, “…1,001…1,002…1,003…”
A newspaper on the floor next to the bed had a headline: “Bad Publicity
Worries Pentagon / Finally Admits Poison Gas Accident Killed Those 6000 Sheep
in 1968.”[561]
On June 19, Nobel Prize-winning geneticist and political
activist Joshua Lederberg – who called for BW limitations in a 1966 Washington Post op-ed – condemned the
secrecy of the U.S. CBW program. He said
he supported research into defenses against such weapons, “But that research
has to be directed towards useful goals.
It must be open and available to the scientific community and the world at
large.”[562] Lederberg would not be the last
scientist-activist to support transparency of CBW or BW research while at the
same time opposing proliferation – positions that arguably contradict.
On June 24, The Washington Post noted the political pressures that had been
building for a change in CBW policies.
“President Nixon, in ordering a review of chemical and biological
warfare policies, responded both to the problems posed by CBW and to the public
pressures building up against it. Last
April Representative Richard McCarthy, leader of the current effort to
challenge the country’s unthinking drift on CBW, had requested the President to
resubmit the 1925 Geneva Protocol . . . The Administration was mindful that a
Senate hearing could easily become a wide-ranging confrontation, particularly
on the controversial issues surround American use of tear gases, herbicides and
defoliants in Vietnam. So it decided,
after a two-month internal debate, to make its own private review of the whole
range of CBW policies and practices – trading off secrecy for breadth.”[563]
On June 29, Seymour Hersh reported in
The Washington Post that “These are
bad times for the chemical and biological warfare (CBW) advocates in the
Pentagon. Morale is low among the men
who have visions of ‘War Without Death,’ as one propaganda slogan put it ten
years ago.
“Brig. Gen. James A. Hebbeler, head
of the Army’s CBW efforts, is retiring early to take a job in industry (not in
chemicals). He’s made it clear in
private comments to a number of friends that the recent congressional criticism
over CBW had much to do with his decision.”
The U.S. Army “blanketed early
plenary sessions” of the U.N.’s Committee of Experts (Group of Consultant
Experts), Hersh reported, but in the later stages of the committee’s work, they
were nowhere to be seen. One delegate
said, “They just stopped showing up.”[564]
(It is not hard to imagine why the Army gave up on
influencing the committee, which appears to have been stacked. Of the 15 members[565],
four, including two Pugwash conferees, came from Soviet-occupied countries;
one, a Pugwash conferee, came from
Hersh, in the Washington Post report, described the ongoing White House review of
the CBW issue, “which had the blessing of Henry Kissinger,” and which reflected
“a political reality: it’s becoming increasingly difficult to justify spending
more than $600 million a year, including salaries, on a weapons system whose
potential is, to say the least, unproven.”
He added: “Another supporter of the
review, sources report, is Secretary of Defense Melvin A. Laird, who knows a
political problem when he sees one.”
Hersh also reported that
Hersh reported that, “If the larger
quantity of gas is shipped, . . . it could put the West Germans in violation of
the 1954 West European Union Protocol, which prohibits either the manufacturing
or stockpiling of CBW weapons.”[567]
THE U.N. WEIGHS IN
On July 2, the United Nations’
Committee of Experts (Group of Consultant Experts) issued its report, which, to
no surprise, characterized CBWs as foolish and dangerous.
The report was agreed to unanimously
by the 14 states represented on the committee.
Regarding CBWs, it declared, “Their very existence . . . contributes to
international tension without corresponding military advantages.”[568]
According to the Los Angeles Times, “The overall picture it gives is of lethal,
unpredictable weapons which could damage their users as much as their victims,
harm civilians more than soldiers, upset the environment widely and for long
periods, be formidably expensive even for a great power to defend itself
against, be almost certain to cause escalation whenever used – and spread
dangerously to the hands of irresponsible leaders of small nations.”
The experts expressed the hope that
“an aroused public will demand and receive assurances that governments are
working for the earliest effective elimination” of the weapons.[569]
Because of the infeasibility of CBWs
as weapons, “their universal elimination would no detract from any nation’s
security,” the experts concluded. They
said that the momentum of the arms race would clearly decrease if CBWs were
banned.[570]
In response to the report, U.N.
Secretary General U Thant called on all nations to bind themselves legally
never to use chemical or biological weapons in war, and to reach an immediate
agreement dismantling stockpiles and halting production and research. The Los
Angeles Times reported, “Thant’s plea was aimed mainly at nations such as
the
President Nixon responded to the report of the Committee of
Experts (Group of Consultant Experts): “Experts from many countries have
contributed to this important work. I am
pleased that an expert from the
“The delegation of the
On July 3, the Senate Armed Services Committee cut about 10
percent – nearly $2 billion – from the Pentagon’s research and development
budget, including the entire $16 million requested for new CBW agents.
Senator Thomas McIntyre (D-New Hampshire) said his
subcommittee, which recommended the elimination of the CBW funds, “felt we must
do all we can to protect our people and our troops against biological and
chemical agents but, measured against this Nation’s traditional opposition to
the offensive use of such agents, we could not justify research and development
expenditures for that purpose.”[573]
The Christian Science Monitor, in a July 8 editorial, acknowledged
that –
Intelligence estimates suggest that
the
In this situation the existence of an
American CBW arsenal may seem a necessary deterrent. But there is no reason why the arms control
talks beginning this summer between
Since the gas attacks of World War I,
mankind has especially abhorred poison gas.
Biological weapons are equally regarded as both subtle and vicious. Thus, there exists, deep within humanity’s
conscience, a built-in readiness to abolish these horrendous devices. The nations of the world should take
advantage of this inclination and move, beyond foreswearing the use of CBW weapons,
to their total abolition.”[574]
(That day, an incident occurred in
On July 9, The New York
Times published an editorial on “The Lunacy of Germ Warfare”:
Dean Swift himself could not do
justice to a world which over the centuries and with great skill has eliminated
diseases one by one for the sake of humanity, and then systematically bred the
germs of those diseases as a possible weapon of war. Yet all the major countries, even those that
have the nuclear power to wipe out the earth’s population several times over,
persist in the solemn lunacy of stockpiling lethal bacteria and poisonous gases
in the name of national defense.
Fortunately a few rays of good sense
have been penetrating this Kafka-like realm, and it is at least possible that
the world may be spared further hazardous progress along a particularly
gruesome road.
Those signs, the Times
noted, included McCarthy’s campaign against CBW, the Senate Armed Services
Committee’s elimination of CBW R&D funds, Nixon’s CBW review, and the U.N.
report drawn up by “14 distinguished scientists.”[575]
THE BRITISH DRAFT
On July 10, a draft convention banning research, production,
stockpiling, and use of biological weapons was submitted by the British to the
ENDC. The previous summer, the British
had proposed separating the CW and BW issues, so the new British draft focused
on the elimination of biological weapons only.
A draft convention proposed in the General Assembly by the
Soviet bloc on September 19 dealt with both chemical and biological
weapons. The Federation of American
Scientists reported: “The Soviet representative argued that [the issues] had
been treated together in the Geneva Protocol and in the General Assembly
resolutions and report, and should continue to be dealt with in the same
instrument. A separate biological
weapons convention, he warned, might serve to intensify the chemical arms
race.”[576]
Meanwhile, the U.N. Secretary General accepted the expert
group’s report and called for a halt to the development, production, and
stockpiling of all chemical and biological weapons. [577]
Interestingly, the British representative acknowledged at the
time that “verification, in the sense in which that term is used in disarmament
negotiation, is simply not possible in the field of biological warfare. The agents which might be used for hostile
purposes are generally indistinguishable from those which are needed for peaceful
medical purposes, and militarily significant quantities of a biological warfare
agent could be produced clandestinely in a small house or large garage.”[578]
At this point, Theodor Rosebury re-entered the story. Rosebury, one of the original staffers of the
CBW program at Fort (then Camp) Detrick in 1943, called for scrapping the BW
research at the facility. Speaking at a
program at nearby
“Because of the lack of any real positive research about what
types of biological warfare the opposing side was involved in, we had to devise
our own conception of what were potentially technically available types of
agents that could be produced.
“Thus, we became involved in the offensive manufacture of
biological weapons here in order to devise a means of attempting to ascertain
if there was any safe way we could produce fairly safe countermeasures to the
dissemination of diseases as weaponry during conflicts.[579]
In the
The stigmatization of BW work by mid-1969 is clear from the Washington Post article; the reporter,
John Hanrahan, felt it was necessary to raise the question of whether the
INCIDENT IN
On July 18, the public learned of a July 8 incident involving
24 Americans in
(Contrary to the Journal’s
claim – “Leak .at U.S. Base Fells 25” – only four persons were even
hospitalized, briefly, none with serious injuries. A total of 24 persons were kept briefly under
medical observation.[582])
“At a late hour last night,” the Journal’s Robert Keatley reported breathlessly, “high Defense and
other Administration officials were debating what to say about the matter or whether
to say anything at all.
“Their sensitivity springs from awareness that disclosure of
the unsuspected deployment could have broad and adverse repercussions for the
“Capitol Hill Controversy [subheadline]
“The information seems certain, in addition, to arouse new
Congressional opposition to the development of toxic weapons in particular and
to the military in general. Word of the
Okinawan incident may come at a particularly bad time for advocates of
deployment of the Safeguard Antiballistic Missile, since that project is now
being debated by the Senate.”[583]
So the reported incidental exposure of as few as four persons
to nerve gas, at a level insufficient to cause harm, was expected to lead to
“repercussions” in areas ranging from the U.S. relationship to Japan and other
military allies, to the political strength of pro-U.S. parties in other
countries, to the general view in the world of U.S. policy, to political support
at home for the chemical weapons program, the military in general, and even the
proposed Ballistic Missile Defense program![584]
Worse, the
(On July 19, Stephen S. Rosenfeld of The Washington Post wrote that little was known about whether the
Soviets had a CBW program. According to
Rosenfeld, an official familiar with classified information on the subject said
that classified materials revealed no more than the published ones, “which – in
the specifics – amount mostly to assertions from sources with an ax to grind,
such as Army Chemical people or anti-Soviet émigrés.”[586] Presumably, the claims of such people could
be safely ignored. The Rosenfeld article
is discussed in Chapter Ten.)
As predicted in anxious news accounts, protests broke out in
the days following the
The New York Times reported that the incident
jeopardized the entire security relationship between the
“The report, if confirmed, will have far-reaching implications
not only for American bases on Okinawa but also for the entire security-treaty
relationship under which the United States maintains bases in Japan proper,
according to Japanese and Western political observers. . . .
“The Japanese public has suddenly faced up to the unpleasant
thought that perhaps such weapons have been stocked for years, not only on
The Times also
reported that “Opposition parties in
Meanwhile, the Times
followed up on Hersh’s reports regarding
On July 20, The
Washington Post noted, “In the last two days reports have multiplied that
the
Hersh told the Post,
“I understand that we are stockpiling nerve gas in the
In a July 22 editorial, the Post
asked, regarding the stocking of nerve gas on
That day, the Defense Department officially acknowledged the
shipment of nerve gas to
On July 23, a spokesman for the West German government
claimed that his government did not know whether
Members of Congress acted shocked to discover that
Mauroni wrote, “The whole theory of discouraging potential
adversaries from using CB weapons was based on the threat of retaliation in
kind,” which necessarily meant that significant quantities of modern,
ready-to-go munitions would have to be kept close to where the U.S. might
engage the enemy.
On July 25, the
At the AAAS conference, James Russell Wiggins, a former
managing editor of The Washington Post and LBJ ambassador to the U.N., declared
that the time for a ban had arrived.
“When we have a situation in which no country in the world is far into
this dreadful traffic, it would be easier to stop it at the start – to use
Churchill's phrase, ‘to smother the baby in the cradle’ – than it would be to
wait ten or twenty years hence when military figures will have made a large
investment of prestige and money in laboratory development and field trials in
these weapons.”[600]
On July 31, the Los
Angeles Times published an editorial entitled “‘CBW’ Weapons Dangerous --- to
Us.” The editors wrote:
[T]he idea of developing and
stockpiling these extremely dangerous agents as a deterrent against their use
by the Russians simply does not make sense.
The use of deadly gas or germ weapons
by one of the superpowers against the other’s troops or population centers
would be an act of such gravity that escalation into nuclear war would be
inevitable. That being the case our
nuclear capabilities constitute the real deterrent against Soviet waging of
chemical and biological warfare.
And, as the nerve gas incidents in
At some point in July, in secret testimony that was later
released, Lieutenant General Austin W. Betts, chief of research for the Army,
told the House Appropriations Committee: “It seems to me that it would be
absolutely indefensible for us to cease all offensive lethal weapon development
. . . It would be foolish if we ceased doing offensive development work that
allowed us the knowledge of what it takes to defend against any agent that our
technology might conceive.”[602]
On August 4, The
Washington Post ran a highly favorable profile of young congressional aides
who were standing up to the Pentagon. At
last, George C. Wilson reported, members of Congress were standing up to the
“military ‘experts.’” (Note the sarcastic quotation marks around the word
“experts.”) They were supported by
young aides who were “the kind of bright young people former Defense Secretary
Robert S. McNamara attracted to the Pentagon before he became obsessed with the
Vietnam war.”
One of the new “support troops in the Senate’s campaign
against the Pentagon” was Heidi Wolf, an aide to Senator Charles Goodell (R-New
York) and a former assistant to Kissinger at Harvard. Her partner in the work on CBW amendments was
Arnold Brustin, an aide to Senator Gaylord Nelson (D-Wisconsin) who quit a law
practice to work on arms control, “even though the mechanics of the
military-industrial complex were as foreign to me as medicine.”
The article continued: “He [Brustin] said CBW is ‘a perfect
example’ of how it is possible to get into a subject in depth in a few
months. ‘The really important thing is
not to be snowed by these guys. You have
to sit there and ask them questions.’”[603]
LEAKED PLANS?
On August 25, the West German magazine Stern reported that it had received a photocopy of a top-secret
The editors of Ramparts
announced plans to publish the documents in September. Stern
said that
Der Spiegel later revealed that the original
versions of the documents had been given to the Soviets by a former courier for
The revelation that the mailing was a hoax did little to
diminish its impact. Days had passed
between the release of the documents to the public and the follow-up stories
about the age of the documents; the documents did appear to be based on actual war-planning documents;
and the issues raised by the documents – the use by the U.S. and NATO of WMDs
in Europe, if war should come – were legitimate issues. Thus, the disinformation worked as it was
apparently intended, to create anxiety among Europeans about U.S. WMDs and to
build political pressure against
This narrative of the NSC review and
the events surrounding it continues in Chapter Thirteen. The next three
chapters deal with intelligence aspects of the NSC review, scientific aspects
of the review, and the question of BW feasibility and technological surprise.
CHAPTER TEN
The NSC review and the lack of good intelligence
In 1969,
- A
general weakness in
- A
decline in the quality of
- Lack
of interest on the part of policymakers, or negative interest (policymakers did not want an accurate
assessment on Soviet BWs because it might interfere with the pursuit of
more important goals).
- Disinformation
by the Soviets and their allies and supporters.
- Reliance,
regarding the scientific aspects of biological weapons, on anti-CBW
activists, to the exclusion of military experts.
(The last factor is examined in Chapter Eleven.)
In 1982, Angelo Codevilla wrote: “The task of US intelligence
is enormous: to watch the whole world and, at any time, to pull out enough
information about any matter to enable US officials to understand it at least
as well as those who have worked to make that matter into a threat to the interests
of the United States. The task of US
intelligence analysts is further complicated because the
And, as Amrom Katz noted famously, “We have never found
anything that the Soviets have successfully hidden.”[607]
SEEING INTO THE BW
COMPARTMENT
This was especially true with regard to biological weapons
programs. For one thing, non-democratic
societies such as the
For another thing, the Soviets’
strict compartmentalization and their control over the communications media and
over contact with foreigners made it difficult for intelligence agencies to
development human sources. Because it is
relatively easy to hide biological weapons development and production behind a
fog of non-BW-related activities, HUMINT (intelligence collected and provided
by humans) is the principal means of detecting a clandestine BW program. But a high government official familiar with
CIA operations between 1969 and 1977 told journalist Edward Jay Epstein that
the CIA failed to establish a single productive mole in the Soviet Union
between the arrest of famed spy Oleg Penkovsky in Moscow in 1962 and the
recruitment in 1976 of Anatoly Filatov, who became an aide in the Soviet
Foreign Ministry.[609]
With regard to biological weapons in particular, Tom Mangold
and Jeff Goldberg, in their book Plague
Wars, quoted a former CIA senior analyst who studied all of the Soviet
defector reports for more than 20 years: “The Soviets compartmentalized their
BW program very efficiently.”[610]
Soviet military technology seemed to
be an especially difficult subject for
Henry Kissinger wrote of this technological surprise:
In 1945 it was said that the
Our complacency with respect to
Soviet progress in the nuclear field, coupled with the notion that war was
likely to start with a surprise attack on us, lent a quality of unreality to
all thinking about military problems in the immediate postwar period. It gave rise to this syllogism,
psychologically if not actually: (1) War must start with a surprise attack; (2)
the Soviet union will not possess an atomic capability for a long time; (3)
therefore, there will not be a war.[612]
PERCEPTION OF SOVIET
SUCCESS
The generally low level of quality of
Former CIA Director Allen Dulles explained in 1963 how the
“Taken at face value,” John Prados wrote, “the flyover
indicated Soviet heavy bomber strength at four times the number of modern B-52
bombers then available to the U.S. Strategic Air Command.”[614]
The Soviet trick led to an upward revision of intelligence
estimates of Soviet heavy bomber strength and to claims of a “bomber gap” that
preceded a so-called “missile gap.” And
the nonexistent “missile gap” was used by Democrats to paint Republicans as weak
on national defense, helping John F. Kennedy win the presidency in 1960.
As Sun Tzu noted in The
Art of War, if you appear strong where you are weak and weak where you are
strong, the enemy, seeking to attack you at your weakest point, will attack at
your strongest. The Soviets made
themselves look stronger than they really were in the 1950s in terms of
bombers, missiles, and economic growth, and later held themselves as weaker
than they really were. (Indeed, the
latter deception was facilitated by the desire of analysts to “correct” for the
earlier one.[616])
In an analysis of U.S. Department of Defense estimates of
Soviet strategic forces between the early 1960s and early 1970s, Albert
Wohlstetter noted that, in forty-nine of first-one cases, “the eventual Soviet
deployment exceeded the mid-range of the Secretaries’ estimates. In forty-two of the fifty-one, it exceeded
the Secretaries’ high.”[617]
Between 1966 and 1979, Soviet ICBMs increased from 224 to
1400, SLBMs from a handful to over 950; the Soviets introduced two new
generations of ICBMs, three of SLBMs, and a new strategic bomber; the Soviets
matched the U.S. in MIRV technology and accuracy. They accelerated a national civil defense
program, and achieved first-strike capability.[618] Yet, as David S. Sullivan noted in 1979, “a
US policymaker relying on NIEs between 1965 and 1978 likely would have
concluded that the USSR suffered from hopeless technical inferiority, was
(until quite late in the period) amassing its forces not to fight and win a war
but rather for ‘assured destruction,’ and had little or no hope of achieving
exploitable strategic superiority or a damage limitation capability.”[619]
In the 1950s,
“Ignoring intentions in intelligence assessments has
deleterious consequences,” Brian D. Dailey wrote. “It fosters mirror-imaging and inadequate
intelligence products. Assessments that
lack consideration of the regime’s historical tradition and the dynamics and
disparities of its polity vis-à-vis other states lead to static conclusions
about military capabilities versus a more useful product that includes
strategic capabilities and
calculations. A by-product of
mirror-imaging is that we tend to look for elements that reflect a Western
predisposition while ignoring writing, activities, and weapon systems that
conflict with that strategic mindset.”[620]
Mirror-imaging, one of the worst and most common mistakes in
dealing with adversaries, is the assumption that others are like
ourselves. Examples of mirror-imaging
listed by Dailey included: “dismissing Soviet civil defense activities as not
serious and thus ignoring its indication of Soviet military strategy,
intentions, and calculations; accepting Soviet arms control definitions of
weapons systems irrespective of their gray area or dual-use capability;
denigrating the significance and impact of ideological training in military and
civilian education; assuming Soviet objectives in arms control are similar to
ours, while Soviet defense spending, research and development, training, and
force posture are all antithetical to the underlying principles associated with
U.S. objectives.”[621]
Richard Pipes noted a difference between the 1964 second
edition of Merle Fainsod’s landmark study, How
Russia is Ruled (originally published in 1953), and a later edition,
entitled How the Soviet Union is Governed,
produced by a student of Fainsod, Jerry Hough.
Comparing the two, Pipes wrote, “reveals a general decline in
understanding.” The approach of the
author of the new volume “tends to be doctrinaire and flawed by the same fault
common to much of our intelligence, namely, mirror-imaging. One of the purposes of the new version of the
Fainsod volume is to get away from the totalitarian model which views the
Soviet Union as a society fundamentally different from ours and to depict it,
instead, as one which is a kind of mildly distorted version of our own American
society, but whose basic functioning is similar.”[622]
Today we might call the later approach Politically Correct. In doing so, we would be using a term that
was originally used, without irony, by Communist Party members to describe
works that were in line with Soviet/Communist ideology.
By the 1960s, analysts understood
that, even if the Soviets were eventually going to catch up with the
The problem with that thinking is
that, in a totalitarian system, the governing class can maintain itself in a
relatively affluent lifestyle without regard to the needs and concerns of the
general population. The wellbeing of the
populace becomes relevant only when it threatens the government’s military
strength or creates the danger of a popular uprising.
Mirror-imaging often blinds
Westerners to genocide and other forms of mass murder as committed by the
Soviets, the Communist Chinese, the Nazis, the Japanese militarists, the Khmer
Rouge, Saddam Hussein and the Baathists, etc.
Such crimes are simply outside the understanding of many in the West. The most extreme effects have been seen among
Holocaust deniers and among those who believed that the Cold War stemmed from a
lack of communication between the American and Soviet peoples.
An unrealistic, mirror-imaged view of
the Soviets led to a belief, among analysts, in détente.
David S. Sullivan wrote that the
National Intelligence Estimates of the 1960s “postulated a
By the early 1970s, some in the national security field acted
as if the Cold War were over. Robert
Bathurst wrote that, “In spite of all the factual evidence of new, aggressive
naval policies [on the part of the Soviet Union], the Naval War College
abandoned teaching about the operations of the Soviet Navy, Soviet military
strategy, and the political ideas of Marx and Lenin. The explanation was that the Cold War was
over, and the
Wishful thinking played a role in
intelligence mistakes about the Soviets.
Joseph D. Douglass, Jr. wrote: “For a variety of reasons, we all want to see the
Why did mirror-imaging and wishful thinking seem to get worse
in the 1960s and ’70s? One explanation
for the decline was offered in 1987 by Uri Ra’anan, who noted that “the size
and quality of the Western Sovietological community has shrunk alarmingly
during recent decades. For many years it
was staffed by former party members, émigrés, and defectors, trained by their
own experiences to read and extrapolate the operational meaning of Soviet
publications, with political instincts honed by ‘life itself.’
“By the 1960s and 1970s, biology had wreaked havoc upon this
community, many of those finest members succumbed to illness and old age. Their place was taken by a new generation,
born and educated in the West, untutored politically by experience.”[627]
This hanging-of-the-guard was accompanied by a change in the
culture of
The old, hard-charging
WHAT THE
In addition, some information came from Jewish refugees who
had been menial workers at BW facilities.[630] The
Washington Post in 1952 quoted a Swiss newspaper, Die Tat of Zurich, that had reported on the account of the Soviet
defector: “A Russian expert who succeeded three years ago in escaping to Great
Britain states with all details that at Eupatoria (near Baku), at Bjerzinsk and
Omsk, centers of bacteriological research have been established under the
leadership of Professor Worenin.” (The
town of
Nevertheless, CIA reporting on the Soviet program was
underdeveloped. A January 15, 1957
Special National Intelligence Estimate on the threat of Soviet WMDs, “Soviet
Gross Capabilities for Attack on the Continental United States in Mid-1960,”
included one paragraph on biological warfare, noting vaguely that “The USSR
possess all the necessary basic knowledge for the production of most BW agents
and devices for their effective dissemination.”[632]
The CIA’s IMINT (image intelligence) capability took a
quantum leap in 1956 with the beginning of U-2 flights over the
As of 1964,
The NIE continued: “We believe that
the Soviets have no present intention to employ BW in military operations. They probably consider BW to be less
effective than other available weapons and uncertain in its effects. The
In addition, “While we have no
positive indications of any Soviet effort to produce and stockpile BW weapons,
BW research alone would provide the
The NIE conceded that “over the years
we have accumulated indications of possible BW activity at a few locations. The
most suspect of these locations is Vozhrozdeniya [sic]
The report indicated that the Soviets
could produce significant quantities of some pathogenic organisms “in a few
months using present facilities,” that CW munitions could be converted to BW
use, but that “Several years would be required to develop a line of effective
BW weapons systems for use on a large scale.”
The Soviets and Soviet-bloc countries already had BWs for clandestine
use, according to the NIE. Also,
Czechoslovak and East German medical research was contributing to the Soviet BW
effort.[636]
Nevertheless, the NIE concluded that, considering the
“delayed and unpredictable” effects of BWs compared to nuclear weapons, it was
“highly unlikely” that the Soviets would use them as either strategic or
tactical weapons, the CIA reported in a 1964 NIE.[637] The “delayed and unpredictable” argument
would surface again in the debate leading up to Nixon’s renunciation of BWs.
Thus, the CIA by the mid-1960s was giving its clients less
information than a few years earlier. As
suggested above, this may be because analysts were being trained to
second-guess themselves, and sometimes they were second-guessing to the point
that they could no longer reach conclusions.
With respect to a given set of facts, no theory could be considered
proven until all alternative explanations were disproved. In the world of secret intelligence, in which
deception was coin of the realm, that standard could never be met when it
counted.
ANALYTICAL FLAWS IN
Consider the way intelligence analysts looked at BW agent
selection by the Soviets:
From medical and military publications and other sources, the
CIA had a good idea what pathogens the Soviets were studying, and that list
included a number of good candidates for biological weapon use.
The Soviets, as one would expect, often selected as BW
candidates those microbes and toxins about which they were already
knowledgeable, and which, in case of an accidental release, would not reveal
the presence or extent of the Soviet program.
(Indeed, an important clue in the Yellow Rain case was the fact that
victims of reported CBW attacks in
CIA analysts asked: How could we know that the Soviets aren’t conducting legitimate medical research
on diseases endemic to their territory and legitimate defensive research on
diseases that the
That is a reasonable point, but it was used by analysts to
suggest that, if there was an alternative explanation for that aspect of the
case for Soviet BW research, there might be alternative explanations for all
the other parts, too. They implied
wrongly that the existence of alternative explanations for the Soviets’
research into candidate-agents lessened
the probability that the Soviets were conducting offensive BW research.
That analytical flaw was one of several that appeared in “The
Enigma of Soviet BW” by Wilton E. Lexow and Julian Hoptman, an article in the
Spring 1965 issue of the CIA’s in-house journal, Studies in Intelligence.
In the article, Lexow and Hoptman suggested that there was a
“dearth of information” on Soviet BW activities. “Despite a considerable
expenditure of time and resources, the pursuit of intelligence on biological
warfare activities in the
The authors complained: “The paucity of real evidence has
forced us to resort to indirect signs.
Attempts have been made to examine all military-related activity in the
fields of biology and medicine, all technical publications which appeared to be
censored by security considerations, and all biomedical studies which did not
jibe with Soviet public health requirements as we know them. Analysts have used speculation, analogy, and
parallels with other nations' BW research, development, and practice in recent
times and in the historical past. They
have analyzed Soviet, Satellite, and Chinese propaganda charges of
The reader should note the wording the authors used. The claim that “[t]he paucity of real
evidence has forced us to resort to indirect signs” is peculiar, since such
indirect signs are real evidence and
such signs are often more convincing than other forms of evidence. (In the law, when someone complains that
evidence is “only circumstantial,” he betrays his ignorance of the nature of
evidence.)
“The foremost suspect as a biological warfare center had long
been
Lexow and Hoptman wrote that there was much fruitless searching
for information on the
But, the authors reported, the assumption that
So “some” of the parameters were “too critical to be
discounted.” The authors continued:
“The island was photographed a second time in 1959. Although there were changes such as
additional building, there were no new clues to its function. Three major obstacles remained before it
could be classified as a BW installation.
First, the apparent ‘grid systems,’ needed for measuring dispersion of
test agents, were small, ill-defined as to configuration and purpose, and not
comparable to those at the Soviet CW proving ground and U.S. BW-CW proving
grounds. Second, there were no
indications of the necessary air support for BW test activities. For example there was no evidence of a
sophisticated landing strip, decontamination facilities for aircraft, or night
landing facilities. Third, the buildings
and presumed inhabitants of
Why did it preclude tests with live BW agents? Because the Soviets would not put innocents
at risk to test biological weapons, the analysts believed!
As Gregory Koblentz noted in his dissertation, “The dismissal of
Lexow and Hoptman’s mirror-imaging continued. Because
The authors did acknowledge, though, the possibility of a
Soviet covert attack on the
The confusion reflected in the Lexow-Hoptman article
continued to afflict the CIA over the next few years.
In NIE 11-67, “Soviet Military Research and Development,”
June 1967, there is no mention (in approximately two pages) of the BW issue,
although it is noted that “It is almost certain that the Soviets have some type
of R&D underway in every important field of military technology.”[647]
Finally, in 1968, the CIA got a break: the defection of a
highly knowledgeable official from the Soviet bloc.
In 1968, intelligence on Warsaw Pact BW programs took a leap
forward with the defection of Jan Šejna, who had been a member of the ruling
presidium of the Czechoslovak parliament, assistant secretary to the
Czechoslovak Defense Council, and chief of staff to the Czechoslovak Minister
of Defense. The Chicago Tribune reported that “Šejna is believed to be the highest
ranking official of a European communist country ever to defect.”[648]
Joseph D. Douglass Jr. and Neil C.
Livingstone, in America the Vulnerable,
called him the “highest-ranking official in the actual decision-making process
to have defected from the East.”[649]
As with all high-level defectors, the quality of Šejna’s
information varied. Assuming a defector
is straightforward (an assumption to be made with the greatest of care), the
quality of the defector’s information is highest regarding specific facts about
which he or she has personal knowledge, and lowest regarding matters of
speculation – although informed speculation can be useful if it is incorporated
into a larger picture. In addition, a
defector’s information tends to be “frozen” at the time of defection, so that
it loses value over time.
Given those caveats, here is the
picture painted by Šejna:
In 1963, the Soviets came to the conclusion that CBW was the best way to
seize
In 1965, the Soviets launched a 20-year plan for CBW superiority – from 1965 to 1971, training workers,
equipping factories, and otherwise preparing for CBW production; from 1971 to
1976, production and stockpiling; and, by 1985, the development of qualitative
new chemical and biological weapons.[651]
Šejna claimed that the Soviets had
concluded it was possible to get the West to disarm unilaterally. Their plan for bringing this about involved
hiding CBW research and production so that the Soviet Union could be seen as
complying with the Geneva Protocol, while stigmatizing CBW research in general
and U.S. CBW research in particular
in order to persuade the U.S. to shut down its program in return for the
Soviets’ doing the same (or, at least, pretending
to do so).[652]
He also provided extensive
information on Czechoslovak involved in Warsaw Pact research on biological
weapons, and identified Ivan Málek – a world-class microbiologist and anti-CBW
activist in Pugwash, SIPRI, and the World Federation of Scientific Workers – as
the director of the main military biological warfare institute in
Despite Šejna’s claims,
In NIE
On the other hand, the CIA noted, “We believe that political
considerations would weigh heavily against Soviet initiation of BW. . . . We
believe it highly unlikely that the Soviets would employ BW in an initial
strategic attack, although it might subsequently be used in the course of a
general war. BW is especially suitable
for clandestine delivery. The Soviets probably
believe that BW weapons are of doubtful effectiveness in many tactical
situations because of delayed and unpredictable effects, There is, however, some evidence which
indicates that front commanders
[emphasis in original] would be authorized to employ BW in circumstances in
which Warsaw Pact forces were being compelled to withdraw, and that the means
to do so could be provided to them.”
Regarding the availability of biological warfare agents, the
CIA reported, “We believe that, through their own research and open
The identification of
At the time of NIE
The intelligence community’s view of the Soviet BW program at
the time of the 1969 CBW review is reflected in contemporaneous newspaper
reports and analyses.
On
which – in the specifics – amount
mostly to assertions from sources with an ax to grind, such as Army Chemical
people or anti-Soviet émigrés. Against
the Pentagon’s standard contention that it cannot disclose its information lest
its sources be compromised, must be set the question whether there is any
substantial secret information to disclose.[657]
On the one hand, Rosenfeld wrote:
In international forums . . . some
Russian (and Czech and Polish) scientists have shown an expertise and “feel”
consistent with CW work – both in its technology and in the mechanisms and
methodology of its deployment, one qualified source reports. . . . [But] American
scientists in a position to know have found their Soviet counterparts as
passionately opposed to CBW as themselves.
How, absent telepathy, they would possibly know what their
“counterparts” thought was a question Rosenfeld did not address.
Rosenfeld continued:
Within the last year the American
government mounted a crash search for Soviet admissions of CBW capability. Aside from guarded generalizations which can
be read in several ways, only one such admission could be found. Thirty-one years ago the late Marshal Voroshilov
said that if Hitler used such weapons,
Only, on gathers, in the most private
limited way have those Soviets licensed the discuss CBW with foreigners given
any hint of Soviet work in the field.
Because Soviets in a position to know about their
government’s CBW work do not talk about it, Rosenfeld wrote:
Some American specialists wonder if
That comment seems to be of a piece with arguments often
heard during the Cold War that U.S.-U.S.S.R. tension was caused by the two
nations’ failure to understand each other, rather than by their success in
doing so.
Rosenfeld went on the praise the Soviets for their position
on the issue.
For decades the Soviet government has
urged that CBW be outlawed. Its vehicle
for this effort has been the Geneva Protocol of 1925, a pledge against use of
CBW in war. . . . They [the Soviets] have consistently opposed efforts to push
the Geneva Protocol out of diplomatic center stage but nonetheless they have
indicated some favor for a new British initiative to move beyond the Protocol
and to ban the production and possession, as well as the use, of BW agents.
That the Soviets, like gang members supporting gun control
laws or bootleggers voting for Prohibition, might have wanted to ban BWs so as
to establish a monopoly on them, is not something that apparently occurred to
Rosenfeld.
Toward verification of any
prospective ban on the development, production and stockpiling of CB agents,
the Russians maintain their traditional stance that the first requirement is to
agree internationally on a ban. Typically,
the Soviet member of an international panel which recently submitted a strong
anti-CBW report to the United Nations, refused to let the panel write a section
of verification.
Note that Rosenfeld excused opposition to verification as
part of the Soviets’ “traditional” behavior.
During the Cold War, whenever the Soviets behaved in a way that
suggested villainy, their apologists explained away the behavior as the result
of cultural norms. For example, the
explanation was often offered that they were overly sensitive to international
threats because of the number of times their country had been invaded – even
though they and their Russian forebears had almost always been the aggressor in
international conflicts. When the
Soviets stood in the way of verification, they were just being paranoid about
foreigner sticking their noses into their business. Or, as Rosenfeld seemed to suggest, they
opposed verification measures because they wanted to get a treaty first, then
work out the minor details of verification.
It appears that it simply did not occur to Rosenfeld and people like him
that the Soviets opposed verification because they were planning to cheat.[658]
Rosenfeld asked:
What does this all add up to? The Russians are prepared to conduct CW,
probably BW too, but they never have done it and presumably they are extremely
reluctant to begin, even in retaliation.
They want to lock the legal, political and moral doors opening on CBW as
tightly as possible. They are not
hobbled in their approaches to arms control, as the
When the Rosenfeld article was published in the Los Angeles Times, the headline on the
story was “Russians Want Tight Lock on Doors to Gas Warfare.”[659]
In response to the article, Representative McCarthy, in his
book The Ultimate Folly, quoted
Rosenfeld – “a well-informed correspondent” – at length and added: “My only
quarrel with Rosenfeld’s estimate is that he may have overestimated Soviet BW. I
have been amazed to discover that the
Seymour Hersh also reported on what
In a
Hersh wrote that fear of Soviet BWs
and a belief in the need for a deterrent is central to the case made for
continuing the
William E. Black,
an Army Intelligence officer (and former Chemical Corps officer), said flatly
that “today
This justification
for research into biological warfare has been offered by the military for more
than 20 years; but many Government critics argue that the picture is not at all
that clear. In fact, the intelligence
agencies of the Government are bitterly divided over the precise state of the
biological warfare art in
“We’ve been asking
the Army for years” to find the Russian biological test facility, one
Government official said, “and it can’t.”
Even in their classified briefings to Congress, Army intelligence
officials are careful not to list a biological test facility inside
Much intelligence
information comes from a special C.B.W. panel set up inside the Central
Intelligence Agency, but nonagency sources point out that the C.I.A. panel is
staffed largely by retired Chemical Corps officers, a fact that, the sources
feel, precludes objectivity. It’s argued
that many of the officers have previous intelligence estimates, made while they
were in the service, to uphold.[661]
Forrest Russel Frank, in his dissertation, reported that,
“During NSSM-59, initial estimates of foreign capabilities drafted in the
Central Intelligence Agency and the Defense Intelligence Agency were complete
with quantitative estimates of Soviet biological agent stockpiles. A strongly worded dissenting footnote to the
Interdepartmental Group paper authored by the State Department’s Bureau of
Intelligence and Research prompted an NSC staff member to ask for greater
documentation to support the estimates put forward by the CIA and DIA. At the conclusion of the NSSM study,
In Frank’s 1974 dissertation, one comment, above all, stands
out: “In subsequent discussions with U.S. officials [during the period from
October 1973 to February 1974], the author was told that . . . no facility
comparable to Pine Bluff Arsenal [the U.S. BW production site] had been
detected in the Soviet Union via national technical means of verification. The inference repeatedly drawn is that the
Soviets have hidden their biological weapons capability. Only one individual accepted the hypothesis
that the Soviets, too[,] had unilaterally eliminated their biological weapons
capability because it made little sense for a nuclear power.”[663]
If Frank’s assessment was correct, most officials saw through the Soviets’ efforts to hide their offensive
BW program – but then pursued policies that had the effect of giving the
Soviets a monopoly (among superpowers) in biological weapons.
That is consistent with a report that
at least some significant information on Soviet BWs was actively ignored. In a 1998 op-ed in The Wall Street Journal, Joseph D. Douglass Jr. wrote that the CIA
prepared a study in 1969 on Soviet CBW activities, but – according to Herb
Meyer, former deputy director of the National Intelligence Council – the study
was “removed” at the direction of Henry Kissinger. Meyer said he believed the study was removed
because it might have jeopardized efforts at arms control. (In 1981, Meyer was given a copy of the report
by one of its authors, who took it to CIA Director William Casey, who went to see
President Reagan about it.[664])
Douglass also reported that, in 1976,
ACDA officials questioned a top NSC official about Soviet BWC violations, and
“The NSC official discounted the alleged violations and advised they be
ignored, on the grounds that chemical and biological weapons had no strategic
value that would warrant such violations.”[665]
Finally, there is one additional intelligence-related aspect
to the CBW review: the story of two double- or triple-agents with memorable
codenames.
FEDORA AND TOPHAT
This dissertation raises the possibility that President
Nixon’s decision to renounce biological weapons was done without adequate
consideration of all the facts. There is
also the possibility that his decision was the result of Soviet deception and
manipulation. In particular, there is
the case of Fedora and TopHat.
In 1978, The New York
Times reported: “The
“The aim of the agents’ messages was to persuade Mr. Nixon
that if the
“In effect, it was an invitation to mutual restraint in the
field of chemical weapons, an intelligence officer remarked.”
In response to the Times
story, Nixon, speaking through aides, claimed no recollection of having been
briefed by Hoover on the matter and said his decisions regarding CBW were good
on their own merits, regardless of Soviet behavior. Aides to the former president said his
decisions on CBW reflected a principled stand against WMDs.
Nixon’s former aides, including Kissinger, said they did not
recall that any information from Soviet agents played a role in the decisions
on CBW. They said Nixon’s CBW policies
were designed as an invitation to the Soviets to restrain development of their
chemical arsenals.
Both former and then-current aides said the CBW policies were
intended to open the way to limits on nuclear weapons.[666]
After the October 1973 Arab-Israeli war, during which
In the Times story,
David Binder wrote:
“A Soviet agent in New York who purportedly was cooperating
with the F.B.I. told bureau officers dealing with him in 1969 that he had
received an assignments [sic] two years earlier from superiors in Moscow to
make an extensive study on United States chemical warfare programs and
capabilities.
One intelligence officer said the assignment had been given
on the orders of the State Committee on Defense headed by Leonid I. Brezhnev,
head of the ruling Communist Party and now also President.
“The task was relatively easy, a Defense Department
specialist said, because, ‘at that time there were 259 open contracts in the
field’ covering chemical weapons production between private industry and the
Defense Department.
“Early in 1969, the Soviet agent advised the F.B.I. that his
report on American chemical weaponry development had ‘shocked’ the Soviet
leadership and had led the State Committee on Defense to recommend a ‘crash
program’ to meet the American threat, especially in the area of nerve gas.
“The double agent’s report on the ‘crash program’
consideration was ‘confirmed’ by a second Soviet agent who seemingly was
cooperating with the F.B.I. in
“Mr. Hoover went directly to President Nixon to tell him
about the information passed by these two Soviet agents.”[667]
Another account of these machinations
came in 1980 from intelligence writer Edward J. Epstein: “The FBI received
information from two Soviet agents at the United Nations in 1969, code-named
Fedora and Top Hat, who it assumed were anti-Soviet and FBI double-agents,
which greatly affected the Nixon Administration’s perception of the
“After J. Edgar Hoover personally
brought this message to his attention, President Nixon decided to avert a
Soviet-American arms race in these lethal weapons by dramatically announcing
that the
This is the background for the New York Times story and Epstein’s comments above:
On
Golitsyn’s claims were startling. He said that the KGB had penetrated every
intelligence service in NATO, and that the KGB was plotting the assassination
of a Western political figure. He also
said that false defectors would follow him, to contradict and discredit
him.
His information led to the exposure, in
Most importantly, Golitsyn revealed what he said was the
Soviet plan for winning the Cold War.
Mark Riebling described the scheme in Wedge: The Secret War Between the FBI and the CIA: “Greatly
simplified, this plan called for massive political warfare, buttressed by
secret intelligence deceptions. At the 20th Communist World Congress, in 1959,
the
Golitsyn was not perfect.
For example, he saw the Sino-Soviet split as a deception – an error that
has been used endlessly to discredit him.
But most of what he said is consistent with what we now know about
Soviet strategy, consistent with what we now know about the course of the Cold
War (including, to cite one major example, the Soviet arms control deception
involving biological weapons), and, indeed, consistent with the behavior of any
state seeking to win a war.
No one who knows anything about Soviet strategy is surprised
to learn, say, of the deception in 1921-28 known as The Trust, in which the
Soviets created a fake “anti-Soviet” network that they used to entrap their
opponents and to persuade the West that the Soviet Union, with its New Economic
Plan, was moving aware from doctrinaire communism.[670] No student of history is surprised to learn,
say, that Operation Fortitude, the operation to deceive the Germans regarding
the site of the D-Day invasion, included phony wedding announcements in
Scottish newspapers, to lead the Germans to believe in the fictitious “Fourth
Army.”[671] Yet for some reason, some people resist the
idea that the Soviets engaged in what amounted to a massive public relations
campaign – doing exactly what political campaigns and p.r. agencies do, or
would if they commanded armies, assassins, leagues of journalists, and master
forgers.
Indeed, Golitsyn’s concept of fake defectors was merely a
repeat of what happened with The Trust, which provided the West with fake
anti-communists. Golitsyn even allowed
for the possibility that false information would be provided to real defectors,
as World War II pilots were fed false information that they would give up when
captured.
The idea that the Soviets in 1959 began a highly organized
effort to disinform the West is also consistent with the drop in the quality of
Golitsyn had predicted that he would be followed by false
defectors. He was, in fact, followed by
other defectors whose legitimacy is still the subject of debate.
In 1962, the FBI in
Kulak would be codenamed Fedora, and Polyakov would be known
as TopHat.
FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover was proud that his bureau had
come up with Fedora and TopHat and was reluctant to share any information on
them with the CIA, with whom the FBI was engaged in a bitter rivalry. However, it became necessary to involve the
CIA in the Fedora and TopHat case, because the supposed double agents needed
material they could feed back to the Soviets.
The CIA was skeptical about the two agents, in part because their
information contradicted information from Golitsyn (who had warned that false
defectors would follow in his path to discredit him).
There were many problems with Fedora and TopHat – from the
fact that Fedora simply walked into the FBI office, which was presumably under
Soviet surveillance, to the fact that most of the information they provided was
of little value or already known.
Later that year, Yuri Nosenko, a KGB security officer with
the Soviet Disarmament Commission, went through a
Nosenko, Fedora, and TopHat seemed to back each other up, to
the exclusion of Golitsyn – but then, he had warned about false defectors
following on his heels.
(Oswald, by the way, had another possible connection to the
biological Cold War: He served as a radar operator on a U-2 base in
Fedora also played a hand in the Watergate scandal. In June 1971, Fedora reported that a complete
set of the so-called Pentagon Papers had been delivered to the Soviet Embassy
in
Ultimately, Fedora returned to the
Today, the list of books dealing with the
Golitsyn-Nosenko-Polyakov-Kulak case – including Henry Hurt’s Shadrin: The Spy Who Never Came Back,
Tom Mangold’s Cold Warrior - James Jesus Angleton: The CIA's Master Spy
Hunter, Chapman
Pincher’s Too Secret Too Long, Edward
J. Epstein’s Legend: The Secret World of
Lee Harvey Oswald and Deception: The
Invisible War Between the KGB & the CIA – is long and growing. In 2007 came the publication of Spy Wars by Tennent H. (Pete) Bagley,
who was the initial debriefer of Nosenko and who takes the anti-Nosenko
position. In contrast, deception expert
Richards Heuer, in a now-declassified article in the CIA’s Studies in Intelligence, took the pro-Nosenko position.[677] Even as this dissertation was being
completed, the CIA released its “Family Jewels” files on misdeeds and
questionable conduct in its past, including material on this case.
I believe that Golitsyn was a genuine defector and mostly
correct in his analysis, and I believe that Fedora was a phony.[678] Beyond those points, the controversy is
simply too complex to unravel here, and I will leave it to some other
dissertation-writer to figure things out.
CHAPTER
ELEVEN
The NSC review and the scientific stacking of the deck
In his farewell address, President
Eisenhower warned about “the acquisition of unwarranted influence” by “the
military-industrial complex.”
Little-noted is Eisenhower’s other warning from that speech: that, “in
holding scientific research and discovery in respect, as we should, we must
also be alert to the equal and opposite danger that public policy could itself
become the captive of a scientific-technological elite.”[679]
The dangers of a
scientific-technological elite were apparent in the advice presidents got from the
President’s Science Advisory Committee – advice that was not always reliable,
and that sometimes was heavily biased and characterized by groupthink.
For example, in 1957, PSAC’s Security
Resources Panel projected that the Soviet Union’s economic growth would be
“half again as fast” as that of the U.S., which, if the disparity continued,
would have allowed the U.S.S.R. to surpass the U.S in 1998 based on nominal
growth rates or 2021 based on real growth rates.[680]
Based largely on the work of the PSAC
panel, CIA Director Allen Dulles in 1958 saw the Soviet economy, in the words
of The New York Times, “making
spectacular progress [while] the
A decade later, President Johnson was sandbagged by scientific
advisors on the anti-ballistic missile issue.
As Schlafly and Ward noted, Defense Secretary Robert McNamara
“controlled LBJ’s position on the ABM by setting up a committee to study the
issue on which six of the seven members were advocates of
In the case of the 1969 review of CBW policy, the ability or
inability of the president’s top science advisors to provide unbiased
information may have determined the review’s outcome.
Remember that the NSC review of the CBW issue consisted of
four major parts: three reports from the diplomatic, military, and intelligence
communities, plus a report analyzing the scientific and technical aspects of
the issue. As we shall see, the scientific
report was, by far, the most important.
According to Jonathan Tucker, the scientific report was
requested by Kissinger at the suggestion of Meselson, a fellow Harvard
professor.[684] However,
the August 22 cover sheet to the science group’s report does not mention
Meselson. On that cover sheet, Science
Advisor Lee DuBridge wrote that, “Because of the NSSM 59 study and because of
the public discussion of the area, I asked an expert panel of my office to look
into the CW/BW question, viewing it from the technical point of view.”[685]
The science group was overseen by Vincent McRae of the Office
of Science and Technology and chaired by Ivan L. Bennett, dean of the New York
University School of Medicine, who was completing his service on the United
Nations’ Committee of Experts (Group of Consultant Experts) examining CBW
issues.[686]
During the course of his UN work, Bennett concluded that the
Members of the science group[689]
were –
- Ivan
L. Bennett (a Pugwash conferee), appointed by LBJ to PSAC, appointed
deputy director of OST by LBJ;
- John
D. Baldeschwieler, chemistry professor at CalTech;
- Rolf
Eliassen, environmental engineer at Stanford;
- Richard
L. Garwin (a Pugwash conferee), arms control activist and IBM physicist;
- Colin
M. MacLeod, geneticist, chairman of Life Sciences Panel of JFK’s PSAC,
JFK’s deputy director of OST;
- Frank
T. McClure, chemist and rocket expert who also worked in physics and
microbiology and molecular biology;
- Leo
D. Newsom, entymologist at Louisiana State University; and
- Frank
H. Westheimer, chemist and member of LBJ’s PSAC.
with Guhin as an observer and Vincent V. McRae as staff
assistant.
Those listed in the group’s report as having met with the
panel met were –
- Meselson
(a Pugwash conferee),
- Harvard
botanist Arthur Galston, and
representatives of the Federation of
American Scientists:
- [John
O.] Rasmussen,
- [John
T.] Edsall (a Pugwash conferee), and
- [Victor
W.] Sidel.
George Kistiakowsky, Pugwash conferee and former science
advisor to President Eisenhower, who chaired the NAS study on the disposal of
CW agents and munitions, was also consulted, as were W.B. Ennis Jr., and
Charles E. Kellogg of the Agriculture Department.
The panel also met with personnel from the Defense Department
and ACDA.[690] Although the names of the Defense and ACDA
representatives were not listed in the report, Albert Hayward of the Defense
Department is known to have made a presentation to the panel. (In fact, Hayward’s presentation and
Meselson’s were later described by participants as the most memorable.[691]) And ACDA’s top CBW expert was Bowman Cutter,
who had had discussions with Hayward and Bennett in June at which they agreed
that BWs were not useful militarily and at which they discussed bringing about
a renunciation. (See above.)
The panel also reviewed with the CIA the intelligence data on
which the assessment of the Soviet threat was based.[692] (See Chapter Ten.)
The panel was dissatisfied with the information it received
from the CIA, in part because of its insistence on making a distinction between
possible, probable, and confirmed information.
(See the discussion above of the problem that Matthew Meselson and
others had with the possible/probable/confirmed distinction in the field of
intelligence analysis.) According to
Paul G. Conway, in his dissertation, the panel was, in Ivan Bennett’s words,
“disturbed by the dustiness in the [CIA] briefing” and had to arrange for an
additional session with Office of Science and Technology and NSC personnel to
distinguish what was guessed about Soviet capabilities from what was
confirmed. Conway wrote: “From the
interviews [with participants] it seems probable that two main considerations
emerged during this phase of the review: (1) the lack of confirmed Soviet BW
capability and (2) the substantial Soviet CW capability particularly modern
nerve gas stockpiles.”[693]
Although he is not acknowledged in the science group’s
report, Harvard chemistry professor Paul Doty (a Pugwash conferee) was reported
by Jonathan Tucker to have worked with the committee.[694] (Doty was a key advisor to Kissinger on
scientific and other matters. During the
month of November 1969, for example, Doty spoke with Kissinger on the telephone
at least seven times, and twice in December.)[695]
A number of participants in the work of the science group –
members of the committee, and those whom the committee consulted -- were
political activists as well as scientists.
For example:
- As
noted, Bennett, Garwin, Meselson, Edsall, Kistiakowsky, and Doty, along
with Kissinger, were Pugwash conferees, according to Pugwash secretary
general Joseph Rotblat, in his 1972 book Scientists in the Quest for Peace: A History of the Pugwash
Conference.[696]
- Meselson
and John T. Edsall had led a campaign among scientist-activists for a ban,
among the U.S. and its allies, on what the signers considered “barbarous”
tactics involving chemicals such as those being used in Vietnam. They, along with Doty and Irwin C.
Gunsalus, delivered a letter to that effect, said to be signed by 5,000
scientists, to the White House in 1967.[697] Sidel was one of the 29 original
signers of the letter. [698]
- Doty
worked with Meselson to organize a major AAAS conference on the CBW issue
in June 1969.[699]
- Kistiakowsky,
who served as science advisor to President Eisenhower, was a “peace”
activist; he, along with Meselson and Edsall, were members of Scientists
and Engineers for [Eugene] McCarthy, a “peace” candidate in 1968, while
Rasmussen supported another “peace” candidate, Robert Kennedy.[700] Meselson signed a 1966 advertisement
declaring that the Vietnam War represented a civil war within South Vietnam and ridiculing
the idea (now well-established) that the war, by the time of significant
U.S. involvement, was the product of an invasion by North Vietnam of South
Vietnam.[701]
- In
the science group’s work, Victor W. Sidel, along with Edsall and John O.
Rasmussen, represented the Federation of American Scientists, which, the
previous year, had called for an end to the U.S. CBW program, based in
part on the group’s belief that nerve gas testing killed the Dugway sheep.[702] FAS was primarily an “arms control”
organization that supported the concept of Mutual Assured Destruction as a
way of maintaining peace; it had conducted a “war against the Sentinel
anti-ballistic missile system,” in the words of an article reprinted in
the FAS newsletter.[703]
In addition, the FAS had called in
1967 for an end to all classified research by universities[704];
Rasmussen said in 1968 that it was “time to end the erosion of university
standards” and “It is most desirable and feasible to separate classified
research completely from our university campuses.”[705]
Rasmussen had been one of the
singers of a 1965 letter opposing U.S. victory in the Vietnam War based on
the U.S.’s “inexcusable brutality.”[706]
- Sidel
co-founded Physicians for Social Responsibility, which opposed U.S. policy
on nuclear weapons, and he would later serve as president of International
Physicians for the Prevention of Nuclear War. Sidel, along with Federation of American
Scientists officials George Wald, Carl Sagan, and Phillip Morrison (a
former Communist Party member[707]),
signed a 1984 newspaper ad declaring Ronald Reagan to be the “performing
star” of “Far-Rightists” who exude “a scent of fascism in the air.”[708]
- Sidel,
Galston, and Meselson presented papers in February 1968 at the Conference
on Chemical and Biological Warfare, the first major event sponsored by the
Marxist-oriented J.D. Bernal Peace Library in London.[709]
- Meselson
was so well-identified as an opponent of the Nixon administration that,
despite his friendly acquaintance with Kissinger, he would be included
later in the file that Nixon White House counsel John Dean called the
“Opponents List and Political Enemies Project” – known to history as
“Nixon’s Enemies List.”[710]
- Garwin,
who was originally appointed to the PSAC by President Kennedy, later
served as senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations. He is a board member of the Federation
of American Scientists, and his FAS biography notes that he was a member
of the Pugwash Council.[711]
In noting the political activities of some of the science
group participants, I do not mean to suggest that they should not have
participated. This information is noted
in order to show the strong likelihood of bias.
It appears that the science groups’ members and consultants included
forceful, experienced opponents of a U.S. CBW program, but no forceful advocate
for the other side.[712]
This bias was common in discussions of CBW during from the
late 1960s through the end of the Cold War.
For example, a Nature magazine
review of CBW: Chemical and Biological
Warfare, the book produced by the Bernal Library conference, noted that the
conference’s lack of balance – the “absence from this conference of any
representatives from the Microbiological Research Establishment or the Chemical
Defense Experimental Establishment” – “certainly impoverished both the value of
the contributions as a whole and, one suspects, adversely affected the quality
of the discussion. The absence of any
qualified military specialist . . . results in the symposium having to depend
for its information about the military utility of chemical and biological
weapons on guesswork, some of which is shrewd and some not.”[713] For an academic/journalistic conference on
CBW, a lack of balance lessened the value of the proceedings. For the science group considering
ENSURING BALANCE BY
EXCLUDING OPPOSING VIEWS?
One possible explanation for this bias is that participants
in the review process believed the pro-CBW or pro-BW point of view was already
overrepresented in the discussion. They
saw the process as providing, at last, a sort of “equal time” for anti-CBW
viewpoints. Paul G. Conway, in his
dissertation, wondered,
Why did the Chiefs decide to fight
for BW in light of unmistakably strong evidence [!] that the program was
counterproductive? The question is even
more perplexing in light of the relative unimportance of germ warfare in the
over-all CBW effort. At best, it
accounted for a relatively small part of the total program and never generated
a wide or vocal constituency on its own behalf.
Though the financial cost was negligible, the criticism BW programs
engendered was another cost that had to be calculated. Halperin suggested that the normal
fact-gathering process in Pentagon evaluations of weapon systems was operative
in this case: Pentagon administrators and policy analysts gathered the bulk of
their information from a small core of experts in the area, virtually all of
whom were committed proponents of BW programs.
“The generals went to specialized technicians in the Chemical Corps and
got very predictable feedback on the BW programs.” In effect, “The Chiefs usually defer to the
agency, corps, or staff experts on technical matters that they are not very
interested in.”[715]
It is said that people do not recognize their own biases
because one person’s bias is another person’s seeming reality. By excluding pro-BW views from the review
process, those opposed to biological weapons could ensure an objective review
of the issue – or so they thought.
The anti-CBW bias on the part of some participants in the
process might not have been a problem if it had been offset by the involvement
of strong advocates for an opposing view, but that does not appear to have been
the case. Lest the reader assume that
the anti-CBW bias was offset by a Republican tilt to the panel, I should note
that Bennett was appointed to the PSAC by President Johnson and, in 1967, was
named by Johnson to the position of deputy director of the Office of Science
and Technology; that MacLeod was chairman of the PSAC Life Sciences panel under
President Kennedy, and was appointed by JFK to be deputy director of OST; and
that Westheimer was a member of President Johnson’s PSAC. Also, Lee DuBridge, Nixon’s science advisor,
who was credited with selecting the science group from among the PSAC membership,
was originally named science advisor by President Truman, was held over for a
time by President Eisenhower, and was reappointed by Nixon. It may have been Nixon’s PSAC, but it is
difficult in retrospect to find much of a Nixon imprint on it.
Compounding the problem, it appears, was the lack of BW
expertise on the part of participants other than the anti-CBW activists.
The biographical information that I have been able to obtain
does not suggest that any of the named participants in the science group’s
deliberations, including both panel members and consultants, had any experience
in developing or producing chemical or biological weapons. Due to his interdisciplinary background,
McClure was obviously qualified for a discussion of BW-related issues, but he
was the only named participant of whom that could be said – except, of course,
for Meselson and the others whose expertise in CBW came entirely from their
background as anti-CBW political activists.
As noted above, the Defense and ACDA representatives who met
with the panel were not named in the report, but Albert Hayward, who is known
to have briefed the panel, was strongly anti-BW, as was ACDA’s top expert,
Bowman Cutter. It is unlikely that the
CIA briefing presented a pro-BW point of view, since the CIA took an anti-CBW
position in the NSC review. It is
unlikely that Ennis and Kellogg, the participants from the Agriculture
Department, acted as BW advocates; the information they provided was probably
on technical aspects related to livestock, crops, or, perhaps, animal vectors
and epidemiology.
Thus, it is fair to say that the science group and its
deliberations were heavily stacked against a continuation of the CBW
program. Of course, if the science group
were seeking merely to answer scientific – i.e., technical – questions about
CBW, it may have been possible for the panel’s members and consultants to put
aside their personal beliefs regarding CBW and for them to deliver a set of
objective judgments. But the ultimate report of the science group was
a political and policy document, not a scientific one. Taken together with the fact that the science
group’s analysis was, in effect, plagiarized by the analysts representing the
military, the failure of the science group to consider adequately all points of
view was potentially catastrophic.
Once completed, the science report would go directly to the
NSC Review Group, along with the summary report of the three Intergovernmental
Groups.[716]
In August, the science group’s report was delivered by
Bennett, McRae, and White House Science Advisor Lee DuBridge to Deputy
Secretary of Defense David Packard, a member of the NSC Review Group. The group asserted that biological weapons,
compared to chemical weapons, were far less reliable, had effects far less predictable,
and had shorter shelf lives; and that they presented longterm hazards because
of the chance that pathogens could infect wild animals and become persistent
foci of disease, and because of the danger of mutation into a more dangerous
form.[717]
Based on interviews conducted in 1973, Frank, in his
dissertation, reported the science group’s recommendations:
The
The
The
Additional studies should be
undertaken to evaluate the combat utility and long term environmental
consequences of herbicides and riot control agents.
Research on synthesis of toxin agents
should continue.[718]
The problem with the recommendations is self-evident. The science panel was assigned the task of
making scientific findings on BWs,
and instead chose to inject itself in the policy debate. The science panel’s opinions on politics and
policy are interesting, in the sense that the collective opinion of a panel of
plumbers, truck drivers, or chicken farmers would be interesting. But they have nothing to do with science, and
undermine the credibility of the group’s scientific analysis by (a) suggesting
that the group had a political agenda that might have influenced its scientific
findings and (b) suggesting, based on the fact that no member complained or
presented a minority report, that people of divergent views were excluded from
the panel or were intimidated into joining a false unanimity.
Nevertheless, Jonathan Tucker
reported, based on a 2001 interview with Michael Guhin, that the science
group’s report, by providing technical grounds for questioning the military
utility of BWs, strengthened the anti-BW position of the State Department and
ACDA.[719]
NOTE ON PAUL DOTY
Matthew Meselson is generally credited as the most important
scientist influencing Kissinger on the CBW issue. However, it is anti-CBW activist Paul Doty
who appears to have had the most contact with Kissinger during the period
leading up to the Nixon renunciation.
When I examined the Nixon collection at the National Archives, I found
notes – and, in some cases, what appear to be transcripts – of nine telephone
conservations between Kissinger and Doty during November and December 1969,
compared to one conversation between Kissinger and Meselson.
The Doty conversations for which I found records were at 9:10
a.m. on November 10, 4:10 p.m. on November 15, 9:35 a.m. and 9:55 a.m. on
November 17, 2:55 p.m. on November 24, 4:55 p.m. on November 25, 11:45 a.m. on
November 26, 10:18 a.m. on December 3, and 1:50 p.m. on December 23. The Meselson conversation was at
When Kissinger was planning a meeting with academics on
November 19 to discuss arms control issues, including CBW, he asked Doty to
come 20 minutes early, but wanted to keep Nixon’s science adviser, Lee
DuBridge, out of it. According to
Kissinger’s notes from a November 17 telephone conversation with Doty, “The
more K can keep DuBridge out of it, the better; he doesn’t add anything for the
President.”[720]
As the frequency of telephone calls indicates, Kissinger’s
relationship with Doty appears to have been a reasonably close one. Until resigning to become National Security
Adviser, Kissinger was a member of the Committee on International Studies of
Arms Control, which Doty chaired.[721] They had served together on an ACDA committee
on the level of forces that reportedly helped draw up the 1965 defense budget
and helped put a limit on Minuteman forces.[722] And, of course, they were both Pugwash
participants.
Interestingly, as noted in Chapter Four, it was reportedly
Doty who, in 1963, brought Meselson to
Because of the influence Doty apparently exerted over
Kissinger, Doty’s political views are relevant to any study of the biological
weapons renunciation.
In 1971, Doty made clear his vision for the scientific
community in the political process. In
an article in the September 10 issue of Science,
an adaptation of an April 26 speech to the National Academy of Sciences, Doty
noted a complex relationship between “science and peace.” Science, he wrote, “is understanding,
primarily of the physical and biological worlds, but also, to the extent that it
is possible, of the more complex domain of human behavior.” He defined peace as “more than the absence of
war: it is the restraint of aggression, the sense of security among nations,
and the functioning of domestic order and economy at a level sufficient for
meeting the deeply felt needs of the citizenry.”
Thus, Doty saw science as including “understanding . . . of
human behavior,” while his concept of peace included political economy. Once the definitions of science and peace are
stretched to such a degree, of course, the idea that they are interrelated is
tautological.
Doty noted the increase in world population during the 20th
Century and commented: “The strains that this explosive growth produces are
more likely to promote war than peace.”
During a period in which world resources were experiencing explosive
growth, Doty expressed concern that people would fight over “dwindling
resources.” Mankind, he wrote, “has
bought time and a little self-confidence with which to measure the dimensions
of two towering, global problems – the prevention of nuclear war (and, with it,
large-scale conventional war) and the control of population growth to the
extent that its attendant problems of hunger, malnutrition, unemployment, and
disease can be systematically reduced.”[723]
Although it is troubling that Kissinger might have been
influence by Doty’s pseudoscientific views on the future of mankind, it is more
troubling that he may have been influenced by Doty’s view of the U.S.-Soviet
relationship. Doty, in the Science article based on his NAS speech,
declared that “we can be rather certain that the relatively peaceful condition
of the world in the last two decades is, in large measure, due to the mutual
deterrence of American and Soviet nuclear weapons. Without this nuclear deterrence, the
continuation of world wars would seemingly have been inevitable.”
Was Doty really suggesting that Soviet nuclear weapons were helpful, even essential, in preserving
world peace? Apparently so.
He went on to note that “the two nations that have pioneered
in the development of strategic nuclear weapons also lead the world in
production of goods and energy.” In
reality, at that time, the
NOTE ON KISSINGER AND SCIENTISTS
It can be argued that the performance of the PSAC panel on
CBW reflected the personality of the person ultimately in charge of the review
process, Henry Kissinger. Kissinger
tended to rely on a small group of trusted friends for technical expertise, and
sometimes was known to act as if he had a greater understanding of technology
than he actually possessed.
Kissinger’s well-deserved reputation was of a man who seemed
to want to do it all himself. John
Newhouse wrote of Kissinger: “Congress is unused to a figure who seems to be playing
every instrument in the band; for such a figure to be beyond the reach of
congressional committees, as in the case with presidential assistants, is hard
to swallow.”[724] But his take-charge impulse may have led to
overreach with regard to technical issues.
In college, Kissinger toyed with the idea of becoming a
chemist, and asked Professor George Kistiakowsky, the future White House
science advisor, if he should. “If you
have to ask, you shouldn’t,” he was told.
Years later, Kissinger remarked: “I joked to Kistiakowsky that he could
have kept me out of years of trouble by allowing me to become a mediocre
chemist.”[725]
Sometimes, though, it seemed as if Kissinger considered
himself a member of the fraternity of physical scientists. He attended Pugwash conferences at a time
when Pugwash was dominated by physical scientists. In the White House, he depended on a sort of
“kitchen Cabinet” of science advisors, most of them from Pugwash and/or
Harvard, rather than the official science advisor, Lee DuBridge.
For example, when Kissinger was planning a meeting with
academics on
According to notes from a
DuBridge is mentioned only once, in passing, in Kissinger’s
1,521-page memoir of the first four years of the Nixon Administration, White House Years (which, by the way,
does not mention biological weapons).[729]
And by January 1973, Kissinger had had the position of
science advisor abolished, along with the entire PSAC.
Under JFK, Jerome Wiesner had, in the words of political
activist Phyllis Schlafly and retired Admiral Chester Ward, “parlayed his
position as Science Adviser to such an intensity that insiders knew him as one
of the most influential men in the world.
His access to the President had been so nearly unlimited that Kissinger
abolished the position in order to
ensure maintenance of his own monopoly and a Wiesner-successor from working the
same approach.”[730]
While disdaining the advice of DuBridge, Kissinger relied on
his fellow Pugwashites to the degree that he ignored at least one credible
warning about the security risk.
Representative Chet Holifield (D-California), chairman of the Joint
Committee on Atomic Energy, wrote Kissinger on February 23, 1970 about the
upcoming (June 26-30) Pugwash conference on the “impact of New Technologies on
the Arms Race” – technologies including the latest information on ballistic
missiles, ABMs and ABM countermeasures, MIRVs, command and control of military
systems, new submarines, sonar and other censors, computers and data
processing, and control of military Research and Development.
It is my understanding that this
international group has traditionally had representatives of the
I have been informed that some
experts who are being asked to participate in this conference are at the same
time holding top secret clearances which allow them access to highly classified
matters relating to the subjects they will be discussing in the conference.
It would appear to be extremely
difficult for an individual to compartmentalize those matters that he deals
with on a classified basis from matters that he may discuss during this
conference. It would seem to be
appropriate and prudent to at least consider whether it would be in the
National interest to recommend that scientists and technicians possessing top
secret clearances and who are called to work on these matters by the Government
be requested to refrain from participating in such a venture to avoid the
possibility of inadvertent disclosures of classified information.
I strongly support the concept of
East-West negotiations and particularly supporting the forthcoming Strategic
Arms Limitations Talks (SALT). I believe
tat this is the proper international setting in which these matters should be
discussed.
I would appreciate your view on this
matter.”[731]
Kissinger brushed off the congressman’s concerns. On May 5, he wrote:
Dear Congressman Holifield:
Thank you for your letter suggesting
that the Government seek to prevent persons having access to top secret
information from attending Pugwash Conferences.
I will discuss your proposal with the
officials responsible for these matters.
Best regards,
Henry A. Kissinger[732]
On July 20, Holifield wrote back, referring to his previous
letter.
I said that it would seem to be
appropriate and prudent to at least consider whether it would be in the
National interest to recommend that scientists and technicians possessing Top
Secret clearances, and who are called to work on these matters by the
Government, be requested to refrain from participating in such a venture to
avoid the possibility of inadvertent disclosures of classified information.
I asked for your views on this
matter.
Your May 5 letter indicated that you
would discuss this with officials responsible for these matters.
The symposium has been held.
Holifield went on, in the letter, to ask Kissinger whether
anyone with Top Secret clearance attended the meeting and whether such persons
provided reports on matters that were covered.
“If so, please supply us a copy.”
Holifield also asked, “What were the results of your discussion with
officials on this matter as mentioned in your May 5 letter?”
Kissinger responded by sending a memo to the Secretaries of
State and Defense, the chairman of the Atomic Energy Commission, the ACDA
director, and the director of the Office of Science and Technology, including
copies of the correspondence with Holifield and asking the memo recipients to
deal with the matter. “Any information
which you may be able to provide for the Congressman on the subjects dealt with
in his letters would be appreciated.
Please send me copies of whatever information you provide to the Congressman
in answer to his questions.”[733]
In the meantime, on August 18, Kissinger himself met with
members of the American Pugwash Group.[734]
Kissinger’s avoidance of unbiased technical expertise
sometimes got him in trouble. John
Prados reported in his history of the NSC that, during the negotiations related
to the Strategic Arms Limitations Talks (SALT), “Kissinger consulted with his
own selection of experts. . . .Like the SALT delegation, the NSC technical
specialists were left behind. This, as
well as Kissinger and Nixon’s frequent reliance on Soviet interpreters during
their negotiating sessions, contributed to flaws in the agreements.”[735] Kissinger apparently failed to take into
account that fact that a new generation of Soviet missiles – weapons in
development at the time, as the
Prados wrote that Kissinger once boasted of negotiating 90
percent of the SALT agreement, but, “In a moment of introspection, Kissinger is
recorded as lamenting that he did not, at the time, better think through the
limitations of MIRV. The generation of
bigger Soviet missiles represented a protected pool of ICBM throwweight that
could be MIRVed progressively as Russian technology improved. . . .
“In his testimony at the SALT II ratification hearings, Dr.
Kissinger told the senators that the Moscow agreements focused on launchers
because ‘we were dealing initially with single warhead systems,’ as if the NSC
itself had not ordered up a MIRV Panel to look into this whole question. Similarly, Kissinger ‘supposed’ the problem
was ‘one of the legacies of a period in which technology outran us,’ as if the
question of a MIRV ban had not been squarely posed in 1969.”[737]
Of course, technology overrunning you
is a good way to lose a war.
CHAPTER
TWELVE
Technological surprise and the feasibility of biological weapons
According to Ken Alibek, who was the chief scientist for the
Soviet biological weapons program, the Soviets by the beginning of World War II
were able to manufacture weapons based on tularemia, epidemic typhus, and Q
fever, and were working on weapons using smallpox, plague, and anthrax. By the early 1970s, they had weaponized
smallpox, plague, anthrax, Venezuelan equine encephalomyelitis, Glanders, brucellosis,
and
The Soviet view, expressed in the 1983 Soviet Military
Encyclopedia, was that biological weapons can have high combat effectiveness
because of the smallness of the required dose, the possibility of concealed
employment over a large terrain, the difficulty of detection, the available
selectivity (only on humans, only on certain types of animals or plants, etc.),
the strong psychological pressure the weapons create, the difficulty of
protecting troops and civilians from them, and the liquidation of their
effects.[739]
As time passed, technological advances only increased the
importance of biological weapons to the Soviets. Joseph D. Douglass Jr. and Neil Livingstone
wrote (in 1987!), “The improvements of the latest hydrogen bomb over the atomic
bomb are dwarfed in comparison to the increases in effectiveness that are
available through biotechnology. There
is no leveling off in the biotechnology field as there is now in the nuclear
field. Where we stand today is only the
beginning.”[740]
By the late 1980s, the Soviets were loading anthrax and other
biological weapons into SS-18 missiles, which had multiple warheads and a range
of at least 6,000 miles.[741]
“The [Soviets’] wartime mobilization plan was to produce 300
metric tons of anthrax and load it onto weapons in a 220-day mobilization
period in preparation for all-out war,” said Andy Webber, an adviser to the
Defense Department’s Threat Reduction program.
“That would be enough, just at this one plant [in Stepnogorsk,
Khazakhstan], to wipe out billions and billions of people.”[742]
Over the decades that it took the Soviets to build their BW
program, biological weapons “experts” in the
For example, President Johnson’s science advisor, Donald
Hornig, sent Johnson a memo in December 1966 describing the results of a review
of BW policy by the President’s Science Advisory Committee. Hornig wrote that “we have been presented
with no scenarios, nor have we thought of any ourselves, in which the military
value seems significant.” [743] (For more on Hornig’s memo, see Chapter Five.)
And, in 1971, The
Washington Post, endorsing the Biological Weapons Convention despite its
lack of verification, explained the rationale for a no-verification treaty:
Both the
Any country that uses germ warfare
automatically risks danger from the germs which can spread in all
directions. More importantly, there are
many conventional means of retaliating against use of germs, up to and
including nuclear weapons.
A simple treaty banning development,
production and use of bacteriological weapons therefore does not really require any “policing.” [744]
(Emphasis added.)
How did reasonable people come to the
conclusion that biological weapons were of absolutely no significance? The answer is that they believed what they
were told by the people they considered experts.
MESELSON’S ARGUMENTS
Matthew Meselson, the Harvard
professor and anti-CBW activist, was a leader in the effort to discredit BWs as
weapons.
In 1966, The Harvard Crimson summed up Meselson’s arguments: “For the
military, chemical-biological warfare (CB warfare, for short) is too unpredictable. Military strategists cannot measure the exact
range a virus will cover, the way they can for a fusion blast. Resistance to the disease would be unknown,
and would vary with the victims. The
problems of delivering the dose, which would have to be in the form of an
aerosol cloud, are technically difficult, Meselson suggests. ‘Even if it could
be improved in the remote future,’ he says, military control “would suffer
along the way.’”
The Crimson noted: “After listening to Meselson inveigh against biological
warfare, one wonders how anyone anywhere could be in favor of it. Meselson says it is militarily inconvenient,
socially disastrous, and no more humane than any other form of war.”[745]
In 1968, at the Bernal Library conference on CBWs, Meselson declared that it
would be extremely difficult to perfect, in secret, a biological weapon for
military use. According to published
notes from the conference, “Professor Meselson pointed out that if biological
weapons do become militarily significant one would see it developing because
the tests required would have to be under combat conditions. The chance of having an effective biological
weapon developed secretly is very remote.
The only way one can do the kinds of tests that would develop a
predictable weapon would be under wartime conditions, and if that went on one
would surely know it.”[746]
At a hearing on April 30, 1969,
Meselson told members of Congress that “these are ridiculous weapons, that “it
would be absolutely lunatic to launch a biological attack on a nuclear power,”
that “if you are talking about major strategic threats among nuclear powers, I
think biological weapons are useless and foolish ,” that “we would do ourselves
far more harm than good by stimulating interest in these weapons, by breaking
down the barriers against them,” and that a biological weapon is “not the kind
of weapon that a large power should consider for strategic use.”[747] (For an examination of Meselson’s testimony,
see Chapter Nine.)
With no experience developing BWs, Meselson and many of his
colleagues may have simply succumbed to the temptation to assume that, because
they couldn’t imagine something, it couldn’t be done.
R.V. Jones – in whose
name the CIA created an award for “scientific acumen applied with art in
the cause of freedom” – wrote
that, “Plausible as it seems, the scientific experts in one country are not
necessarily as good at assessing evidence as independent intelligence
officers. It may happen for some reason
that they gave not developed a particular weapon either because they have not
thought of it or, more likely, they have thought of it but have done some
careless work which has led them to a wrong conclusion and have therefore
decided that the development is not feasible.”[748]
With regard to a given weapon technology, Jones noted, there
are four possible situations:
- Neither
we nor the enemy make it work.
- Both
sides succeed.
- We
succeed, and they fail or do not try.
- We
fail or do not try, and they succeed.
The last case “is the most interesting Intelligence case, but
it is difficult to overcome the prejudice that as we have not done something,
it is impossible or foolish.
Alternatively, our experts in examining the [adversary] development are
no longer experts but novices, and may, therefore, make wilder guesses than
Intelligence, which at least has the advantage of closer contact with the
enemy.”[749]
Author Richard Preston interviewed Bill Patrick, a scientist
famous for his work in the
One of the side effects of the
closing of the American bioweapons program was that the
Sitting in Bill Patrick's kitchen, I
said to Alibek, “There seems to be a common belief among American scientists that
biological weapons aren't effective as weapons. You see these views quoted
occasionally in newspapers and magazines.”
Alibek looked disturbed, then
annoyed. “You test them to find out. You learn how to make them work,” he said
to me. “I had a meeting yesterday at a defense agency. They knew absolutely
nothing about biological weapons. They want to develop protection against them,
but all their expertise is in nuclear weapons. I can say I don't believe that
nuclear weapons work.”[750]
In another essay in The
New Yorker,
The if-we-can’t-do-it-no-one-can problem was not unique to
biological weapons. During
Likewise, Michael Handel of
Handel asked: “With such information available, why was the
There may also be another reason, a
very ironic reason, that persons who considered themselves experts on
biological weapons came to believe the weapons are infeasible:
In the long run, it seems, BWs were seen as infeasible because
policymakers and others in high places acted as if they were.
Gregory D. Koblentz wrote, “The widespread belief that
biological weapons lack military utility is rooted in the
“NEGOTIATIONS WHERE IT
IS A MATTER OF INDIFFERENCE…”
In his 1974 dissertation, Forrest Russel Frank noted that the
subject of chemical and biological weapons “has been virtually ignored by most
commentators and scholars writing on the subjects of national security,
international relations or arms control and disarmament.”[757]
In Intelligence Policy
and National Security (1981), a book that grew out of a
Not all arms control negotiations attract the same level of
interest regarding the outcome of negotiations.
In 1986, Jonathan Dean, a
- Negotiations
where it is a matter of indifference if there is an outcome or where no
outcome is desired
- Negotiations
where there is moderate but not urgent interest in an outcome, but where
concessions by the other side or changes in the negotiating environment
can intensify interest
- Negotiations
where an outcome is actively desired, even as the cost of real negotiating
concessions
Dean noted that “Negotiations that fall into Category 1 of
interest in an outcome are conducted mainly for the sake of being seen to
negotiate. . . .
“For the United States, and probably for the Soviet Union,
multilateral arms control negotiations like MBFR [Mutual and Balanced Force
Reduction], CDE [Conference on Confidence- and Security-Building Measures and
Disarmament in Europe], and the chemical and biological warfare negotiations at
the United Nations Conference on Disarmament at Geneva fall into Category 1 or
2 simply because they are considered, rightly or wrongly, not to involve issues
of national survival. . . .
“Observation of how U.S.-Soviet arms control negotiations
have been conducted over the past decade suggests that both the
Concern over nukes to the exclusion of BWs is what
Christopher J. Davis, a British intelligence officer and BW expert, called
“nuclear blindness.”
The demise of the biological weapons
capability of the United States in 1969 and the advent of the Biological and
Toxin Weapons Convention in 1972 caused governments in the West to go to sleep
to the possibility of biological weapons development throughout the rest of the
world, as technically knowledgeable workers were transferred and retired,
intelligence desks were closed down, and budgets were cut. By 1979, despite the
Douglass and Livingstone wrote in
1987 of the cycle of obliviousness to BWs, in which lack of information leads
to lack of interest which leads to lack of investigation and, therefore, lack
of information:
“At present the
The result of this obliviousness was that the Soviets
achieved their goal with regard to biological weapons: The U.S. was in position
to suffer a potentially fatal blow due to technological surprise.
A HISTORY OF TECHNOLOGICAL
SURPRISE
David, who is said to have slain Goliath with a slingshot
circa 1013 B.C., is considered the father of technological surprise. Goliath, J. Bowyer Bell and Barton Whaley
wrote, was “the victim of his preconceptions about the nature of battle. . . .
The future king of
From the time of Karl the Great (Charlemagne), who became
Holy Roman Emperor in A.D. 800, for eight centuries to come, certain
assumptions were universal in the area under Christian rule; one of them was,
Bell and Whaley wrote, “a disdain for the practice of guile in combat. The Christian religion imposed a moral
command that turned the minds of the governors and governed to otherworldly
values at the expense of secular considerations. Pragmatic considerations, even raison d’état, could seldom be offered
as a ready excuse for recourse to fraud.”[764]
The Byzantine emperor, Leo the Wise, commented: “The Frank
believes that a retreat under any circumstances must be dishonorable, hence he
was fight whenever you choose to offer him battle. This you must not do until you have secured
all possible advantages for yourself . . . ”[765]
Inventions such as the armor-piercing compound reflex bow (by
1000 B.C.) – used for a shot to the rear known as a Parthian (“parting”) shot –
and the stirrup (A.D. 300) have had great impact on armed conflict.[766]
For a time, “proper” war meant knights on horseback carrying
lances. Other forms of warfare were
beneath the dignity of, for example, the French. At the battle of Crécy in 1345, the French
knights were slaughtered by English longbowmen.
At
George H. Heilmeier, director of the Defense Advanced
Research Projects Agency, wrote about technological surprise: “In 1878,
Friedrich Engels indicated that the weapons used in the Franco-Prussian War had
reached such a state of perfection that further progress which might have
revolutionizing influence was no longer possible. Yet thirty years later, the following
unforeseen systems were used in World War I: aircraft, tanks, chemical warfare,
trucks, submarines, and radio communications.
A 1937 study entitled "Technological Trends and National
Policy" failed to foresee the following systems, all of which were
operational by 1957: helicopters, jet engines, radar, inertial navigators,
nuclear weapons, nuclear submarines, rocket power missiles, electronic
computers, and cruise missiles. The 1945 von Kármán study entitled ‘New
Horizons’ missed ICBM’s, man in space, and solid-state electronics – all of
which were operational within 15 years.[768]
The Navy in 1947 argued that a 1000-mile missile was almost impossible.[769]
ICKY WEAPONS
The 20th Century brought change in the conduct of
war in a number of areas, not just technological ones. The Soviets began the methodical use of
state-sponsored terrorism, assassination of foreign nationals (including governmental
leaders), ideological manipulation of foreign scientific elites, development
and production of bacteria and viruses as weapons – these were ungentlemanly
ways of fighting any war, especially an undeclared, “cold” one.
Some Western policymakers, opinion leaders, and analysts had
a hard time adapting either to technological change or to changes in the
conduct of war.
In an August 1968 New
York Times article, Seymour Hersh wrote: “Inevitably, the arguments against
chemical and biological weapons have a strong emotional overtone; the subject
is almost too horrible for rational debate.
This distaste for C.B.W. even pervades parts of the Pentagon; some
military men I spoke with conveyed the impression that the use of gases and
biologicals isn’t manly; it isn’t the kind of warfare that cadets learn about
at
Albert J. Mauroni wrote of the military mindset around the
time of the
Business Week reported: “Back in 1969 the Defense
Dept. barely protested Nixon's decision to halt bioresearch. Most military
leaders then believed that bioweapons had limited strategic value and were risky even for the attacker.”[772] James Leonard, the assistant director of the
Arms Control and Disarmament Agency at that time, explained: “I can’t stress
this enough. The
On the other hand, four months before the renunciation,
Lieutenant General Austin W. Betts, chief of research for the Army, told the
House Appropriations Committee in secret (later released) testimony: “It seems
to me that it would be absolutely indefensible for us to cease all offensive
lethal weapon development . . . It would be foolish if we ceased doing
offensive development work that allowed us the knowledge of what it takes to
defend against any agent that our technology might conceive.”[774]
As Betts’s comments suggest, technological surprise may be
self-induced if, for example, one simply gives up a certain category of
research. As noted, it may also stem
from the arrogant belief that if we can’t
do it, no one can. Zeev Bonen,
former head of the Israeli Armament and Development Agency, noted that “The
launching of the Sputnik came as a major surprise and shock to the American
public[,] abruptly challenging American supremacy. Was the Sputnik a technological intelligence
surprise? Definitely not. The information was given directly and
clearly by the Russians themselves on various occasions before the actual
launching (October 4, 1957). . . .
“Obviously there was no intelligence surprise. The information was freely available. It was a problem of acceptance. The Americans did not take the Russian challenge
seriously. Their strong belief in
American technological supremacy was a very effective filter that discounted
and rejected the possibility of being overtaken by the Russians in the
satellite race.”[775] Bonen suggested that technological surprise
is usually avoidable and that such surprise “out of the blue” is rare if not
impossible.
Technological surprise may stem from
an overreliance on modeling of chaotic phenomena such as human behavior. For example, the Nobel laureate Thomas
Schelling asserted, for reasons rooted in game theory, that no one would
weaponize smallpox; he continued to make that assertion long after it was
revealed that the Soviets had weaponized smallpox.[776] (See Chapter Four.)
Ideology may also play a role in
creating the conditions for technological surprise. Science historian Susan Wright of the
“Heaven only knows how they think a terrorist is going to put
up a lab and do this stuff without being caught,” she said. “Labs with
ventilation and good scientists leave huge footprints.”[777]
Regarding the
And the faster technology advances, the more likely
technological surprise becomes. The risk
of technological surprise was particularly great at the time of the
“With the technology that is now available,” Douglass wrote
in1987, “agents can be tailored to produce very specific results and do so with
the greatest efficiency.”[779]
Throughout the history of chemical and biological weapons,
few policymakers or other officials have admitted their ignorance on the
subject of CBW. Rare is the example of
Sidney G. Winter of the RAND Corporation, who testified before Congress in
August 1961, “I should mention that throughout my talk . . . I am neglecting
some important possibilities in the range of military postures, particularly
the possibility that bacteriological and chemical weapons might play a significant
role. . . . The reason is simply stated: ignorance. . . . I believe that this
ignorance is widely shared, and I doubt that the possible effects of
bacteriological and chemical weapons are known with sufficient accuracy to
permit an evaluation of how important their effects might be on the recovery
[i.e., recover after attack] problem.”[780]
Equally rare, it seems, were those who educated themselves
and the subject and, facing ridicule as warmongers, explained to the public and
to public officials the critical importance of the study of these weapons.
Often, it fell to officials of the Chemical Corps and other
CBW-related organizations to speak out.
In a 1955 speech, Maj. Gen. William M. Creasy, chief of the
Chemical Corps, said, “The time has come for a realistic appraisal of just what
an attack upon our ‘homefront’ could be like.
There are few scientists outside of the military establishment, and
still fewer laymen, who comprehend the dangers to this country from such an
attack and the possible means for countering the actions of the enemy.”
Creasy continued: “All warfare is
anti-personnel in nature, no matter how it is accomplished, for without
manpower, machines and weapons become inoperable. . . . In any attack upon the
American ‘homefront,’ we will be the targets.”
The New Republic recounted:
As the General saw it, the use of nuclear weapons didn’t make sense
economically for an aggressor, because such weapons “cause physical destruction
not only to the human element, but also to the buildings and machines these
humans operate.” In contrast:
“Poisoning, sickness, radioactivity, starvation, and mental derangement can
cause death or dehabilitation [a nice term] among humans, but do not destroy
material things.”
He then came to the point: “From our viewpoint as the potential targets,
[the enemy] probably would debilitate instead of kill, for the machines would
need people to operate them at the conclusion of hostilities. If we can keep the human element away from
the machines through illness and other debilitating means during combat, he
will have achieved his purpose of neutralizing our machinery of war and
industry.”
Therefore, the General summed up: “On this basis any far-sighted person
would b forced to conclude that the threat from chemical and biological weapons
is just as great as the threat from nuclear weapons.”[781]
In the 1962 article, The New Republic went on to describe a
recent speech by the current Chemical Corps chief, Major General Marshall
Stubbs:
CW and BW weapons, the General flatly declared, can now be used
strategically to “cause casualties in an area the width of a continent.” Delivered as missile warheads or by other
means, they can penetrate even the deepest atomic blast shelters, he said. He recommended that the President take a good
look at this line o neglected weaponry from other than the viewpoint of its
danger to civil defense. The range of
effects possible, the General pointed out, are just what the President needs to
fulfill his goal of a wider choice of military response to aggression than
‘humiliation or all-out nuclear action.”[782]
Not surprisingly, as we have seen, people involved in the
The New York Times reported in 1946 that “many
scientists believed until recently that bacteriological warfare was ineffective
and overrated. However, wartime
experiments in this and other countries – the detailed results of which still
are closely guarded – indicate clearly that the war of disease is practicable,
though difficult to control.”[783]
A
“Basically, the division is a sound
one. It reflects the fact that the
difference between the atom bomb and its predecessors in weaponry is not merely
one of size but one of essence. It is
not so clear, however, why they give one of these two families a population of
only one.
“The characteristics that make the
atom bomb different from the 16-inch gun or the battle fleet are characteristics
that are shared today with many other weapons.”
White noted these characteristics
that make WMDs different: relatively low cost; surprise (“the ability of a
country to stock up without alarming the rest of the world”); and decisiveness
(effect on large areas). “None of the
old weapons possesses all three.”
Other weapons share these
characteristics of atomic bombs, White wrote.
The first of these, as has been made abundantly clear in
hints by officialdom and less-restrained accounts by the press, is biological
warfare. It is generally known that it
is cheap and that it can achieve surprise.
Its importance in fighting a decisive war has been deprecated, in part
because it is similar in effect to poison gas – and that weapon proved to be no
threat in the last war – and in part because it has existed for many years and
has never been used on a major scale.
Both comforting thoughts are illusory. Gas was not used because it was an unsound
method of achieving its objective. To
saturate an area of any size with poison gas demanded an industrial and
military effort out of proportion to the results that could be expected.
But saturating the same area with the poisons produced by
biochemistry is a relatively simple affair.
It can be done through the water supply or through the food supply. The organic poisons are so much more powerful
that those manufactured by man that they will kill in dilutions which almost
defy analysis. Quantities so small that
they cannot be seen or weighted are toxic enough to kill.
As for the failure of nations to use the biological weapons
that they have had for decades, here, too, the reason was clear. Up to a few years ago these weapons consisted
of living organisms, the organisms that cause anthrax, for example. In theory they would be employed in times of
war to set off an anthrax epidemic in the enemy country, an epidemic that would
sweep the country like a scourge.
The weakness of such a weapon for
The change that has come in biological weapons in the last
few years has been the shift from live organisms to inanimate poisons. . . .
Biochemistry has learned to isolate such poisons in pure form, and it is this
that the Army considers primarily when it speaks of bacteriological warfare.
For this weapon, as for atomic energy, all nations are
rapidly developing long-range rockets for efficient delivery of the destructive
packets. The stage of development in
rockets that was reached by the Germans with the V-2 was no more than
preliminary. They themselves had in
prospect – and relatively near prospect – rockets with a range of better than
3000 miles.
In his analysis, White erred in
treating anthrax as communicable between humans. Otherwise, though, he makes a good case for
BWs as strategic weapons, addressing points that
Almost a quarter-century earlier, in 1924, Winston Churchill
discussed the possibility that wars of the future might be fought not with
steel but with “electrical rays” (electromagnetic pulse weapons), or with bombs
“no bigger than an orange” each of which “the force of a thousand tons of
cordite,” or with explosive-laden “flying machines” guided by “wireless or
other rays, without a human pilot.”
As for poison gas and chemical
warfare in all its forms, only the first chapter has been written of a terrible
book. Certainly every one of these new
avenues to destruction is being studied on both sides of the
It is evident that whereas an equally
contested war under such conditions might work the ruin of the world and cause
an immeasurable diminution of the human race, the possession by one side of
some overwhelming scientific advantage would lead to the complete enslavement
of the unwary party. Not only are the
powers now in the hand of man capable of destroying the life of nations but for
the first time they afford to one group of civilized men the opportunity of
reducing their opponents to absolute helplessness.
In barbarous times superior martial
virtues – physical strength, courage, skill, discipline – were required to
assure such a supremacy; and in the hard evolution of mankind the best and
fittest stocks came to the fore. But no
such saving guaranty exists today. There
is no reason why a base, degenerate, immoral race should not make an enemy far
above them in quality the prostrate subject of their caprice or tyranny, simply
because they happened to be possessed at a given moment of some new
death-dealing or terror-working process and were ruthless in its employment. The liberties of men are no longer to be
guarded by their natural qualities but by their dodges; and superior virtue and
valor may fall an easy prey to the latest diabolical trick.[785]
In war, technological surprise is an important goal of
strategic deception: “one wishes to attack an enemy who is not prepared because
he misestimated when, where, or how an attack would occur,” Abram Shulsky
wrote. “Similarly, in wartime one wants
to conceal from the enemy the development of new weapons, and, if possible, to
deceive him about how new weapons work.”[786]
These things the Soviets accomplished: creating an entire
class of strategic weapons, while helping persuade Western elites that such
weapons were too difficult to use and too dangerous even to study. But they could never have done it without the
help of people who styled themselves as biological weapons “experts.”
NOTE ON THE STRANGE CASE OF THE CUBAN WARGAME
One of the most bizarre accounts to
come out the 1969 debate over the feasibility of biological weapons appeared in
a September 1969 New York Times
article by Seymour Hersh, and was repeated by Representative McCarthy in his
November 1969 book The Ultimate Folly.
According to Hersh: In a wargame
based on the Cuban missile crisis, the U.S. used incapacitating biological
agents such as Q fever (less than one percent fatality rate) and tularemia
(about 8 percent) on the Cuban Army.
Hersh’s secret source said the U.S. Army claimed that the attack
incapacitated 96 percent of the hypothetical Cuban Army with 102 degree fevers,
headaches, diarrhea, “and so on.”
“Then we went back to the infantry,
asked them to show what such symptoms would do to the Cuban Army’s combat
efficiency. Their answer was that the
Cubans would fight like hell and not retreat so quickly – precisely because they
felt so miserable. A soldier manning a
machine gun in a trench wouldn’t want to get up and run; he would stay in the
trench firing his weapon instead and create even more casualties until he was
overrun.” Besides, Hersh noted, the
study determined that the disease would cause three percent casualties among
the island’s resident population, “mostly among babies and old people.”
“‘The net conclusion of the study,’
the source said, ‘was that, as we told the Army, “you had positively helped the
Cuban Army fight off an invasion and killed off a lot of old people and
children in the process.”’”[787]
Representative Richard (Max)
McCarthy, the anti-CBW crusader, told essentially the same story in his book The Ultimate Folly.[788]
If the story told in his book by
McCarthy and in The New York Times by
Hersh is true, it suggests an interesting military tactic – that countries
deliberately infect their own troops with the agents to improve their fighting
efficiency by giving them headaches, vomiting, diarrhea, and fevers of 102 or
102.5 degrees.[789]
CHAPTER
THIRTEEN
The NSC review (part two)
Details of the NSC review became known to the public over the
weekend of
But anti-Defense Department forces
were in the ascendancy on Capitol Hill.
On August 6, they had nearly defeated the Safeguard ballistic missile
defense system; it had survived in the Senate only with the tie-breaking vote
of Vice President Spiro Agnew. This
group, called “military critics,” “critics of the Pentagon,” and “the liberal
coalition” by The New York Times,
quickly struck at the CBW program with an amendment to place severe
restrictions on it.[794]
On August 9, Laird endorsed the
Senate anti-CBW effort; “It appeared to be a case of the Defense Department’s
acknowledging the inevitable,” wrote Warren Weaver Jr. of The New York Times.[797] In his endorsement, Laird said he wanted to
maintain “our chemical warfare deterrent” and “our biological research
program,” phrasing that suggests that – since his July 28 defense of CBW – he
had come to think of CW and BW as separate issues.
What happened during those 12
days?
The Senate then passed the
amendment, by Senator Thomas McIntyre (D-New Hampshire), placing controls on
the transportation, storage, and disposal of CBWs, and – as in the previous
year’s measure that was passed in the Senate but killed in conference –
requiring the Defense Department to submit twice-yearly reports on the program. No money could be spent on delivery systems,
nor could lethal agents be stored in foreign countries without notice to the
countries and relevant congressional committees, nor could agents be tested
outside the
Supporters of the military complained about the anti-military
atmosphere in Congress; Senator John Stennis (D-Mississippi) warned, “It’s down
with the military, and down with the [pro-Defense] Senators because they’re
dominated by the military – that’s the inference here. . . . If we have too
many reductions, cutting in the dark, we’ll rue this day.” But it appears that, with the military
threatened on a number of fronts, the CBW program just wasn’t worth the fight. The amendment passed 91-0. (The version that eventually became law was
weakened somewhat from the original McIntyre proposal. For example, the President could override the
prohibition on delivery systems and the Surgeon General’s position on
transportation.)[799]
Laird said, “I believe this revised
amendment will allow us to maintain our chemical warfare deterrent and our
biological research program, both of which are essential to the national
security.”[800] As he had first done on August 9, Laird
differentiated between CW and BW, referring to “our chemical warfare deterrent”
and “our biological research program.”
As noted above, the
PACKARD RECEIVES THE
REPORTS
At roughly this time, Deputy
Secretary Packard received the science group’s report and two other reports –
one by the Office of Systems Analysis[804] and one, a draft on military options,
prepared largely by the Joint Chiefs of Staff and the State Department’s Bureau
for Politico-Military Affairs.
The OSA often produced reports that ran counter to the JCS
view. (Remember that OSA’s 1967 analysis
had been charged to Han Swyter, who appears to have treated BWs
dismissively.) Not surprisingly, the OSA
report questioned the value of BWs as military weapons and as instruments of
deterrence or coercive diplomacy. Ivan
Selin, the acting director of Systems Analysis at the time, told Jonathan
Tucker in 2002 that “The paper looked at a narrow set of criteria and military
applications and did not take the threat
of biological warfare seriously.”[805] (Emphasis added.)
Meanwhile, the draft military options paper concluded that
BWs were reliable and controllable in the field, that the BW program should be
maintained, and that the CW program should be expanded.
Presented with diverse conclusions – one pro-BW (the draft
military options report from the Joint Chiefs) and two anti-BW (the science
group’s report and the Systems Analysis report) – Laird in mid-August ordered
the Joint Chiefs’ contribution withdrawn.
As
Laird shifted the responsibility for the military
contribution to the Defense Department’s Office of International Security
Affairs (ISA), despite the fact that ISA had much less CBW expertise than OSA
or another possible choice, the Office of Defense Research and Engineering.[807] It was not the office with the greatest
expertise on CBW issues, but it did routinely staff the Defense Secretary in
his dealings with the NSC and the State Department.[808]
ISA was headed by G(ilbert) Warren
Nutter, co-founder of the
Nutter’s independent thinking suggests that his ISA might
conducted a useful analysis of the CBW issue, given enough time and
resources. It got neither.
Laird’s decision to reassign the Defense review necessitated
a change in schedule. At an August 22
meeting of the IPMG, the group responsible for combining the three
intergovernmental reports, David Wu of the ISA asked for more time, a delay in
the consideration of NSSM-59 from the scheduled date of September 5. With irritation, Kissinger and the NSC
accepted a delay until October 5.[813]
According to
Jonathan Tucker later interviewed Lt. Gen. (ret.) Robert E.
Pursley, Laird’s military assistant, and concluded that “Laird had become
increasingly concerned that the NSSM study process was out of control and that
NSC principals such as himself, who bore the ultimate responsibility for
policymaking, had been relegated to a secondary role. Because the NSSM study groups were
autonomous, it was not clear to him how the various issues and options were
being chosen and why. Laird worried that
the options would simply reflect the prejudices and parochial interests of
bureaucrats far down the chain of command.
According to [Pursley], ‘Laird decided to blow the whistle on the whole
NSSM process. He insisted on being kept
fully informed about how the military options study group was developing issues
and formulating alternatives.’” Laird,
according to Tucker, requested that the NSSM process be modified to give agency
principals a chance to review the options papers before they were finalized.[815]
The delay caused by Laird’s involvement allowed time, Frank
reported, “to iron out differences of opinion regarding intelligence estimates
of foreign capabilities, particularly Soviet capabilities, in chemical and
biological warfare.”[816]
THE CRITICAL ERROR:
BASING ONE REPORT ON ANOTHER
If the purpose of NSSM-59 was to provide the ultimate
decision-makers with a balanced view of the biological weapons issue, Laird’s
intervention was catastrophic. That’s
because the staffers at ISA – on a tight deadline even with the extension, overwhelmed
by their workload even before the new assignment, and lacking the CBW expertise
of other parts of the Defense Department – did what one might have expected
them to do: They cribbed from one of the
other reports. And the other report
from which they cribbed was the report of the science group.
Forrest Russel Frank noted that “The revised Defense
Department submissions virtually repeated the findings and recommendations of
the PSAC [President's Science Advisory Committee] panel report.”[817] Paul G. Conway quoted Vincent McRae, deputy
director of the Office of Science and Technology, as saying of the PSAC paper:
“it did, if you talk to the people in Defense, have an impact” on Laird and his
deputy David Packard. Ivan Bennett told
The use of extensive material from the science group’s
report, which was done with the license of the White House’s Office of Science
and Technology, may have served another purpose, in addition to enabling the
ISA staff to meet its deadline.
According to a former high government official interviewed by Frank in
1974, the ISA people wanted to avoid prolonged debate between the new
appointees at the top levels of ISA and the holdover staff, and they knew that
Deputy Secretary Packard had been happy with the science group’s report.[819]
In September, Meselson submitted a
paper on policy options to Kissinger, according to
On September 19, Soviet Foreign Minister Andrei
Gromyko spoke on CBW to the United Nations General Assembly, and the Soviet
bloc circulated a draft treaty for a ban on development, production,
stockpiling, and use of chemical and biological weapons, and the destruction of
existing stockpiles.[822] Columnist
Chalmers Roberts wrote in The Washington
Post: “Usually the Soviets find some issue they figure will embarrass the
On September 23, The New York Times reported extensively
on the CBW debate within the Nixon administration.[824]
By the end of September, at least
100 House members and “scores” of Senators were reported, by Seymour Hersh in The New York Times, to have urged
That claim appeared in a September
28 New York Times article on
biological weapons by Hersh, the journalist who took the lead in exposing the
Hersh declared that “The need for a
biological disarmament agreement has been long overdue: the growing C.B.W. race
now involves at least 14 countries,” including “Russia, Communist China and
Poland, which recently announced plans to be ready with biologicals to defend
itself against ‘any eventuality.” Hersh
considered
Hersh quoted Meselson: “One might
spread something thought normally to be very lethal in the form of a spray
cloud, an aerosol cloud over a populated area, and very few people might die;
or one might spray something thought not to be so lethal and very many might
die. The reason is that we don’t know
enough about the patterns of resistance to disease and the factors which
determine the virulence of bugs to make predictions. It could be that a small biological attack or
even the field testing of biological weapons, especially viruses, could lead to
the infection or rodents or bird populations and lead to the emergence of a
hitherto and dangerous organism.”
Hersh wrote that fear of Soviet BWs
and a belief in the need for a deterrent is central to the case made for
continuing the
“This justification for research
into biological warfare,” Hersh wrote, “has been offered by the military for
more than 20 years; but many Government critics argue that the picture is not
at all that clear.” (For more on the intelligence aspects of Hersh’s September
28, 1969 article, see Chapter Ten.)
Hersh reported that, in recent
weeks, the Pentagon had stopped talking of CBWs and had begun to differentiate
between the two types of weapons. “It
seems clear that, to many military men, biologicals are causing more trouble
than they’re worth. Right now the
military is spending roughly (precise statistics are classified) 10 times more
on chemical than biological weapons.
Perhaps 3,500 of the 15,000 men now working at C.B.W. installations
around the nation are dealing with biologicals, many of them on a part-time
basis.” In other words, BWs, unlike CWs,
did not have the constituency with which to build political support.
Another reason for waning support
for BWs, Hersh reported, was secret exercise in 1964 involving the hypothetical
use of incapacitating agents. In a
wargame based on the Cuban missile crisis, incapacitating biological agents
such as Q fever and tularemia were used to produce such symptoms as headaches,
diarrhea, and 102 degree fevers in 96 percent of the Cuban army. U.S. Army CBW experts touted the exercise as
a success, until it was pointed out that soldiers with headaches, diarrhea, and
102 degree fevers fight much more effectively than healthy ones.
(!)
That, at least, is the story
Seymour Hersh told in The New York Times.[826] The diarrhea-makes-you-a-better-soldier story
was repeated by Representative McCarthy in his book The Ultimate Folly, which was published the following November.[827] (For further details on Hersh and McCarthy’s claims regarding
the exercise, see Chapter Twelve.)
Finally, Hersh reported: “It will
take more than Congressional attacks and Presidential studies to stop the
spread of biological warfare research.
No international agreement to ban biological weapons will ever get the
approval of the military unless there is a foolproof means of monitoring
it. Yet the technical difficulties in
monitoring it can be solved, scientists say, with enough money. . . .
“The burden, clearly, for the
future control of biological weapons is on the
On October 1, the “virtually plagiarized” ISA report was
delivered to Laird, who approved it.[829] Laird, Michael Guhin said later, had
concluded that the military drawbacks of BWs outweighed the benefits and that,
“politically, it was a tar baby.”[830]
At the October 8 meeting of the IPMG, the Defense Department
representative distributed copies of DoD reports on chemical warfare and
“biological research,” and a summary paper calling for a halt to BW production
and maintenance of only a defensive BW program.
A State Department memorandum regarding the summary paper noted that
“Secretary Laird's views are far closer to the likely State and ACDA position
than we anticipated. It is likely that
the JCS will submit a strong reclama.”[831]
By October 14, according to a State Department memo,
“Secretary Laird has now personally reviewed this subject and made a series of
policy decisions which by and large overruled
the positions that Defense people have been taking in the interdepartmental
discussions, and which moves the Defense position substantially closer to what
we would expect the State Department would like to see as U.S. policy in this
area. The Joint Chiefs of Staff, however,
have not agreed with Mr. Laird's position.”[832]
(Emphasis added.)
On October 13, Meselson chaired a “Symposium on Chemical and
Biological Warfare” before the National Academy of Sciences. The symposium featured Bennett, Swyter, and
George Bunn (who had been the first general counsel at ACDA).[833]
During his remarks at the symposium, Bennett stressed the
need for a CBW policy, and the need for a policy doing away with BWs.
The lack of a clear and agreed-on
policy in the past, the almost incredible fact that the Senate failed to ratify
the Geneva Protocol of 1925, and the use of tear gas and chemical herbicides by
our forces in
Similarly, this lack of a definite
policy, the peculiar abhorrence felt by most people of the concept of using
poisons or diseases, and the dreary sequence of recent episodes such as the “sheep
kill” at Dugway Proving Ground in Utah, the controversy over the Army’s plans
to ship obsolete chemical munitions from Denver to the east coast and to dump
them in the ocean, the “Okinawa incident,” the subsequent admission that the
United States also maintains stocks of lethal chemicals in West Germany, and
the revelation of open-air field tests of lethal chemicals in Hawaii without
the knowledge of state officials, have all merged to mobilize public and
Congressional criticism and demands for reform so as to create a domestic
political climate that is unusually conducive to a revision of our national
stance on CBW.[834]
However, despite the universal revulsion for CBW, Bennett
said, it would not be easy to get the military to give up its CBW
programs. To overcome military
resistance, Bennett suggested, moral arguments could be turned into military
ones. For example, with regard to the
unpredictability of the effects of CBW:
Since reliability of performance is
highly desirable, from a military viewpoint, for any weapons system, this moral
objection can be used analytically to argue that at least portions of the “chemical-biological
option” which many defense establishments desire to retain is militarily
unsound on technical grounds. . . .
To a large extent, the political
decisions that will be required to further restrict these or other forms of
weaponry or to abolish them will be dependent upon convincing military
establishments that they can relinquish an ‘option’ by arguing within the
framework of their responsibilities and missions as they view them. [Emphasis in the original.] The task of translating convincingly the
moral argument of the threat to civilians implied by non-controllability into a
military argument of technical unreliability of a weapon system is an example,
and a simple one at that, of an analytic approach to problems of disarmament.[835]
Bennett did not say that scientists should tailor their
technical judgments to achieve desired policy results – but one could certainly
infer such a suggestion. Comments such
as Bennett’s 1969 remarks highlight the problem with scientist-activists
serving both as analysts of technology and of the natural world and as analysts
of public policy. How does the
policymaker know which role the scientist-activist is playing at any given
moment? How does the scientist-activist
resist the temptation to present policy choices as scientific matters, as when
“scientific” organizations (actually, political organizations with scientific
themes) came out against the Strategic Defense Initiative, in favor of
abortion-on-demand, against President Reagan’s tax cuts, and in favor of
Kyoto-inspired restrictions on carbon emissions? How does he or she resist the temptation to
present scientific understanding as clearer and policy choices as more stark
than they really are? (According to The New York Times, a 1975 M.I.T. study
of prominent scientist-activists found that “The visible scientists are those
who are willing to take unqualified, dramatic stands on issues.”[836])
Bennett concluded his remarks at the 1969 NAS symposium by
calling for a BW ban. “If we separate
the B from the C in CBW, we have an opportunity to ban, for the first time, the
very existence of a weapon. [Emphasis in the original.] This could be done without waiting to
complete wrangling over retaliation in kind with lethal chemicals, the status
of tear gas and of herbicides, both domestic and international, and the exact
meaning of the mysterious phrasing of the Geneva Protocol. Such a move would not arouse the same
vigorous objections from military establishments that come forth when their
chemical ‘option’ is threatened.
“The journey toward the goal of general and complete
disarmament will be long and hard. It is
high time that we took this first step, no matter how small it might seem.”[837]
On October 16, The
Christian Science Monitor reported: “Informed sources say the Defense
Department may try to shine up its image a bit by some concessions [on
CBW]. One suggestion is that the
Pentagon may order a reduction of its stockpiles of such weapons in certain
areas. . . .
“But pressures are mounting on Capitol Hill and across the
nation for some clear, early steps to retreat from the hair-raising prospects
of all-out germ warfare.”[838] Note that this was a news story, not a
commentary.
On October 18, Robert M. Smith in The New York Times reported on a two-page memo that Laird submitted
as a supplement the IPMG report. The
story began: “Secretary of Defense Melvin R. Laird has submitted a secret
memorandum to the National Security Council urging that the
Smith reported, “It is not clear yet, according to reliable
sources, whether the Joint Chiefs of Staff will support Mr. Laird’s position on
halting the production of germs. . . .
“As recently as a few weeks ago, the representative of the
Joint Chiefs asked the interagency study group to leave the manufacture of
biological weapons in its report as an option that the National Security
Council should consider.
“However, knowledgeable sources see Mr. Laird’s memorandum as
very likely to spell the end of American production of biological agents, which
is now officially described as ‘limited.’”[839] Indeed, given the political atmosphere at the
time, it is hard to imagine how the BW program could have survived the
publication of the position Laird took in the “secret” memo. If even the Secretary of Defense – if even
Melvin Laird, who was considered a hardliner regarding the
The Times story,
with its treatment of the Laird memo, showed the degree to which the
classification of information on the U.S. BW program was taken seriously.
Another example occurred later in the same Times article: “Specific information on
biological weapons is secret. However,
Representative Richard D. McCarthy, Democrat of upstate New York, an outspoken
critic of American chemical and biological warfare policy, has said, ‘The
disease-bearing weapons that we develop and test are in some cases stockpile
include the plague, anthrax, tularemia, psittacosis, Q-fever, botulism, Rocky
Mountain spotted fever, brucellosis and Venezuelan equine encephalitis.’”
On October 22, Lee DuBridge, Nixon’s science advisor, sent
Kissinger a memo in which he wrote:
I understand that the Department of
Defense in its contribution to NSSM-59 indicates a willingness to forego [sic] the
further development of an offensive BW capability while maintaining R&D
programs on defensive measures and to an extent that would avoid technological
surprise by an enemy. This would involve
no engineering development and no operational systems. However, the question of existing stockpiles
of BW agents is not addressed specifically by DOD.
If the President should decide to
forego [sic] offensive BW as a policy, the timing and the phasing of a public
announcement will be of crucial importance insofar as public reaction, domestic
and international, is concerned. There
is a large reservoir of skepticism, cynicism, and incredulity that has
developed as a result of our past lack of policy and the inconsistency of past
statements in this area. The results of the NSSM-59 review are being awaited
impatiently by the press, the public, and the Congress.
I suggest that the President announce
his conclusions from the study at the earliest possible date. If the final
decision includes elimination of offensive BW, the announcement might be
accompanied by a publicly announced order for immediate destruction of all
existing stocks of BW agents. Our stocks
consist of only small quantities of ineffective agents anyway, and, rather than
allowing them to disappear through attrition and non-replacement, their
destruction offers the President an opportunity to underline the policy change
in a most dramatic and convincing fashion.
DuBridge’s memo may have influenced the timing of Nixon’s
announcement, if Nixon followed DuBridge’s advice.
During the last week of December
1969, the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of
Science in Boston will feature a symposium on CBW . . . [which Ivan Bennett has agreed to attend and]
which will be attended by large numbers of interested citizens and very likely
will be nationally telecast on network TV.
(It will certainly be on the educational network.) If the President’s decision could be
announced in advance of this symposium and Dr. Bennett and Mr. Hayward [Albert
Hayward, another participant and Bennett’s colleague in the renunciation
effort] could prepare their papers on the basis of the new policy rather than
the present situation (they must submit their papers early in December) the
public climate might be improved and a ‘new start’ might be generated in this heretofore
controversial area.[840]
On October 22-29, Pugwash met in
On October 29, DuBridge announced a number of government
actions to restrict the use of 2,4,5-T, a major component in the herbicides,
such as Agent Orange, being used by the
On October 30, the NSC review group met to consider
NSSM-59. Regarding BWs, members agreed
to focus on the questions:
1. Should the
2. Should the
3. Should the
4. Should the
The project was nearly complete. “At that the study took months to write amid
constant haggling,” Roger Morris wrote.
“When it finally came to the White House in October 1969, it was wrapped
in committee prose so bleached as to be nearly unintelligible. ‘I can’t even read this paper, let alone
understand the issues,’ Kissinger complained to assistants. But he understood well enough that the review
had indeed uncovered an opportunity” – a chance to disarm without significant
opposition from the military and, it appeared, without weakening the
On November 5, Kissinger spoke on the telephone with Harvard
Professor Arthur Maass, a fellow political scientist, regarding the political
situation at Harvard, where the faculty on October 7 had voted against American
involvement in
According to the notes on the Kissinger-Maass conversation in
the National Archives, “K asked how the situation was at Harvard and said it
doesn’t sound like a place to go back to.
M said it is unbearable. The
faculty is split and it is no dense you could cut it with a knife. M said it is no fun.”[846]
The conversation with Maass illustrated the psychological
pressure under which Kissinger, like other academics in government, labored at
the time – pressure that may have pushed Kissinger toward measures that would
be seen by his friends and colleagues as promoting peace. Melvin Small wrote, in Johnson, Nixon, and the Doves: “Of all of Nixon’s major advisers,
Henry Kissinger, the most important
Making the pressure greater was the fact that, according to
Marvin and Bernard Kalb in Kissinger,
Kissinger maintained close ties to liberal Democrats throughout his time in
political office, confiding later that “almost all of my friends were liberal
Democrats.”[850] (Kissinger wasn’t alone in feeling pressure
from the liberal establishment. “The
more moderate or even liberal the adviser, the more likely he or she was to be
troubled personally by the bad press and to think that the not-so-conservative
and pragmatic Nixon was as well. Adviser
and friend Leonard Garment thought that New
York Times criticism especially bothered Nixon. Like Johnson, Nixon ‘craved legitimacy’ and
was ‘resentful’ when the most important American paper did not support
him. He ‘tried not to let it get under
his skin,’ but for a man who thought he was a ‘liberal’ or at least a
‘centrist,’ such a lack of acceptance was irritating.”[851])
Meanwhile, the NSC review group continued its work, asking
for a minor revision of the summary report, which necessitated another IPMG
meeting on November 6. In the final
report, November 10, the response to the first question, “Should the
PROS:
1. Maintenance of such a capability
could contribute to deterring the use of such agents by others.
2. Without any production capability
and delivery means for lethal agents, the
3. Retains an option for the
CONS:
1. Control of the area of effect of
known BW agents is uncertain.
2. A lethal BW capability does not
appear necessary to deter strategic use of lethal BW.
3. Limits our flexibility in
supporting arms control arrangements.[852]
In November, McCarthy’s exposé, The Ultimate Folly: War by Pestilence, Asphyxiation and Defoliation,
was published in paperback. The cover of
the book declared that it was “By Congressman Richard D. McCarthy who has
uncovered the Pentagon’s huge secret reserves of chemical and biological
weapons and has launched the national drive to control them.”[853]
On its back cover, the book quoted the
The text on the back cover continued: “Now in this urgent
book Congressman McCarthy – who more than any other American has spoken out on
chemical and biological warfare – makes public all that is known, and much that
has been secret, about the terrifying nature of our CBW program: the kind of
weapons we have created and are planning, the vast stockpiles that already
exist, the accidents that have taken place, the potential for far more deadly
accidents in the immediate future.” Only
through “accidents and near misses (such as the nerve gas death of 6,400 sheep
in
During November and December, Representative Clement Zablocki
(D-Wisconisn) conducted hearings of the National Security Policy and Scientific
Developments Subcommittee to consider resolutions on CBW sponsored or
cosponsored by 108 members of Congress.
The resolutions called for a review of CBW policies (already underway,
of course), a reassertion of the
On November 17, the State Department’s Bureau of
Politico-Military Affairs recommended to Secretary of State Rogers that he –
support the position of the Secretary
of Defense that we maintain a biological research and testing program only
for defensive purposes and to safeguard against technological
surprise. You should urge that the IPMG
be asked to define specifically what activities and what stockpiles, if any,
will be included in such a program.
Assuming that the President supports this position, you should recommend
that the
Before the November 18 NSC meeting, Guhin and other NSC
staffers stayed up all night preparing a memorandum from Kissinger to Nixon
summarizing the issues. Attached were
the NSSM-59 report and an analytical paper on the positions of the NSC
principals, including Kissinger’s recommendations.[857]
Kissinger’s talking points for the NSC meeting on CBW policy
began by noting: “A. This is a complex subject.”
According to the talking points,
There is a consensus that we need:
—Continued research and development,
with emphasis on defense.
—Refinement of controls and safety
measures.
—Better intelligence on other
nation’s [sic] CBW capabilities.
—Continuation of our declaratory ‘no
first use’ policy for lethal chemical and biological weapons.
—A tightly controlled public affairs
policy.
The points continued:
It will simplify our discussion if we
focus on four [three][858] basic
issues to be decided. What should be
our policy on:
—Biological Warfare (BW) [&
—Chemical Warfare (CW) excluding Tear
Gas and Herbicides
—The Use of Tear Gas and Herbicides
and Ratification of the 1925 Geneva Protocol [A hand-drawn bracket united the
second and third items, accounting for the count of three rather than four
basic issue.]
—Policy on Authorization for Use of
Tear Gas and Herbicides
With regard to BWs, Kissinger’s talking points presented the
policy options as (1) retaining full capability for full use, (2) retaining
capability with regard to incapacitating agents only, and (3) merely continuing
research and development, for both offense and defense. A handwritten note added another option, (4)
merely continuing research and development, for defense only.
Both Options 1 and 2 imply a need for
a retaliatory of deterrent capability.
Some argue that:
—Lethal BW helps deter BW attack and
give us another strategic option.
—Incapacitating weapons might be
effective in some situations (e.g., amphibious invasion) and might enable
capture of areas more humanely than with conventional weapons. They are the only effective incapacitants we
have (although chemical incapacitants are under development).
—Without production facilities and
delivery means available we could not respond quickly if we wanted to do so.
[SJA: A hand-drawn arrow moved the third point to the second position.]
Others say:
—We do not need BW for deterrence [if BW use great time lag due to incubation]
when we have nuclears.
—Control and effectiveness of BW
agents is questionable.
[Attacker
can’t immunize, defender would know]
—In any event we could not respond
promptly because the source and character of the attack would be unclear for
some time. [Flu epidemic, for example]
—Incapacitants would be most
effective in ‘first-use’ but this could result in escalation.
—With an R&D base and the existing
facilities in production, we could move quickly to produce agents for offensive
use, but there would be some time lost if we were not actually in
production. [The remainder of this item
was highlighted with large hand-drawn brackets.] (FYI: Biological agents
production and munition filling is done at Pine Bluff Arsenal,
—In any event, [even if against active capability] we would need some research on
offensive agents as basis for study of defensive measures and to protect
against technological surprise.
[Defensive
use presupposes some offensive research to avoid surprise.]
[Cut-off
between offensive & defensive research & defensive research vs.
production]
The Kissinger talking points addressed the
- At
that point only
- The
draft not clear on what level of R&D would be allowed.
- It
had “no provision for on-site verification, but rather complaint
procedures for investigation under UN auspices.”
- “Many
states oppose separating BW from CW,” but “This is not an important item”
at
- If,
and only if, the
The options listed in the talking points for dealing with the
[1.
Ignore]
1. [changed to 2.] Defer decision.
2. [changed to 3.] Associate in principle only.
3. [changed to 4.] Do not
support. [(oppose)]
Noting the pros and cons:
—Some argue that we should
associate in principle:
To evidence willingness to consider
limitations on BW particularly if we retain only an R&D program.
To gain some political benefit
without tying our hands.
—Others argue that:
[under
no pressure]
There is no urgency to consider the
convention and,
Association with with [sic] the Convention would weaken our hand in
opposing other arms control proposals which lack adequate verification provisions.
The talking points then turned to chemical weapons and a
discussion of the
An “Issues for Decision” memorandum for the NSC review noted
the arguments:
Some argue that we should retain a
full BW capability because (1) a lethal BW capability helps deter BW
attack and gives us another strategic option; (2) because it would take
considerable time to reconstitute stockpiles and delivery means; and (3)
because biological incapacitants – the only effective incapacitating
capability we maintain – could be useful in military operations such as
amphibious invasion.
Others argue that we should maintain
a research and development program only because (1) our nuclear deterrent
serves to deter strategic use of lethal BW; (2) the control and effectiveness
of BW weapons are uncertain as are the deterrent or retaliatory value of
incapacitants; (3) though they could possibly be useful in a ‘first-use’
situation, such use could risk escalation and would be considered by most
nations to be contrary to the international law; and (4) a research and
development program would protect against technological surprise.[859]
The summary of the arguments for and against maintaining a BW
program is faulty. In the list of
“cons,” Points 1 and 3 are wrong: In some circumstances, BWs can be used
covertly without risk of nuclear retaliation (because escalation would require
certainty of an attack and of the identity of the attacker), and BWs can be
used in war coincident with the use of nuclear weapons, when retaliation is
already occurring or is imminent. Point
2 is wrong: There is nothing inherent in BWs that makes them less controllable
and effective than other weapons, particularly with regard to anthrax and
toxins, which are not communicable.
Point 4 is wrong: BW defense requires knowledge of BW offense, and if an
adversary is able to conceal its advances in technology, it will eventually
attain the ability to achieve technology surprise – as would have happened, had
the
The analysis was, as Joseph D. Douglass Jr. and Neil C.
Livingstone wrote in 1987, a “rushed pro forma analysis.”[860] Nevertheless, the NSC process continued to its
preordained conclusion.
Kissinger biographer Roger Morris wrote:
More important than White House
motives in instigating the study, however, was the process itself in terms of
organizational politics. It was the
system as it was supposed to work, though circumstances were seldom so neat or
vested policy interests so expendable. Under
the charge to present all realistic alternatives, the bureaucracy produced a
review which included the option to eliminate or reduce reliance on
chemical-biological weapons. The
Pentagon also had its option to maintain current programs. Yet the agreement of the joint chiefs to the
range of options was a reluctant but implicit admission that change was still
within the bounds of national security.
They could not easily claim afterward with their congressional
supporters or the press that their expertise was unheeded. Moreover, the onus for advocating change fell
on no department or individual. The
presidential choice would not depend on a Secretary of Defense bringing himself
to oppose the army or a Secretary of State mustering his courage and
credentials to infringe on military affairs.[861]
FINALLY, THE NSC
MEETING
On November 18, the NSC met in the Cabinet Room. Among those present were Nixon, Kissinger,
Laird, Rogers, ACDA Director Gerald Smith, DCI Richard Helms, and the chairman
of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, General Earl Wheeler.[862]
If the NSC meeting followed the format outlined the previous
week by Guhin, it included four briefings: the Director of Central
Intelligence, on “Assessment of Enemy Threat and Problems of Intelligence” (10
minutes), the Department of Defense representative on “Current U.S. Capability
and Programs and the Defense Recommendations” (10-15 minutes), the Joint Chiefs
of Staff representative on “Military Utility and Implications of Various Policy
Options” (10 minutes), and the Department of State representative on “Political
Considerations and Implications of Various Policy Options (e.g., Geneva
Protocol, UK Draft Convention, overseas deployment)” (10 minutes).[863]
Clearly, that schedule did not leave much time for in-depth
briefings, especially considering the range of issues related to chemical and
biological weapons that had to be covered.
President Nixon’s agenda for the meeting directed him to
state that “Chemical and biological warfare is an important and complex
subject. Our basic purpose in dealing
with it today is to establish a policy framework for future CBW programs which
is consistent with both national security and arms control objectives.”
Nixon was directed to call first on DCI Helms “for briefing
on the nature of the threat,” then JCS Chairman Earle Wheeler “for briefing on
the military significance of chemical and biological weapons,” then Kissinger
“to outline the major policy issues.”
After Dr. Kissinger has outlined the
major issues, you may wish to ask Secretary Laird, Secretary Rogers,
and General Wheeler for their views.
In addition, you may wish to ask the following for their views on
specific subjects:
[U.N.]
Ambassador [Charles W.] Yost for his views on the CBW issues at
the United Nations.
[Science
Adviser] Dr. DuBridge for his view on the question of biological warfare
programs.
[Deputy
ACDA Director] Mr. [Philip J.] Farley for his views on the arms
control aspects, particularly the Draft Convention on Biological Warfare
proposed by the British.[864] [Emphasis in the original.]
The NSC meeting was tense, according to New York Times reporter Robert M. Smith in a 1970 interview[865]
and according to a report published November 17 in The Washington Post.[866]
“The NSC meeting in early November was perfunctory,” Roger
Morris wrote in his biography of Kissinger.
“The chiefs argued that CBW had ‘symbolic’ value, despite admitting, as
their representatives had in drafting the NSSM, that the weapons were largely
impossible to use. Laird and Rogers were
vaguely in favor of curtailing the programs.
In his cover memo and later discussion with the President, Kissinger
pressed for a unilateral initiative.”[867]
At the NSC meeting, Wheeler presented the Chiefs’ position
that only the first use of BWs should be renounced, that the U.K. draft
convention for a BW ban did not provide for adequate verification, that all
options should be allowed for CWs (or, as a fallback position, that the U.S.
should renounce only the first use of lethal CWs), and that the Geneva Protocol
would set a bad precedent for no-first-use of nuclear weapons. The civilian representatives on the NSC
quickly rejected the JCS position on BWs.
They argued that
Ratifying the Geneva Protocol, which was effectively a
no-first-use agreement, would not prevent the
According to The
Washington Post, “Pentagon sources acknowledged that the generals had been
overruled but characterized the Joint Chiefs as ‘not heartbroken.’
“‘They carried their views to the National Security Council,’
one Pentagon figure said, ‘but they accepted it. It wasn’t something they were willing to go
to the wall on.’”[869]
A 1970 account in The
Wall Street Journal suggested that Wheeler was unenthusiastic in his
presentation at the NSC meeting. “When
Wheeler reads the official JCS view at a National Security Council meeting,
says an insider, ‘you sometimes can tell from the sound of his voice that he
doesn’t really believe in it.’ Once the
chairman presented a JCS paper opposing restrictions on chemical and biological
warfare. Then, having stated the
official case, he joined in the active discussion that resulted in sharp limits
on
During the NSC discussion, Nixon recalled that, in the
Eisenhower presidency, “the whole subject [CBW] was taboo, one of those things
not even a President talked about.”[871]
Ultimately, at the November 18 meeting, the NSC agreed with
Wheeler and the Chiefs only on maintaining the possibility of using herbicides
and incapacitating chemicals (excluding BZ, a hallucinogen). On the major issues – renouncing BWs, renouncing
the first use of CWs, and resubmitting the Geneva Protocol for ratification –
the military position was overruled.[872] It was the result that any knowledgeable
observer, after surveying the political landscape, would have expected.
Just before
On November 19, Lord Chalfont, the British foreign minister,
called on the United Nations to foster a treaty calling for a ban on the
stockpiling or use in warfare of biological weapons. “Biological weapons are totally unsuitable
for battlefield use in view of the incubation period before they take effect
and their great unpredictability,” he declared.[875]
On November 24, according to Kissinger’s notes from a
telephone call with Nixon speechwriter Jim Keogh, “K said he had taken Keogh’s
advice as it bears upon bacteriological weapons. K said we can’t do it on chemical
weapons. K said we don’t have
enoughstocks [sic] now. We are only
renouncing first use. Keogh said
[speechwriter William] Safire suggested that we say we would destroy something
we are not going to destroy. K said we
have no intention of destroying them.”[876]
Also on November 24, Paul Doty called regarding a plan by
Cyrus Eaton, the initial funder of Pugwash, to meet with Alexei Kosygin, the
Soviet foreign minister, and then go to
Regarding the following day’s planned
announcement about biological warfare, “K thought Doty would be pleased.” Kissinger “thought some expression of good will”
– presumably meaning praise for the new BW policy – “would be very helpful in
restoring relationships” – presumably between the Nixon administration and
academic/scientific activists. “K
indicated that this was not an issue in which we would need help since it is
not a controversial subject within the intellectual community. The people who are fighting it are not going
to be affected by Doty’s expression of support.”[877]
THE ANNOUNCEMENT AND
THE NSDM
After all the work that the Nixon administration put into the
study of the CBW issue leading up to the November 25 announcement, the White
House wasn’t able to control the announcement of the BW renunciation. Representative McCarthy was able to jump the
gun. On the morning of November 25, The Washington Post reported that
“President Nixon is expected to announce today that the
That day, Kissinger signed National Security Decision
Memorandum 35, declaring that “The term Chemical and Biological Warfare (CBW)
will no longer be used. The reference
henceforth should be to the two categories separately – The Chemical Warfare
Program and The Biological Research Program.”
NSDM-35 went on to declare, “With respect to
Bacteriological/Biological programs:
a. The
b. The
c. The
d. The Secretary of Defense will
submit recommendations about the disposal of existing stocks of
bacteriological/biological weapons.
e. The
On November 25, Nixon announced:
Soon after taking office I directed a
comprehensive study of our chemical and biological defense policies and
programs. There had been no such review
in over 15 years. As a result,
objectives and policies in this field were unclear and programs lacked
definition and direction. Under the
auspices of the National Security Council, the Departments of State and
Defense, the Arms Control and Disarmament Agency, the Office of Science and
Technology, the intelligence community, and other agencies worked closely
together on this study for over six months.
These Government efforts were aided by contributions from the scientific
community through the President's Science Advisory Committee. This study has now been completed and its
findings carefully considered by the National Security Council. I am now
reporting the decisions taken on the basis of this review.[880]
Nixon reaffirmed the
The President announced that he would resubmit the Geneva
Protocol of 1925 for ratification.
With regard to biological warfare, which “have massive,
unpredictable and potentially uncontrollable consequences” and “may produce
global epidemics and impair the health of future generations,” Nixon declared
that the
The
Nixon endorsed the
He reassured the public that “Neither
our association with the Convention nor the limiting of our program to research
will leave us vulnerable to surprise by an enemy who does not observe these
rational restraints. Our intelligence
community will continue to watch carefully the nature and extent of the
biological programs of others.
These important decisions, which have
been announced today, have been taken as an initiative toward peace. Mankind
already carries in its own hands too many of the seeds of its own destruction.
By the examples we set today, we hope to contribute to an atmosphere of peace
and understanding between nations and among men.”
Paragraph (c) of NSDM-35 provided that “The United States
bacteriological/biological programs will be confined to research and
development for defensive purposes (immunization, safety measures, et
cetera). This does not preclude research
into those offensive aspects of bacteriological/biological agents necessary to
determine what defensive measures are required.” According to Jonathan Tucker, this language
“appears to have been added so that the Joint Chiefs would not challenge the
president's decision.” Halperin told
Tucker: “If the NSC staff had pushed beyond the limits of what the bureaucracy
was prepared to accept, the dissenting agency could have requested a
reconsideration, known as the ‘reclama process.’ Thus, the NSC staff sought to implement the
new policy without provoking bureaucratic resistance that could undercut the President's
decision.”[881]
Roger Morris wrote: “On November 25, emphasizing the novelty
of the review and the historic nature of the decision, Nixon announced that the
United States would renounce first use of both lethal and incapacitating
chemicals, and disband biological warfare programs entirely except for
‘research and defensive purposes.’ The
administration was submitting to the Senate the 1975
In The New York Times,
NIXON RENOUNCES GERM WEAPONS,
ORDERS DESTRUCTION OF STOCKS;
RESTRICTS USE OF CHEMICAL ARMS
with the subheadlines:
A UNILATERAL ACT
Use of Defoliants in
Vietnam War Will
Be Continued
Kissinger apparently believed that the new policies on CW and
BW had been hard won. Late on the
afternoon of November 25, in a telephone conversation with Paul Doty, Kissinger
noted, according to his notes, that “alot [sic] of blood had to be spilled on
this one,” so statements of support from “Doty’s friends” would be helpful.[883]
At
“M asked if his paper was of any use. K said that it was. K said it was good because it showed the
outside and inside communities working together. We did it quietly which made it hard to
mobilize objection. M mentioned that the
Sweeds [sic] are going ahead on question of [riot-control] gases.
“M mentioned that this was so horribly handed
previously. K agreed.”[884]
Jerome Wiesner, president of MIT, called Kissinger that
evening. According to the notes, “K said
what did I do wrong? W said nothing, you
did everything great. W thought he ought
to call and say so. K said aren’t you
nice. W said absolutely great. K said it certainly was tough going. . . .
“W said he heard from Paul [Doty, presumably] that the
session he had with K was very good. K
said they were going to meet on a regular basis.”[885]
Wiesner was considered a strong opponent of the Nixon
administration and of the
Notes from another telephone conversation between Kissinger
and Doty the next day indicate that Kissinger continued to talk with Cyrus
Eaton, who had financed Pugwash from its beginning. (The first conference, in Eaton’s home town
of
Predictably, most governments around the world welcomed
Nixon’s renunciation of biological weapons.
“We are naturally delighted,” said the British Foreign Office. The same view was expressed in other major
Western European capitals, The New York
Times noted. TASS, the Soviet
propaganda agency, declared that the decision had been made “under pressure
from the public, which widely protests against the building up by the Pentagon
of its tremendous arsenal of mass destruction weapons.” Critics pointed out, however, that Nixon had
not banned the use of riot-control agents and defoliants, as they had hoped,
and that the Nixon administration was attempting to reserve its right to use
such weapons even as it submitted the Geneva Protocol to the Senate for
ratification. “I believe the
In a December 3 conversation with Doty, Kissinger spoke of
his reaction to an Atlantic Monthly
article suggesting that Kissinger thought JFK lacked dignity and honor and was
uncomfortable around JFK’s people, who were called the New Frontiersmen. According to the notes, “K said hell, most of
my friends are New Frontiersmen.”
On December 4, Guhin sent Kissinger a memo summarizing
responses to the November 25 announcement.
The included responses, which were all favorable, came from Alastair
Buchan, a British Labour politician and head of the International Institute for
Strategic Studies, which was initially funded by the Ford Foundation; Aspen
Institute President Joseph E. Slater, a former Ford Foundation official who
served as Assistant Secretary of State for Education and Cultural Affairs under
President Kennedy; George Rathjens, political science professor at MIT and
future general secretary of Pugwash; Edward F. Snyder of the Friends [i.e.,
Quaker] Committee on National Legislation, a leading “peace” group; former U.S.
Senator Joseph Clark (D-Pennsylvania), head of World Federalist USA, a group
promoting a single world government and an end to national self-determination;
Cyrus Vance, Deputy Secretary of Defense under President Johnson and future
Secretary of State to President Carter; and former Governor Averell Harriman (D-New
York), who was Secretary of Commerce under President Truman and Undersecretary
of State under Presidents Kennedy and Johnson.[891] It is interesting that all the responses
included in the summary came from people who were politically to the left of
center.
The politics behind the BW renunciation were seen clearly in
the reaction of a group of 35 Republican Senators. On December 6, they signed a three-paragraph
“open letter” praising the decision as “one of the most important arms control
initiatives of this century” and saying that it represented a “reassertion of
the moral and humanitarian leadership of the
Like many of the machinations during the Cold War involving
biological weapons, the process that produced the letter had little to do with
BWs. The letter had more to do with
chilly relations between the White House and the liberal Republican bloc. Only two members of the Wednesday Group had
voted for the recent Supreme Court nomination of Clement Haynsworth, and the White
House had shown its displeasure with those it considered disloyal by inviting,
to a Thanksgiving Eve party, only the 26 pro-Haynsworth Republicans. The liberals had also given the Nixon
administration problems on such issues as
The Wednesday Group letter also gave favorable mention to the
administration’s decision to pursue strategic arms talks with the
On December 9, Kissinger received a memo, also sent to
DITCHING BW TO SAVE CW?
One possible benefit that the
Still, the argument is often made that getting rid of BWs
helped the
WHY HE DID IT
Why did Nixon make the decision to renounce BWs? In 1978, when newspapers revealed the
existence of a Soviet plot to trick Nixon into renouncing biological weapons,
the former president, speaking through aides, said his decisions regarding CBW
were good on their own merits, regardless of Soviet behavior. The New
York Times reported that “He was said to regard these as practical first
steps toward negotiations with the Soviet Union on limiting strategic nuclear
weapons, negotiations that were still far away in 1969, and also to view the
curbs on chemical-biological weapons as a reflection of his own, Quaker
attitude toward weapons of mass destruction.” Nixon’s renunciation of
biological weapons and of the first use of chemical weapons, and subsequent
cutbacks in nerve gas stockpiles, were moves that, “Mr. Kissinger recalled,
were designed as an American invitation to the
Tucker wrote that –
Nixon did not view biological warfare
as a moral issue but rather as a military and political one. He was influenced by the PSAC report [i.e.,
the report of the PSAC’s ad hoc committee on CBW], which pointed out that
biological weapons were subject to the vagaries of wind and weather and had
delayed effects, giving rise to incapacitating symptoms only after an
incubation period of several days. As a
result, biological weapons had limited tactical utility on the battlefield and
did not constitute a reliable and effective strategic deterrent. Lack of institutional support for biological
warfare from within the armed services – with the sole exception of the army,
which defended the interests of the Chemical Corps – eased Nixon's decision to
abandon what was generally considered to be a marginal capability. Unlike nuclear and chemical weapons, biological
weapons did not have powerful constituencies either inside or outside the
At the same time, the secret field
trials in the Pacific had demonstrated that biological weapons posed a
potential mass-casualty threat to
Finally, Nixon wished to be seen as a
“man of peace” at a time when the war in
Another writer, Albert J. Mauroni, noted in America’s Struggle with Chemical-Biological
Warfare that “By 1969 the military had researched biological weapons for
over twenty-five years, and chemical weapons for over fifty years. The Chemical Corps and Medical Corps
understood the agents very well, understood what they could and could not do to
human bodies, and knew they could employ CB weapons with predictable and
measurable results. Military planning
counted on offensive weapons and predictable results, and this included the BW
program. The two main weaponized BW
agents, anthrax and botulinum toxin, were antipersonnel agents that were not
transmittable between infected and unexposed humans and therefore not
epidemic. The possibility of epidemics
precluded many BW agents from the
In Mauroni’s view, Nixon “was trying to score early points in
his first term against an entrenched Democratic majority in Congress, and he
decided to do this through advances of an arms control agenda that included
such topics as the Anti-Ballistic Missile (ABM) treaty and the Non-Proliferation
Treaty (NPT).” Democrats would have no
choice but to support Nixon’s renunciation, given the controversy about
chemical use in
Mauroni noted: “It is somewhat
surprising that this drastic shift in policy takes up very little (if any) room
in books covering Nixon’s legacy and even less mention in arms control
discussions. The complete and utter
abandonment of an entire class of weapon systems with which the
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
The NSC review, as a game
Henry Kissinger once commented on the power of
bureaucracy: “The outsider believes a
Presidential order is consistently followed out. Nonsense.
I have to spend considerable time seeing that it is carried out and in
the spirit the President intended.
Inevitably, in the nature of bureaucracy, departments become pressure
groups for a point of view. If the
President decides against them, they are convinced some evil influence worked
on the President: if only he knew all the facts, he would have decided their
way.”[902]
Traditionally, governmental behavior in the realm of foreign
policy was assumed to follow a certain pattern, that of a rational actor who
considers all options in order to select the option that will bring about the
best outcome for himself. But, as
pointed out by Graham Alison in his famous analysis,[903]
the Rational Actor Model fails to explain blunders such as the failure to
anticipate and prepare properly for the attack at
In the Rational Actor Model, the key question[904]
is “why?” Why, given a full range of
options, did the decision-maker rationally select a certain option as the one
that would have the most value in pursuit of the organization’s goals? Given that all options were fully considered,
what was the value that the decision-maker expected from each choice? (In other words, what was the value that the
decision-maker projected the organization would receive from each choice?) How were the expected outcomes weighed
against each other to select the optimum one?
The problem with the Rational Actor Model is that it assumes
that the decision-maker has –
- A
certain level of awareness (of all the available options)
- A
certain level of information and predictive ability (to foresee the
outcome of each possible choice)
- A
certain clarity regarding the organization’s goals (peace? prosperity?
freedom? cultural dominance? what?), and
- A
certain set of priorities (pursuing the organization’s goals to the
exclusion of the goals of the decision-maker’s peers, supporters, friends,
aides, self, etc.).
The Rational Actor Model often fails to describe policymaker’s
decisions because those characteristics do not exist in the real world of
political decision-making.
In the case of
- Awareness of all options: Despite Nixon and Kissinger’s
intention of providing the President with all available options and of
keeping those options open at least until consideration by the NSC
principals, the fact is that the option of continuing a BW program had
been effectively eliminated by the time of the NSC meeting on CBW
policy.
- Pro-CBW
scientists were excluded from the work of the scientific panel, whose
chairman was seeking a BW ban as a step toward General and Complete
Disarmament and was apparently willing to tailor scientific analysis to
attain that policy goal.
- Intelligence
regarding the Soviet threat had been muddled by second-guessing, by
flawed assumptions, and possibly by cover-up (note Herb Meyer’s charge
regarding intelligence on Soviet BWs) and deception (Fedora and TopHat);
and much of the intelligence that remained to suggest a major Soviet BW
effort was excluded from consideration based on lack of certainty.
- Diplomats’
assessment[905] of the issue
appear to have been based almost entirely on the desire to improve the
- Finally,
at the NSC principals’ meeting, the only pro-BW expression, which was by
Wheeler of the JCS, was perfunctory, made without enthusiasm and almost
in passing, and, from the outset, known by all participants to represent
a doomed position.
- Information and predictive
ability: Information
that subsequently came to light showed that participants were wrong about
the feasibility of BWs and about Soviet BW efforts. Subsequent events – in particular, the
creation by the Soviets of a massive BW program in which agents were
weaponized for uses ranging from strategic to battleground to
assassinational – establish that the NSC review process had little or no
predictive value.
- Clear goals: Nixon and Kissinger’s goals –
for example, that of establishing a stable world order based on the
assumption of the permanence of the
- Organization’s interests as
priority (lack of contradictory motivation): No one doubts that Nixon and
Kissinger perceived themselves as pursuing policies that would best serve
the nation and the world. But
Nixon’s desire to go down in history as a peacemaker and his “Quaker
attitude toward weapons of mass destruction” (as The New York Times paraphrased Nixon’s aides in 1978)[907]
may have affected his judgment, and Kissinger’s judgment may have been
affected by his worry that he might be ostracized for his policies by
fellow academics or, in particular, by fellow Harvard faculty members.
In his Cuban Missile Crisis analysis, Allison proposed two
alternative models to the Rational Actor Model.
Building on the work of others,[908]
he proposed the Organizational Process Model and the Bureaucratic Politics
Model.
The Organizational Process Model, based largely on
decision-making in large corporations, focuses on how decisions are made with
limited time, information, and resources.
In the OPM, the government is made up of a number of separate, largely
autonomous decision-making units. When a
decision must be made, a search is made for the appropriate rule or norm to
cover the situation, such as a “Standard Operating Procedure” or a contingency
plan for situation X. Uncertainty is to
be avoided, and the tendency is to settle on the first workable approach that
adequately addresses the problem is the short run.
In the Organizational Process Model, the key question is
“how?” How was a certain option
selected? Upon what rules and procedures
was the selection based? How was the
range of options limited by the regulations for making such decisions? How did the various procedures built upon or
conflict with each other?
Complementary to the OPM is the Bureaucratic Politics Model,
which focuses on the interactions between and among the key participants in the
decision-making process. A decision is
the outcome of a sort of game; it is the result of conflict, bargaining, and compromise
among the players – say, the heads of the various government departments
involved. Each of the participants sees
the problem from his or her own perspective, which may (or may not) be rooted
in the culture of the particular department.
Political gamesmanship is a major factor in determining the
outcome. Indeed, according to Allison,
“what happens is a resultant of various bargaining games among players” in the
national government.[909] The personalities of the players are
important in determining the outcome.
And, in the end, the leader seeks a consensus of top advisors, with the
result that outcomes are also dependent on such factors of personality as the
degree of certainty/intransigence attached to initial positions and whether the
leader is surrounded by strong-willed, independent advisors or yes-men.
Allison wrote that, in the BPM, “The name of the game is
bureaucratic politics: bargaining along regularized channels among players
positioned hierarchically within the government.”[910]
In the Bureaucratic Politics Model, the key question is
“who?” Who are the stakeholders? What
are their interrelationships and relative levels of power and influence? What is each player’s ability to affect the
outcome of the decision-making process though, in Allison’s term,
“action-channels”? How are they selected
to play in the game, and at what point does each player enter the game?
These models, the RAM, the OPM, and the BPM (which is
sometimes called the “governmental politics” or “politics” model), are standard
tools in political science today.
The Organizational Process Model does not appear to fit the
situation well, in part because Nixon and Kissinger were attempting to upset
the “Standard Operating Procedure” applecart with their new NSSM/NSDM
process. And the elements of the CBW
review that do fit the Organizational Process Model also fit the Bureaucratic
Politics Model. (As noted above, the
models are complementary, and a number of scholars have merged aspects of OPM
into BPM.[911]) On the other hand, BPM does seem to be a good
fit, so I will focus on the application of BPM to the review.
(The reader should note that, in this chapter, I am
reconfiguring information from previous chapters to test it against the BPM
theory. Déjà vu may result.)
APPLYING THE
BUREAUCRATIC POLITICS MODEL
Again, in the BPM, the key question is “who?” That is, one starts by looking at the players
and their characteristics such as their goals in the game, their degrees of
influence over the outcome of the game, and the moves they made in the
game. On one level or another, there
were hundreds of participants in the renunciation decision; I have decided to
focus on five elements: the holdover staffers and PSAC members; Nixon and
Kissinger; Melvin Laird (with David Packard); the PSAC subcommittee; and the
Joint Chiefs of Staff.
Holdovers:
Many staff members at the Arms Control and Disarmament
Agency, the State Department, and the NSC, and a number of members of the PSAC
subcommittee were holdovers from the Johnson administration and even from the
Kennedy administration. Many were around
when the PSAC looked at the issue earlier (in 1961-64, if J.D. Watson’s report
is true) and during the time of the review initiated by ACDA and National
Security Advisor McGeorge Bundy (November 1963 to January 1969). Many of the staffers came into the government
at a time when arms control ideology was a driving force in international
relations – indeed, anyone who joined, say, ACDA in the 1960s was probably
joining precisely to promote policies based on that worldview. Many of the PSAC members from that time were
affiliated with science-themed political organizations that shared this
ideology, and owed their selection to that affiliation.
Together with the Defense Department and the Joint Chiefs,
they had created an agreement that would have virtually shut down the BW
program and applied a no-first-use policy to CWs. But the Soviet invasion of
Even without the momentum from the earlier, aborted review, a
CBW review may have been necessitated that year by the need to respond to the
draft BW ban that the British planned to submit in mid-1969.
By the time a memo from Defense Secretary Laird, asking for a
CBW review, arrived on Kissinger’s desk, there was already a memo there from
the NSC staff presenting questions that would become NSSM-59. In fact, according to Halperin, the Laird
memo and the draft set of questions were presented to Kissinger in the same
package.
Nixon and Kissinger:
As noted, Nixon was probably motivated to a great degree by the
desire to go down in history as a peacemaker and as someone who limited the WMD
threat, and Kissinger was apparently motivated to some degree by peer
pressure. That said, Nixon and Kissinger
functioned as one decision-making entity to the degree that we can examine them
as a single player in the game. David
Rothkopf wrote that “Nixon and Kissinger cannot fully be seen as separate
characters. They were to a large extent
two parts of a whole, complementing each other, augmenting each other, often
infuriating each other, and in the end creating together the smallest, most
powerful most brilliant, and sometimes – thanks largely to the paranoid and
‘strange’ Richard Nixon – most dysfunctional inner circle of all those that
shaped and implemented the international policies of the world’s most powerful
nation.”[912]
Nixon and Kissinger sought to reduce the defense burden on
the American people through the Nixon Doctrine (shifting the burden to allies
for their own defense), playing the
They sought to turn these concepts into policy through a new
decision-making system that would give them, not the bureaucracy, control over
the availability of options. Preliminary
decisions would be made by interagency and interdepartmental groups that,
without exception, were either chaired by Kissinger or directed their papers to
groups chaired by Kissinger. Even while
Nixon and Kissinger maintained the illusion of commitment to the interagency
process, they would take power from the Ivy League liberals at CIA and their
counterparts, the “impossible fags” (Nixon’s words), at the State
Department. They would even shut out the
regular White House staff from the NSC’s work, going so far as to take away the
NSC staff’s Mess privileges in order to limit contact between the two
groups. As for the military, Nixon and
Kissinger would so isolate the Joint Chiefs of Staff from the foreign policy
process that the Chiefs put a spy, Charles Radford, on Kissinger’s staff.
The biological weapons issue was one in which Kissinger
generally had little interest and about which he had little knowledge. But, when the NSC staff’s draft questions and
Laird’s request for a CBW review arrived on Kissinger’s desk, Nixon and Kissinger
were presented with an opportunity: With one stroke, they could take a painless
step toward relation of tensions with the Soviets – painless in the sense of
provoking little high-level opposition from the military and, it seemed,
producing little or no threat to American security. They could open to door to future strategic
arms talks with the Soviets about weapons that really mattered (i.e.,
nukes). And, it was believed, they could
encourage the Soviets to exercise restraint in their own CBW program,
especially the BW part.
The issue also gave them a chance to grab some of the
Pentagon’s power, setting a precedent for future dealing with the Pentagon, and
to show the bureaucracy that Nixon and Kissinger were in charge and would not
be slowed by bureaucratic inertia.
(Ironically, the bureaucracy outside of the Chemical Corps, DoD
research, and the State Department’s Bureau of Politico-Military Affairs was
almost entirely anti-BW, so Nixon and Kissinger were actually giving them what
they wanted and had failed to obtain.)
And taking a pro-peace stand on the issue would improve the world image
of Nixon and of the
The pluses of a BW ban so outweighed the minuses, from the
Nixon/Kissinger perspective, that, once the decision had been made to review
CBW policy, it is likely that only one thing could have stood in the way of a
BW ban: Nixon and Kissinger being presented with a strong argument that a BW
ban would pose a threat to U.S. national security. And Melvin Laird would make such a
development nearly impossible.
Melvin Laird (together
with his deputy, David Packard):
The Secretary of Defense had served 16 years on the defense
appropriations subcommittee, and had seen more than he wished to see of
military spending that was based on inertia or on the need for politicians to
bring the bacon home to their constituents or to their campaign
contributors. The CBW program and its BW
component had grown year after year, seemingly without supervision.
As a politician – not, say, a career national security
analyst or member of the military – Laird had, as a high priority, helping his
president overcome tremendous political problems to get reelected. He was well aware that any money saved from
military programs could be used for domestic programs that were more likely to
bring voters into the Nixon camp. At a
time when the
Laird had to deal with a Congress controlled by the
opposition party, with increasing pressure on the CBW issue, especially from
Senator William Fulbright (D-Arkansas) and Representative Richard “Max”
McCarthy (D-New York), and it appeared that giving up BWs would earn him points
with anti-CBW members of Congress and with other members of an increasingly
anti-military political elite. Laird had
concluded that the CBW issue was, politically, a “tar baby.”[914] Why not get out of the BW part while the
opportunity presented itself?
Laird’s top priority was the Safeguard ballistic missile
defense system, which was hanging by a thread.
(In fact, it would survive a Senate vote only with Vice President Agnew
breaking a tie.) Laird needed a bone to
throw Congress and he needed to show that he was not a rubberstamp for the
military.
Laird knew that the Defense Department needed clarity on the
CBW issue. Indeed, it had been seeking a
clear policy for years. (Ironically,
considering the outcome, some in the military wanted a review so that they
could make the case for a stronger
CBW program.) Just before Nixon and
Laird took office, agreement on a policy had been reached among State, ACDA,
Defense, and JCS, but the agreement was scuttled by the Pentagon, purportedly
to give the new president a chance to implement his own ideas. ISA’s director of Policy Plans and NSC
Affairs, William Lemos, told Laird in the first few weeks of the Nixon
administration that a new CBW study was needed.
Meanwhile, it seemed that the only people who wanted BWs were
those in the Chemical Corps who had a vested interested in the program; support
for BW in the rest of the Army, except for among weapons researchers, was
lukewarm at best, and support in the rest of the military was nonexistent. And, one might assume, even the Chemical
Corps would accept a BW ban if it was necessary so as to resist the Soviet
proposal for a ban on chemical and
biological weapons.
As noted, Laird sent Kissinger a memo asking for a review of
the CBW issue – although it appears that a review would have taken place
anyway, due to the work of holdover staffers from the Johnson administration.
Later, as the review progressed, Laird noted that autonomous
groups were making their own contributions to the NSSM process, and he saw the
process as out of control, with bureaucrats in charge and the principals
relegated to a secondary role. (Of
course, if the idea was to preserve options so that they reached the NSC
principals’ meeting for consideration – postponing the resolution of conflicts
so that the principals could weigh in on them – the process may have been
working precisely as Nixon and Kissinger intended.[915]) In an effort to restore the principals’
authority, Laird demanded that principals review papers before they were finalized, and he would lead the way in doing
so. He, together with his deputy
Packard, not some underling, would make the decision on military options.
Along with the original version of the military options paper
from the JCS and the State Department’s Bureau of Politico-Military Affairs,
Laird and Packard read the OSA report[916]
and the PSAC subcommittee report, both of which trashed the BW idea. The two men were, it appears, outraged at
what they perceived as the military’s attempt to protect its own BW turf. So they ordered the pro-BW draft of the
military options report withdrawn and re-assigned to ISA, which had little time
to re-do the report and little or no expertise on BW. (ISA, wanting to please the bosses who liked
the PSAC subcommittee report and seeking to avoid debate between its own
holdovers and new appointees, and lacking time and BW expertise, simply took
the PSAC report and stole from it.)
In addition to eliminating from the discussion the views of
the CBW supporters in the military and in State’s BPMA, and besides giving the
PSAC subcommittee report double the weight it would otherwise have had, Laird’s
action effectively short-circuited the intelligence review, by creating a delay
that provided time for differences on intelligence on Soviet capabilities to be
ironed out (or, arguably, dumbed down) in advance of the principals’ meeting.
By mid-August, Laird had publicly differentiated CW from
BW. (He did so for the first time 12
days after expressing support for a strong CBW program. What happened in between is a mystery. In the words of two different sources who
spoke to Paul G. Conway for his dissertation, “Somebody got to Laird.”[917] Or, perhaps, his change of heart was simply a
reflection of his decision, with Packard, to accept the arguments of the OSA
and PSAC reports; perhaps it was the authors of those reports who “got to”
him.)
By mid-October, Laird had produced a memorandum calling for
an end to the BW program. Once the memo
was leaked to The New York Times,
survival of the BW program was highly unlikely.
If even the Secretary of Defense didn’t want these weapons, how could
anyone publicly support them?
The PSAC subcommittee:
The PSAC subcommittee was made up of scientist-activists, all
of whom had taken anti-CBW positions or were affiliated with organizations that
had done so, and scientists with no known pre-existing position on CBW
issues. No known proponents of CBW were
members. Those who made presentations to
the group were, likewise, a mix of anti-CBW activists (or members of anti-CBW
groups) and those with no known position.
The chairman of the group, Ivan Bennett, had previously
determined, in meetings with Albert Hayward of the Defense Department and
Bowman Cutter of ACDA, that BWs were indefensible militarily and that the three
men should work together to get the U.S. to renounce the weapons. Bennett also served as a member of the U.N.’s
Committee of Experts that was reaching the conclusion that BWs were a danger to
the world with no positive attributes.
In October, he was to give a speech to the NAS that could be reasonably
interpreted as calling on scientists to tailor their work to achieve the policy
goal of a BW ban. (I am not suggesting
that Bennett encouraged scientists to lie, but that he encouraged them to cross
the ethical line that separates science from policy.)
The PSAC report set forth an argument for the military
infeasibility of BWs and for their elimination – a conclusion that was
inevitable, given the makeup of the committee, the experts brought forth before
it, the strong beliefs of its chairman, and his strong intention to promote a
BW renunciation.
The Joint Chiefs of
Staff:
The military, as represented by the Joint Chiefs of Staff,
got itself into a difficult position by agreeing to a virtual shutdown of the
BW program, then reneging on the agreement in the hopes of getting a better
deal from the incoming Nixon administration.
Throughout 1969, as anti-CBW forces won the public relations war without
significant resistance, the military defended the BW program with less and less
effectiveness.
In effect, through the machinations detailed above, without
the need for a word being spoken, CBW advocates and opponents had worked out a
deal: BWs would be eliminated, and CWs kept for now. Arms control advocates knew that an attempt
to get a complete CBW ban would make the military dig in its heels; the
military knew that an attempt to save BWs could cost them defoliants,
riot-control gases, and the strategically important CWs, which were far better
understood (having been used in combat a half-century earlier) and which
represented ten times as big a program as BWs.
Indeed, intransigence on BWs could cost the military in areas far
removed from CBW, such as in ballistic missile defense.
The JCS presentation at the NSC principals’ meeting paid lip
service to the idea of maintaining a BW program, but actually reflected the
informal deal that had been reached. By
the time the participants walked in the door for the meeting, the game was
almost over.
At the NSC meeting – that is, the meeting of NSC principals –
the President, according to the agenda, was to call on Kissinger, then
Secretary of State William Rogers, then General Wheeler of the JCS, and then,
possibly, the U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, the science advisor, and,
to discuss arms control issues and the British draft, Deputy ACDA Director
Philip J. Farley. The meeting, which was
described as tense, allowed only ten minutes for Wheeler’s entire presentation.
The official JCS position presented by Wheeler was that BWs
should be subject to a no-first-use policy; all options for CWs should be
maintained (or, as a fallback position, CWs would be no-first-use); the British
draft was flawed with regard to verification; and U.S. ratification of the
Geneva Protocol would set a bad precedent regarding the first use of nuclear
weapons. Wheeler’s presentation, the
only pro-BW expression at the NSC meeting, was, as noted above, perfunctory,
made without enthusiasm and almost in passing, and, from the outset, known by
all participants to represent a doomed position. The entire JCS position was rejected out of
hand by the group, with the exception of issues involving herbicides and
incapacitating chemicals other than the hallucinogen BZ.
After the decision was made to renounce BWs, seek
ratification of the Geneva Protocol, etc., the JCS had only one remaining point
on which it could bargain – whether to submit a reclama (request for
reconsideration), which might have undercut the renunciation. To ensure that the military accepted Nixon’s
final decision, NSDM-35 (the policy memo) threw the military a bone, allowing
research on offensive BW to the extent necessary to produce defenses such as
vaccines and protective gear.
On the afternoon of the day of the NSC principals’ meeting,
Kissinger told Paul Doty, according to Kissinger’s notes, that “alot [sic] of
blood” had been spilled to get the final result.[918] That was, it is fair to say, an exaggeration.
THE UNKNOWABLE GAME OF
POLITICS
As Graham T. Allison noted, “Men share power. Men differ concerning what must be done. The differences matter. This milieu necessitates that policy be
resolved by politics. What the nation
does is sometimes the result of the triumph of one group over others. More often, however, different groups pulling
in different directions yield a resultant distinct from what anyone
intended. What moves the chess pieces is
not simply the reasons which support a course of action, nor the routines of
organizations which enact an alternative, but the power and skill of proponents
and opponents of the action in question.”[919]
Politics is a game in which the players have extremely
limited information. In a political
campaign, the campaign manager for a candidate understands to a moderate degree
the part of the campaign that he or she directly controls, and understands to
some degree the efforts of allied individuals and groups and of the opposing
campaign and its allies. But most of
what happens is “under the radar” – unknown even to the campaign manager, even
after the campaign is over and the numerical results can be analyzed. And each candidate knows less than his or her
campaign manager.[920] The candidate who wins doesn’t understand
fully why he or she won, and the candidate who lost never really knew what hit
’em.
Allison took the title of his book analyzing the Cuban
Missile Crisis, Essence of Decision,
from President Kennedy, who noted: “The essence of ultimate decision remains
impenetrable to the observer – often indeed to the decider himself.”[921] It is clear that neither Nixon nor Kissinger,
nor anyone else, fully appreciated the machinations that took the
The work that led to
That’s why the time frame of my analysis began at a point
before NSSM-59 was issued, before Nixon and Kissinger took office, before the
first anti-CBW campaign known to the general public, and before the beginning
of the U.S. biological weapons program.
That’s why I began the main part of my story with the involvement of the
American Association of Scientific Workers and Theodor Rosebury.
Today, we are just beginning to discover the principles of
nonproliferation and of the rollback of existing WMD programs.[922] The lesson of the
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
The toxins ‘slip up,’ the BWC, and creation of the Soviet BW monopoly
The Nixon renunciation announcement did not address the
ambiguous status of toxins, poisons that are derived from living things but are
not themselves alive. To critics, it
seemed that the Nixon administration and the military were leaving themselves a
loophole.
At the time, the
Prior to the Nixon announcement, most critics of CBW
considered toxins to be biological weapons, partly for scientific reasons
(toxin production is more closely related to BW production than to CW
production) and partly for political reasons (weapons classified as biological
were, at least in the short term, more likely to be banned).
Toxins could quite legitimately have been considered
chemical, rather than biological weapons, because they do not multiply in the
host, and because their use is more like that of chemical weapons. Indeed, much of the confusion that arose
later in the Yellow Rain case stemmed from the fact that, in that case, toxins
were mixed in cocktails with chemical weapons.
However, at the time of the Nixon renunciation, anti-CBW advocates
controlled the terms of the debate, so the outcome of the “Are toxins BWs?”
controversy was never in doubt. There
was no chance that Congress would have allowed the so-called toxin loophole to
stay open.
On December 10, the United Nations General Assembly passed a
resolution sponsored by
However, of the U.N. members who were parties to the
protocol, only 53 percent supported the resolution.[925]
The problem had been noted, and a new NSSM process begun to
deal with the toxin issue, when the controversy became public. That was on December 16, when Robert M. Smith
reported in The New York Times that,
despite Nixon’s BW ban, the Defense Department was about to resume toxin
production at Pine Bluff Arsenal. This
was being done over the objection of ACDA and the State Department.[926] Bennett, who chaired the science group, was
accused of being duped by the military.
W. Bowman Cutter of ACDA defended Bennett: “Now, the decision, if you
will to treat toxins as chemicals was made by the committee as a whole during
the January session. I was not at the
January session. But I know their
discussion. Listening to the discussion
and participating in the discussion in the June session, I know there was
absolutely no opposition on the part of anyone to listing toxins as chemical
warfare agents. I am sure it was not a
plot on the part of Dr. Bennett.”[927]
Laird said, “There is no disagreement as far as the
Department of State and the Department of Defense are concerned in this
area. There is no disagreement between
the President’s Scientific Advisor and the Department of Defense in this
area. We have all taken the position
that toxins are in the field of chemical warfare. This is the position taken by the 14 nation
commission that advised the Secretary General of the U.N. concerning chemical
warfare and the whole field of biological warfare.”[928] Laird was correct: The United Nations’
Committee of Experts – on which Ivan Bennett, chairman of the NSC review
science group, had served – considered toxin weapons to be chemical weapons.[929] On the other hand, the U.K. Draft Convention
on Microbiological Weapons prohibited the possession of bacteria for the
manufacture of toxin weapons.[930]
During the period of confusion, scientists at
Why did the NSC review fail to deal with the toxin
issue? Accounts differ in detail but
generally agree that the toxin issue was overlooked in the rush to get NSSM-59
and NSDM-35 completed.
Based on interviews with government officials in 1973 and
1974, Forrest Russel Frank wrote that, during discussions of policy options
before and after the November 18, 1969 NSC meeting, representatives of the
Office of Defense Research and Engineering and ACDA’s Bureau of Science and
Technology concluded that the BW/toxin production facility at Pine Bluff would
have to be shut down. However, they
failed to make that point clear to the NSC staff. Because DDR&E and ACDA personnel were in
agreement on the toxins-as-BWs issue, the issue was not discussed at the
November 18 NSC meeting, and NSC staff was too busy getting the report done to
raise the issue.[932]
Based on an interview with Michael A. Guhin, Jonathan Tucker
has reported that, “Although discussions by the interagency group and the NSC
staff had touched on toxins, the topic was considered too arcane to include in
the final ‘issues for decision’ package for NSC principals, and Guhin was
ordered to delete it.”[933]
(After the announcement of the decision
to include toxins in the renunciation, Kissinger – identified publicly only as
a “White House spokesman” – told reporters, “Quite seriously, the problem with
the toxin was that because it is produced biologically and acts chemically,
because we do not have large stocks of it, it fell between the cracks. . . . It
was a slip up.”)[934]
In a December 18 memo, Guhin noted
that “The issue is not whether toxins should come under the chemical
warfare program or the biological research program, as this would only confuse
the established technical definition.
“Keeping the definition of toxins as
chemicals, the real issue is what should the toxin program be when
considered on its own merits as a separate weapons system, and how would this
relate to the President's decisions and our association with the principles and
objectives of the UK Draft Convention. . . .
“Whatever the decisions on this
matter, I believe that the primary objective should be to avoid any unnecessary
erosion of the President's announced decisions on chemical warfare and
biological research.” (Emphasis in the original.)[935]
In a December 22 memo, DuBridge
agreed with the Defense Department’s classification of toxin weapons as
chemical, but said the decision to include it in the renunciation should be
judged on its own merits.[936]
On December 27, Representative
McCarthy spoke in
On December 31, Kissinger issued
NSSM-85 ordering an IPMG study to be completed by January 16.
The early deadline was necessitated,
it seems, by the threat to the President’s credibility on the entire CBW
issue. Guhin wrote in a memorandum that
it was “important to preserve international credence that the policy on
biological agents will indeed be implemented.”[938]
But such a deadline left little time
for serious consideration of the issue, so Kissinger turned to Matthew Meselson
for a paper analyzing toxins as weapons.
While Meselson was preparing the
paper, the IPMG met on January 7 and 10 to discuss the draft options
paper. On January 21, the IPMG
submitted its memo, 30 pages, to the NSC staff presenting the pros and cons of
the three main policy options, which were –
I.
Keeping
entirely open the option to produce and employ toxin warfare agents.
II.
Not
producing toxins now, but keeping open the possibility of producing them if a
method were developed to make them by chemical synthesis, without the need for
production in bacteria.
III.
Giving
up toxin weapons entirely and working only on defensive measures against them,
such as vaccines and more effective gas masks.[939]
Consistent with their earlier
position, the State Department and ACDA supported Option III. As Jonathan Tucker wrote, “the limited
military advantages of maintaining a toxin warfare option were clearly
outweighed by the political liabilities: diluting the favorable political
impact of the president's November 25 announcement, undercutting international
support for the UK draft convention, complicating efforts to obtain the
Senate's consent to ratification of the Geneva Protocol, and making it harder
to limit toxin warfare programs by other states.”[940]
State and ACDA were afraid that a
failure to renounce toxins would undermine
The Defense Department continued to
show a split between the military and civilian leadership. The Joint Chiefs of Staff supported Option I,
keeping options open, so that toxins could be used in retaliation, as a
deterrent, or as a bargaining chip for a later toxin weapons ban. In addition, the military was concerned about
a rush to judgment on the toxins issue, specifically on the issue of military
utility.[942] Laird and Packard supported Option II,
keeping CW options open only with regard to their production by nonbiological
methods.[943] Still, they noted that any restriction on
toxins beyond the restrictions that existed for chemical weapons would be a
major
In a memo to Kissinger, Packard wrote:
“I recognize that for the near term, three to five years, there is a similarity
between Options II and III since we now lack the technical ability to create
toxins through chemical synthesis. From
the military point of view, I further recognize the JCS concerns. However, through the near term we will retain
a deterrent capability against chemical warfare with other types of
chemicals. These other chemicals will
also provide a capability for retaliation as necessary. For the longer term, beyond five years, I
feel that there is little difference between Option I recommended by the JCS
and Option II, the recommendation of the Secretary and myself. In that time
period, we expect to have the ability to chemically synthesize toxins, thus
meeting the JCS military concerns.”[945]
On January 22, Meselson submitted an 8-page paper, “What
Policy for Toxins?,”[946] in
which he argued that –
- The
- Instead,
the decision to reserve the right to use toxins in retaliation and the
decision to develop toxin weapons should be made based on policy
objectives related to (a) military requirements, (b) arms control and
nonproliferation, and (c) maintaining the President’s credibility and
authority.
- “Today,
lethal toxins are militarily inferior in almost every important respect to
our standardized lethal chemical agents, the nerve agents.”[947]
Future technology might allow a given quantity of toxin weapons to achieve
the same effect as much larger amounts of CWs in a target area; “However,
this reduction of logistic requirements in a major war zone is not so
great as to provide an overwhelming argument for having toxins instead of
nerve agent.”[948] Toxins “do not penetrate the skin and
therefore would not force enemy troops to wear protective equipment as
cumbersome as the suits required for defense against nerve agents.”[949]
- The
- Proliferation
of toxin weapons would be disadvantageous to the
- “At
the strategic level, the hazard for us is much more serious. Toxins could open up a whole new
dimension of strategic threat. For
strategic purposes, their potential for large area coverage per pound of
agent could make them more like germ weapons than like chemicals.”[952]
- Toxin-production
technology is indistinguishable from technology for producing bacterial
weapons, so that any government producing toxin weapons could be accused
credibly of producing BWs. “An
active
- A
toxin weapons program would be seen as inconsistent with the renunciation
of biological weapons. A Washington Post editorial on
January 9 noted: “The revulsion generally felt against biological warfare
arises from the conviction that disease should not be used as a weapon of
war. Surely the President did not
mean that, while a disease induced by living bacteria is out of bounds, a
disease induced by a toxin is acceptable.
He can scarcely have renounced typhoid only to embrace botulism.”[953]
- Allowing
the toxin loophole would undermine the President’s credibility and the
perception of his control over the military, while renouncing toxin
weapons would make the President’s stand against disease-related weapons
unequivocal and convincing.
- To
the extent that the Washington Post’s
view is “shared by a large segment of responsible opinion in the United
States and abroad,” a decision to “maintain a toxin weapons program would
rob the President of the initiative he has gained and would generate
cynicism and disaffection amongst persons who would otherwise come
strongly to the support of his policy.”[954]
On January 29, the NSC review group examined the summary
report and provided the IMPG with instructions for final revisions.[955]
The NSC staff then put together a memorandum presenting the
three options, with boxes for each so the President could indicate his
decision. Guhin later told Jonathan
Tucker that Kissinger leaned toward Option II (allowing the future
nonbiological synthesis of toxins) but did not feel strongly about the matter
and so let the NSC staff recommendation, for Option III, to go through.[956] Guhin told Tucker, “Nixon's political
instincts told him that any retention of toxins would be hard to reconcile with
his earlier decision. The distinction
between biological and chemical means of production was simply too fine a
point.”
Kissinger’s comments during his not-for-attribution briefing
for reporters indicated that the pursuit of détente may also have been a factor
in the toxins decision.[957]
Guhin’s
You are scheduled to see Matt
Meselson early Wednesday evening. We
understand that the meeting will be devoted primarily to possible Senate
strategy regarding ratification of the Geneva Protocol and to the subjects of
irritant agents (CS or “tear gas”) and herbicides. . . .
-- He has sent you a few letters over
the past months, several of which contained background information and data on
these subjects. Particularly,
during the NSSM 59 study on chemical and biological policy, he sent you a paper
on “The U.S. and the Geneva Protocol” (Tab C).
-- He recently sent you (January 22)
a paper entitled “What Policy for Toxins?” [Since the subject may come up in
your discussion, we have prepared a very brief outline of the paper’s main
points (Tab A).]
Purpose of the Visit [Based upon recent conversations and
his papers]
-- His main concern will probably
center abut the Administration’s proposed method of handling its position on
irritant agents (CS) and, to a lesser degree perhaps, herbicides used for
defoliation and anti-crop with respect to the Protocol.[958]
Interestingly, although Kissinger was meeting with Meselson
only three days before the announcement of the toxins decision, toxins were
barely mentioned in the preparatory memo.
Guhin did attach Meselson’s January 22 toxins paper, along with a
one-page summary of the paper by staff, but that appears to have been done
mainly to allow Kissinger to thank Meselson for the input and to save him from
embarrassment in case Meselson wanted to discuss it. Indeed, it seems likely that all key
decisions related to the toxin renunciation had been made before Meselson’s
memo arrived.
Kissinger did meet with Meselson regarding the issues of
Geneva Protocol ratification and U.S. use of nonlethal chemicals in the Vietnam
War, so he was clearly considered a key figure in that debate.
Finally, on
The day after the
THE BIOLOGICAL WEAPONS
CONVENTION
While the Senate wrangled over ratification of the Geneva
Protocol, progress was made on an international ban on biological weapons.
Nixon, in his
After the
Nevertheless, ISA had problems with the draft convention’s
lack of verification provisions – including verification of stockpile
destruction, verification of research conversion to peaceful purposes, and its
reliance for complaint resolution on the United Nations Security Council, a
possibly unfriendly forum for the U.S. and one in which the Soviet Union
possessed veto power. Even if, as some
arms control advocates argued, a BW agreement needed no verification because no
rational government would have such a program, an agreement without
verification would set a precedent for future agreements on things that really
mattered, like nuclear weapons. In
addition, ISA was concerned that the agreement would be too easy to withdraw
from, and that it would not require allocution (a statement confessing past
activities).[963]
ACDA disagreed on a number of these points, asserting that
the
Roshchin admitted that the Soviets’ proposed treaty would be
impossible to police: “Verification, for instance in the form of control posts,
on-site inspection and so on, would be simply impossible to exercise from the
practical point of view since controllers would have to be assigned to
practically every laboratory.” He proposed
that each government guarantee “that no industrial enterprise, no citizen of
that country is engaged in the development and production of chemical and
bacteriological weapons and that, it goes without saying, no stockpiles of such
weapons are being accumulated in the arsenal of that country.”[968]
James F. Leonard Jr., head of the
Meanwhile, regarding the Geneva Protocol: On
Riot control gases and
herbicides continued to be controversial.
An ad hoc “Scientists Committee on CBW” sprung up to oppose
the reservations, lobbying Congress and scientific and science-themed
organizations. One of the targets of
that lobbying effort was the American Chemical Society, which had played a key
role in blocking the Geneva Protocol a half-century earlier. The Scientists Committee, led by radical
activist J.B. Neilands,[971]
held symposia and seminars at various society meetings and conducted a
letter-writing campaign aimed at the society’s public affairs committee. In September 1970, the ACS endorsed the
protocol.[972]
In February 1971, Nixon urged the Geneva Disarmament
Conference to support a treaty prohibiting biological weapons, with the
inclusion of chemical weapons, as the Soviets insisted.[973]
In March 1971, the Senate Foreign Relations Committee,
chaired by Senator J. William Fulbright (D-Arkansas), held hearings on Geneva
Protocol ratification. A witness at the
hearings, McGeorge Bundy, former National Security Advisor to Presidents
Kennedy and Johnson, noted that the use of riot gas and herbicides in
Also testifying was Matthew Meselson, who attacked the
reservation idea, declaring that “The example of the world’s most modern army
using gas for the first time in 45 years and deploying a whole panoply of newly
developed gas munitions cannot help but stimulate the interest of foreign military
establishments in the utility of similar weapons. Military planners in other countries would be
remiss in their duty if they did not carefully study the use of riot gas in
Thus, opponents of the reservation contradicted one another;
they argued that the use of nonlethal chemicals by the
Bundy, Meselson, and other reservation opponents wanted a
delay rather than ratification with the reservation, and they got it. Fulbright and his committee, having waited
seven months to hold hearings, and then, after six days of hearings, laid the
protocol aside so the Nixon administration could reconsider its position.[976] Anti-Defense Department members of the Senate
refused to approve the protocol with reservation, and since ratification would
require a two-thirds vote, reservation opponents were in a good position to
block Senate approval.
Finally, on
In
“At the time, the
The shift coincided with the opening of the 24th
Communist Party Congress in
As noted above in Chapter Twelve, The Washington Post endorsed the BWC, despite its lack of
verification, because “A simple treaty banning development, production and use
of bacteriological weapons therefore does not really require any ‘policing.’ [983]
In July 1971, during the final negotiations on the BW treaty,
the U.S. Army, after what some critics considered foot-dragging, announced its
plan for destroying the biological weapons stockpile.
Ambassador Leonard was proven correct regarding the effect of
the Soviet shift on progress toward a BW agreement. About four months later, on
Frank wrote that “the U.S. gave up considerable diplomatic
ground in the preamble [to the BWC], in articles dealing with procedures to
handle complaints, and in the article linking future negotiations on chemical
weapons control to biological weapons control.
The concessions of the
On
But the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, chaired by the
nemesis of Presidents Johnson and Nixon, J. William Fulbright, did not schedule
hearings on the BWC. The delay on
hearings has been attributed to a number of factors, including the higher priority
of hearings on the SALT agreement, the fact that the election was fast
approaching, and the belief that Fulbright was holding the BWC hostage in order
to get rid of the Geneva Protocol reservations.
By the end of 1974, Senator Fulbright, having been defeated
in a primary election, was in his final days in office. On
Finally, on December 12, the Senate Foreign Relations
Committee approved both the Geneva Protocol and the BWC. On December 16, the agreements were ratified
by the full Senate.
Interestingly, the ratification of the BWC was treated as an
afterthought to an afterthought. In the New York Times story on the committee
approval of the treaties, the BWC was not mentioned until the fourth paragraph.[986] In the Washington
Post story, it was first mentioned in the sixth and last paragraph.[987] When the full Senate voted to ratify, the L.A. Times/UPI story mentioned the BWC
in the second paragraph, ignored it for the next eight paragraphs, and then
mentioned it again in the final paragraph, which read: “Ratification of the
1925 Geneva protocol and the Geneva convention outlawing bacteriological and
toxin weapons [i.e., the BWC] came when the Senate voted on a block of four
measures at one time, an indication of how routine the Senate leadership
considered the matter.”[988]
The Washington Post and the Chicago Tribune ran truncated versions of the same UPI story.[989] The New
York Times story on final Senate approval of the Geneva Protocol and the
BWC was an Associated Press dispatch, one paragraph long.[990]
Ruttenberg wrote: “The importance of this accord [the BWC]
lies in the fact that it is the first one drafted at the Geneva Conference
which provides for the actual destruction of existing arms. Earlier accords banned the spread of weapons
from one country to another or otherwise controlled them without calling for
their elimination.”[991]
The Biological Weapons Conventions entered into force on
The great experiment – arms control ab initio, or as least as close as possible to the beginning of the
action-reaction arms race – was underway.
“EVEN JEWS” ALLOWED TO
WORK ON BWs
As noted, the BWC lacked a workable verification process,
especially with regard to potential violators like the
In 1988, William R. Graham wrote:
The 1972 Bacteriological and Toxin
Weapons Convention was ratified by the
While press reports of Soviet actions
manifestly contrary to commitments freely taken under arms control agreements
have accumulated over the past two decades,
A lack of
As noted, Ken
Alibek was the top scientist for the Soviet biological weapons program – a
massive program that was in absolute violation of the Biological Weapons Convention. In a 2001 interview, he said, “In my opinion
– and I know some people are going to be disappointed in my response – this
treaty is worthless. It isn't worth the
price of the paper it's written on.
Why? Because I believe
enforcement is impossible.”[993]
After the
Russian science writer Mark Popovskiy (or Popovsky) escaped
to the West in 1977, and in 1979 wrote of the Soviet response to
In September 1974 Academician
Ovchinnikov . . . summoned a group of biologists to the Presidium of the
Academy [of Sciences]. Those invited
were not doctors and senior academicians but included many young candidates of
science and juniors with only a first degree.
Without wasting words the vice-president [Ovchinnikov] informed them
that they were confronted by a major political challenge. The Americans had stopped work on a
superpowerful bacteriological weapon, and it was for Soviet scientists to make
the most of the opportunity. A group of
the ablest and most energetic specialists in various fields was being formed
for the purpose – who would volunteer?
It would be a storm troop, a force of marines, a biological commando, a
crack division! All the money and equipment
they wanted! No need for a higher
degree! Even Jews were eligible! The one and only objective was to come up with
a supervirulent type of virus or pathogenic microbe, and gene engineering was
an excellent method to this end. The
elite who volunteered to conduct the experiments need have no concern about
their future: degrees, state prizes, and decorations would be theirs for the
asking.[995]
The program grew to employ more than 60,000 people, according
to most accounts; former White House counterterrorism coordinator Richard
Clarke puts the number at over 100,000.[996] Biopreparat, one of at least four Soviet BW
programs, alone employed more people than the
Alibek said that “the Soviet program not only caught up with
the U.S. program, which was halted in 1969, behind which it had lagged by about
five years, but it became the most sophisticated biological weapons program in
the world by far.”[998]
By the late 1980s, the Soviets were loading anthrax and other
biological weapons into SS-18 missiles, which had multiple warheads and a range
of at least 6,000 miles.[999]
“The [Soviets’] wartime mobilization plan was to produce 300
metric tons of anthrax and load it onto weapons in a 220-day mobilization
period in preparation for all-out war,” said Andy Webber, an adviser to the
Defense Department’s Threat Reduction program.
“That would be enough, just at this one plant [in Stepnogorsk,
Khazakhstan], to wipe out billions and billions of people.”[1000]
Richard Clarke later wrote that “the friendly senior Soviet
officials with whom we were negotiating arms control treaties had known all
about the illegal [BW] program and the efforts to keep it secret from us.”[1001]
Richard Spertzel, former head of BW inspections for the U.N.
Special Commission on Iraq (UNSCOM), said it was simply assumed that countries
would comply with the BWC. “I think it
was highly anticipated that other countries would indeed welcome such a treaty
and probably comply with it – a high degree of naïveté, certainly, in
retrospect,” he said.[1002]
Dr. Christopher J. Davis, a
British intelligence officer, wrote: “The demise of the biological weapons
capability of the United States in 1969 and the advent of the Biological and
Toxin Weapons Convention in 1972 caused governments in the West to go to sleep
to the possibility of biological weapons development throughout the rest of the
world, as technically knowledgeable workers were transferred and retired,
intelligence desks were closed down, and budgets were cut.”[1003]
It would be wrong to suggest that no one in the
In fact, the 1980 Republican Party platform, on which
President Reagan was elected, accused the Soviets of violating the BW ban; it
mentioned, by name, the Soviet city of
During the Reagan Administration, Secretary of State
Alexander Haig and his successor, George Shultz, publicly accused the Soviets
of BWC violations involving Yellow Rain, an apparent toxin weapon used by
communist forces in
But, inside and outside the government, many supporters of
arms control and many leading scientists expressed skepticism, even cynicism;
the Administration’s charges were characterized as disinformation designed to
undermine the Soviets and the arms control process. The anthrax outbreak at
Over time, the West learned details of the Soviet
program. Arkady Shevchenko, a top Soviet
diplomat and personal adviser to Foreign Minister Andrei Gromyko, defected in
1978; he reported that the Soviets signed the BWC with the intention of
breaking it.[1006]
Vladimir Pasechnik, who had been in charge of the
In 1992, Russian President Boris Yeltsin admitted the
existence of the Soviet program, and admitted that the anthrax outbreak at
After Pasechnik defected to the British in 1989, the
In a PBS interview, Baker said that, in late 1990 or early
1991, he asked Soviet Foreign Minister Eduard Shevardnadze about the Soviet
program. “I think I recall him saying,
‘We've checked into this, and we are distressed to learn or embarrassed to
learn that there has indeed been some activity going on.’” Baker
was asked: What about [Soviet President] Gorbachev? Can you imagine that he was
also kept in the dark on this? “I
really don't have the answer to that, because I tend to believe that it is
possible and that is scary,” Baker replied.[1009]
“WEIRD OR OUT OF THEIR
MIND”
Ultimately, even those analysts who believed the Soviets were
violating the BWC were shocked by the size and scope of the Soviet program.
“We underestimated how big this problem is,” the State
Department’s Gary Crocker said in a PBS interview. “. . . [W]e thought we had a pretty good
handle on it, and we were certainly more right than others who said they didn’t
have a program, but it was so massive, such capacity that it was
unimaginable. Industry people who have
visited those facilities couldn’t believe you would build that much fermentation
capacity, for example. That they had
worked on so many agents . . . [W]e’d known about plague, anthrax, botulism
toxin, various fevers, different things, but not that many and that they had
genetically engineered them, that they had gone to extensive lengths to study
them.”
Crocker was asked: Did you realize that they had weaponized
bacteriological and viral agents so that they could be sent successfully and
efficiently by intercontinental ballistic missiles? “I can say back, in over 20 years, only a few
people ever talked about that and they were considered weird or out of their
mind.”[1010]
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
Summary and conclusion
A quick
summary of key points from the preceding chapters:
By 1942,
Following
Germany’s surrender in World War II, scientist-activists from the “atomic
scientists’ movement,” ridden with guilt over their role in creating nuclear
weapons, sought to bring about nuclear disarmament and to lessen tensions
between the U.S. and the U.S.S.R. Their
efforts led to the creation of a number of science-themed political
organizations that included not only atomic scientists but biologists and
scientists from other fields.
One of
these organizations was Pugwash, which was dominated from its inception by
representatives of the Soviet bloc working in tandem with participants from the
West who were sympathetic to the
In 1959,
the U.S. Army launched a public relations campaign to emphasize the
humanitarian aspects of chemical and biological weapons – that, for example, a
temporarily incapacitating illness caused by such a weapon was more humane than
a lethal bomb or bullet. A member of Congress,
Robert Kastenmeier, was offended by the campaign and sparked a congressional
debate over the issue for the first time in a generation. Protests were conducted at
By 1960,
many opinion leaders and policymakers in the
In the
Vietnam War, the
In 1968,
the death of some 6,400 sheep in
In the
following year, several public-relations disasters heightened opposition to the
U.S. CBW program, including a nerve gas accident in Okinawa that sparked
significant protests, reports of forward-basing of chemical weapons in West
Germany, and the exposure of a plan to ship chemical weapons across the country
to be loaded on ships which would then be sunk to the ocean floor. A congressman named Richard McCarthy, working
with an activist-journalist named Seymour Hersh, worked to expose every
potentially embarrassing detail of the U.S. CBW program.
Meanwhile,
the
The new
president, Richard Nixon, and his National Security Advisor, Henry Kissinger,
designed a new system for national security decision-making. They attempted to overcome bureaucratic
inertia and to present the president with clear policy options, but alienated
members of the military to the extent that the Joint Chiefs later felt it
necessary to put a spy on the National Security Council staff.
A new
review of CBW policy was initiated, with the work divided among four sectors –
diplomatic, intelligence, scientific, and military.
The
diplomatic review was marred by the desire, later stated publicly by Nixon and
Kissinger, to use the review as an opportunity to make a gesture to the Soviets
in pursuit of
The
intelligence review was marred by a decline in quality from earlier reviews,
based in part on the loss through attrition of Soviet bloc émigrés serving as
analysts, in part on a cultural shift away among intelligence analysts, and in
part on excessive second-guessing by analysts.
In addition, Nixon may have been influenced by disinformation from two
Soviet agents purportedly working for the FBI.
The
scientific review was marred by extreme bias, in that (the record strongly
suggests) the only persons knowledgeable about CBW who participated in the
review were anti-CBW activists, and in that the report, which was intended to
cover technical aspects of CBW, presented policy recommendations in the guise
of scientific analysis. The review
denigrated the feasibility of BWs as weapons.
A military
review, which, in its original form, was in favor of a U.S. CBW program, was
aborted by Secretary of Defense Melvin Laird, who shifted responsibility for
the review to a different office which – due to the close deadline, a lack of
expertise in CBW, a desire to avoid conflict between recent appointees and
holdovers, and a need to please superiors – based its report on the biased
scientific report.
By the
time the National Security Council met to reach a final decision on CBWs, the
plan to scuttle the BW program was in place, and there was little discussion or
debate on that point. On
The
renunciation effectively broke the deadlock that had prevented the creation of
an international agreement banning biological weapons. Having already given up its BWs, the
The debate
over
The
process that silenced one side of the CBW debate must never be repeated.
METHODOLOGY
In my
quest to identify and analyze the patterns of behavior and the sequence of
events that led to
At the
beginning, I searched the WorldWide Web, various databases in the
Databases
in the GMU system that were particularly useful in this effort were the
Lexis-Nexis Academic database, the ProQuest Research Library (especially
ProQuest Historical Newspapers), JSTOR, PubMed Central, Factiva, InfoTrac One
File, General Reference Center Gold, Expanded Academic ASAP, HeinOnline Law
Journal Library, Blackwell-Synergy, and the dissertation abstracts
database.
The
Virtual Vietnam Archive, an online database of newspaper and magazine articles
and other documents, sponsored by
I made
extensive use of Google and of two narrowly focused Google databases, Google
Scholar (which tracks academic writings) and Google Books (which tracks
books). In my search of books, I also
used Amazon.com’s database that allows Amazon visitors to search for keywords
within books; for books that refer to, or are referred to in, other books; and
for books by the same authors, on related themes, or purchased by the same
customers as books that I had already identified as important. I then used Amazon.com and its network of
used-book dealers to obtain copies of books that touched on the themes I was
developing and the issues I was examining.
Another
use I made of Google was of its “news alerts” service, which provided a daily
summary from Google of online news articles, new Web pages, blog references,
and Usenet postings mentioning the keywords I selected
I searched
the online archives of various news and political magazines, including Time, The Nation, National Review,
The New Republic, and Commentary. I also examined the online archive of the
newsletter of the Federation of American Scientists.
At the
National Archives, I examined White House documents from 1969 and early 1970
related to chemical and biological weapons, as well as some material from the
Johnson administration. And, in the
normal course of my activities, as I attended conferences and other gatherings
of people with interests in national security and BW-related issues, I
discussed my research and asked fellow participants in those gatherings to
point out important documents I might have missed or research ideas I might
have overlooked. On occasion, someone
would grant me access to his or her files on CBW-related issues.
At each
stage of my research, I plucked out additional keywords for database searches
and fed them back through the system.
Fortunately, many of the words and phrases most often used in
CBW/BW-related articles, books, and documents are unusual enough to facilitate
efficient keyword searches – for example, Meselson, Vozrozhdeniye/Vozrozhdeniya,
Pugwash, Dugway-within-20-words-of-sheep,
Laird-within-50-words-of-biological.
When
appropriate and practical, I sought the source materials cited in each article,
book, or other published resource, to add to my collection of material.
Over time,
using the feedback loop method, I assembled a large number of government
documents, published materials (mostly books and magazine, newspaper, and
journal articles), dissertations, and other writings. During a change of residence in September
2006, I inventoried my collection of material, including material on the
post-1969 period, at 38 cubic feet. As I
went through the material page by page, I created timelines and noticed certain
themes, and I began to catalog those themes: arms control, the Nixon-Kissinger
NSC reorganization, scientist-activists’ involvement in politics, views
regarding the strategic value of biological weapons, etc.
Eventually,
I narrowed the list of themes that I would develop in this dissertation. Due to constraints of time and my desire to
avoid writing a 2,000-page dissertation, material that fell outside those
themes ended up, as they say in
SUGGESTIONS FOR FURTHER RESEARCH
As topics for further research, I suggest the following:
- A
social network analysis of scientist-activists involved in arms control
and disarmament issues during the Cold War, and particularly of those
involved in the CBW issue, to determine the relative influence of various
persons and organizations.
- An
analysis of the Dugway sheep incident using an atmospheric dispersion
model to determine the likelihood of various causes.
- An
analysis of the Fedora/TopHat case to determine the bona fides of each
defector and a search of the National Archives, and possibly a series of
Freedom of Information Act requests, for material that might indicate the
degree to which Nixon was influenced in his BW decision by Fedora and
TopHat.
- An
analysis of the effect of the renunciation on the proliferation of
biological weapons, to determine whether Nixon’s decision encouraged or
discouraged proliferation.
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CURRICULUM VITAE
Steven J. Allen received his
Bachelor of Arts degree in Political Science from
He served as press secretary
to the chairman of the U.S. Senate Subcommittee on Security and Terrorism and
as vice president of The Progress and Freedom Foundation, a