fact that relevant US policy at the time was promulgated in NSC 62, approved on 17 February 1950, prior to the outbreak of the Korean War. NSC 62 stated that "[c]hemical, biological and radiological weapons will not be used by the United States except in retaliation."18 In NSC 147 ("Analysis of Possible Courses of Action in Korea") on 2 April 1953, the exact same sentence appears under the caption, "At present the following restrictions apply to UN operations." The policy was only changed on 15 March 1956, long after the end of the Korea War, in NSC 5062/1. The relevant provision in effect permitted US first use:

To the extent that the military effectiveness of the armed forces will be enhanced by their use, the United States will be prepared to use chemical and bacteriological weapons in general war. The decision as to their use will be made by the President.20

As others have noted, this represented a dramatic reversal. There was still a caveat in the phrase "in general war," but US military operations in Vietnam made use of both herbicides and tear gases.21

The second portion of the US government's response to the allegations was as important as the denials, or even more so. It was to request immediately in the United Nations an on-site investigation by a competent international organization, the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) or the World Health Organization (WHO). In his very first statement on March 4, Acheson asked the accusing nations to permit an investigation by the ICRC. Exactly one week later, Acheson sent a request directly to the ICRC, asking them to conduct an

investigation in the areas involved. During World War II, China had appealed to the ICRC to investigate its charges that Japan was employing BW in China, and in 1952 the Red Cross societies of virtually all the Soviet-bloc states had sent direct appeals to the ICRC asking it to "take action against the US atrocities." Within 24 hours, on March 12, the ICRC had applied to China and North Korea to obtain their necessary cooperation. The government of India offered to assist in an investigation, and the ICRC proposed to send a small team composed of three Swiss members, two Indians, and a Pakistani. The ICRC sent the same message again on March 28 and on March 31, and finally, for the last time, on April 10, adding that if they received no reply by April 20, they would consider their proposal to have been rejected. On April 30, the ICRC explicitly terminated its effort.22 Neither China nor North Korea ever replied directly to the ICRC. The only reply in a UN forum came on March 26, from Soviet delegate Malik, rejecting the ICRC offer. China did respond in New China News Agency broadcasts in March and April, by heaping invective on the ICRC:

The Committee's actions brand it as a most vicious and shameless accomplice and lackey of American imperialism. The purpose behind its eagerness to

investigate is obviously to find out the effectiveness of

the American aggressors' unparalleled, brutal crime and to try to whitewash the perpetrators of the crime with a worthless report. 23

China charged that the only purpose of an ICRC or WHO investigation would be the collection of intelligence to be used in evaluating the effectiveness of germ warfare. (But the ICRC was still acceptable as a propaganda platform: on 27 July 1952, Chinese delegates at an ICRC meeting in Canada put forward a motion against "the cruelties in Korea.") China and North Korea also rejected a proposal by the WHO to send assistance into epidemic areas. In July 1952, the US took the issue of an ICRC investigation to the UN Security Council. It submitted a draft resolution calling for the ICRC to carry out an investigation and to report to the UN.24 The Security Council vote was ten in favor and one—the Soviet veto— against. The US then submitted a second draft resolution which stated that "the Security Council would conclude, from the refusal of the governments and authorities making the charges to permit impartial investigation, that these charges must be presumed to be without substance and false; and would condemn the practice of fabricating and disseminating such false charges." The vote was nine in favor, one abstention, and again, a Soviet veto. There was also extensive debate in the UN General Assembly and in the UN Disarmament Commissions in 1952 and 1953, with various governments proffering their opinions.25 In some cases, e.g. Australia, governments submitted the documentation in the ISC report to teams of their own scientists and in all cases, they reported that such assessments came to the conclusion that BW had not been used—or even that, based on the evidence, the charges appeared to these observers to be ludicrous.

Throughout the UN debate in 1952 and 1953 dealing with the BW allegations, the USSR kept pressing the point that the United States had never ratified the Geneva Protocol (which prohibits the use of biological weapons and which the US did not ratify until 1975), and repeatedly called on the US to do so. The US pushed one last attempt at the UN to obtain an investigation: On 8 April 1953, the Political Committee of the UN approved a US proposal to institute a commission of investigation. The vote was 52 in favor, 5 against, and 3 abstentions. A day earlier, the USSR had suddenly and unexpectedly offered to withdraw its allegations of bacteriological warfare "as proof of its sincere striving for peace," on the condition that the United States withdraw its proposal that the United Nations launch an investigation into the allegations. Senior US officials apparently viewed the startling Soviet about-face as merely part of a "whole "be pleasant' campaign" that the USSR was pursuing following Stalin's death the previous month." On April 23, the UN General Assembly accepted the US proposal by a vote of 51 for, 5 against and 4 abstaining. On July 28, the President of the General Assembly of the UN

26

reported that the commission was unable to accomplish its task, due to the refusal of assistance from the PRC and North Korea.

Moscow's Subsequent Positions

Despite the evidence in the newly-discovered documents that Soviet officials have understood at least since 1953 that the BW allegations were fraudulent, neither Soviet officials nor Russian ones have to this day ever stated that the Korean War BW allegations were false. In fact, in 1982 and 1983 the Soviet press continued to repeat the charges that the United States had used biological weapons during the Korean War.28 In many other instances as well, the USSR utilized false allegations against the United States of preparations to use or the use of biological warfare. These were alleged in numerous separate, smaller incidents involving almost every continent on the globe until 1986-1987.29

There were, however, scattered apparent admissions by omission, or indirection. When the report of the UN Secretary General on chemical and biological weapons was published in 1969, it carried the following statement: "Since the Second World War . . . there is no military experience of the use of bacteriological (biological) agents as weapons of war."30 The UN report was a unanimous document signed by the representatives of fourteen governments, including the USSR, Hungary, Czechoslovakia, and Poland. Without specifically referring to the Korean War BW allegations, the sentence implicitly admitted that no such events had ever occurred. However, virtually no one drew attention to those few relevant lines or noticed their implications, except for a few specialists.

31

Two years earlier, in 1967, the Soviet Military Publishing House had printed a technical manual used in the training of its armed forces, Bacteriological Weapons and How to Defend Against Them. It contained a historical review of BW which had no reference at all to Korea. In the manual, the Japanese use of BW in China during World War II in China is followed directly by a description of the use of defoliants by the United States in the war in Vietnam.32 A more popular Soviet history of World War II published in 1985 also followed this pattern.33 Perhaps most significant of all in this group, in 1988 Gen. E. I. Smirnov, a Soviet era Minister of Health who was for many years also directly involved with the USSR's biological weapons program, published a book entitled Wars and Epidemics. It makes no mention whatsoever of the Korean War BW allegations, and the only entry in the book on Korea discusses the affliction of UN forces by Korean Hemorragic Fever.34

Depending on how one interprets the single line, there is a slight possibility that in one instance Chinese officials also considered indicating the same thing by indirection. In September 1984, when China suggested that it might sign the Biological and Toxin Weapon Convention, a Chinese government spokesman noted that “China once

was the victim of bacteriological and toxin warfare." (Emphasis added.) Press accounts at the time understood this to be a reference to the Japanese use of biological weapons in China during World War II. If that interpretation were correct, it functionally omitted the charge of alleged US use of BW during the Korean War.35 For the most part, however, China and North Korea have maintained the Korean War BW allegations until the present day, repeating the charges in numerous publications. There was no official change upon the death of Mao Zedong, or at the peak of closer relations with the United States in the late 1970s and early 1980s. Many others printed repetitions of the standard Korean War BW charges.

Chinese Sources

In 1989 and 1992, Chinese authorities published two documents dealing with the Korean War BW allegations, one by Nie Rongzhen, head of the Central Staff Department of the PLA, and a reply by Mao Zedong to a related message sent by Nie ten days earlier. Additional material was also contained in a Chinese history of the Korean War published in 1988, as well as in the memoirs of several senior Chinese military commanders of the CPV forces.36 These refer to and quote from the materials mentioned above as well as other documents. Finally, the materials were discussed in 1994 and 1996 in monographs by two Chinese-born historians currently teaching in the United States.37

On 28 January 1952, CPV headquarters reported that enemy aircraft had spread smallpox virus, and further reports followed in February. Chen Jian describes this January 28 CPV report as "the first time" that US forces were reported to be using biological weapons in Korea. 38 On February 18, Nie Rongzhen sent a message to Mao Zedong and Zhou Enlai:

Other than sending [bacteriological] specialists [to Korea], for further investigations, we have asked [the CPV headquarters] to send back to Beijing all insect vectors found [in the battlefield] for laboratory tests so as to verify exactly what disease germs these insects carry. Laboratory tests won't be ready for two days, but our specialists estimate the four disease germs such as cholera, typhoid, the plague and scarlet fever are the most likely. ... The first priority would be to strengthen epidemic prevention and treatment [for the CPV]. . . . we must ask the Soviet Union to help us out with their bacteriological specialists and materials.39

Zhang states that Nie had already ordered the health division of the PLA General Logistical Department to make preparations. This is three days before date of the first Soviet document obtained, the fragment of a message from Mao Zedong to Stalin on February 21.

The first of the two (officially) published Chinese documents is Mao's reply on 19 February 1952, in which

Mao instructed Zhou Enlai in a single line to "pay attention to this matter and take necessary measures to deal with it."40

Some time during this period, Zhou Enlai outlined to Mao Zedong six urgent measures of anti-bacteriological warfare:

1. Speeding up the laboratory tests of the insect vectors sent back from the front . . . so as to identify all these disease germs.

2. Dispatching epidemic prevention groups [to Korea] immediately along with vaccine, powder, and other equipment.

3. Issuing a public statement to the world to denounce U.S. bacteriological warfare as war crimes and use news media to pressure the United States to be responsible for the consequences of its biological warfare.

4. Instructing the National Association of Resisting America and Aiding Korea to lodge complaints with the Convention of World Peace and request that the convention launch a campaign against U.S. bacteriological warfare.

5. Sending a cable to the CPV headquarters to request that [the rank and file] be mobilized for epidemic prevention and meanwhile ordering the Northeastern Military Command to get prepared [for possible spread of disease germs in the Northeast] as well.

6. Sending a telegram to the Soviet government asking for its assistance.41

On February 28, Nie sent another message to Mao and Zhou, which is the second of the two (officially) published Chinese documents. It stated that the United States was "still introducing insect bacteria" over "the 38th and 50th Group Armies. . . . we have mobilized 44 Chinese scientific experts-11 entomologists, 15 bacteriologists, 6 epidemiologists, 4 toxicologists, 7 pathologists and a nutritionist, "and that they would leave by air the next day, February 29, for the front lines.42

Three points can be noted. This is all nearly a year after the "short" campaign in the spring of 1951 which had alleged that the U.S. was using BW. Second, if internal Chinese sources claim to show that CPV forces reported U.S. BW use "for the first time" in January 1952, then the spring 1951 allegations must be fraudulent. Finally, a few days between Nie Rongzhen's cable to Mao on February 18 and Mao's cable to Stalin on February 21 seems much too brief a period of time to have allowed for planning and laying the groundwork for the allegations; even the period from January 28 to February 20 or 21 seems insufficient time for that. Zhou's memorandum was presumably written well after disease had become a serious problem for CPV forces.

Previously available sources had identified China's own "investigative commission" chaired by Li Teh-chuan,

director of the China Red Cross, but had claimed that it had not been called into existence prior to March 12 by the China Peace Committee, with an adjunct staff of 25 in addition to the aforementioned experts, and that it had only left for Manchuria and North Korea on March 19.43 By then, the Democratic Lawyers group had already been in North Korea for two weeks. However, Nie Rongzhen's message makes it clear that the experts group must have been organized well in advance of the date of his message on February 28, and that they left for North Korea well before the lawyers group arrived there on March 4. Presumably not by coincidence, the report of the lawyers group listed the allegations of BW use taking place in North Korea as beginning on 28 January 1952, and continuing through March 4, the day of their arrival in North Korea. In public statements, Chinese authorities alleged that BW began over Chinese territory, in Manchuria, not earlier than February 29, which is apparently also contradicted by Nie Rongzhen's message. A book on the Korean War authored in 1988 by Jon Halliday and Bruce Cumings includes a photograph of an audience of the International Scientific Commission with Mao Zedong in Beijing in the summer of 1952. The photograph's caption states that "Mao greeted the delegates [sic] with two sallies: 'Don't make too much of all this! They've tried using biochemical warfare, but it hasn't been too successful,' and 'What are all these uninfected insects they are dropping[?]""44 Mao's first statement was apt, because although Chinese authorities eventually claimed that US aircraft had made nearly a thousand airdrops of BW agents and vectors over China, the two commissions were told that the number of people allegedly sickened through such an enormous effort was quite trivial. The second statement is incredible: the reports of both commissions, the official Chinese charges to international agencies, the massive propaganda campaign, etc., all claimed that the insects were infected with pathogens. Mao's remarks would have effectively aborted any real "scientific" commission and sent them home.

Several Decades of Analysis and Guesswork

In 1952, UN Secretary-General Trygve Lie ridiculed the BW allegations. Dr. Brock Chisholm, who at the time was the head of the World Health Organization, but who had been involved in the World War II joint UK-USCanadian BW R&D program, stated that if BW had been waged, it would have been quickly known since millions of people would have died.45 Theodor Rosebury, a major figure in the US wartime BW R&D program, who had authored two books on the subject in 1947 and in 1949, wrote in 1960 in commenting on the ISC report that he could not tell "[w]hether it be read as a work of imaginative fiction, or a study in abnormal epidemiology, and in the latter event whether its conclusions [can] be accepted in any degree or not."

9946

The RAND report by A.M. Halpern was published in

April 1952, very early and virtually in the midst of the major BW allegations, but it is an extremely detailed account of their evolution. Its major conclusion as to motive was that "The timing and content of the poison gas and BW campaigns suggest that they were initiated in response to specific situations and carried out with attention to objectives of a tactical rather than a strategic nature."47 Halpern judged these tactical objectives to be primarily leverage in the Korean War truce talks. A report of the US State Department's Office of Intelligence and Research was also published quite early, on 16 June 1952, but saw somewhat larger motives for the allegations:

The threefold nature of the bacteriological warfare charges atrocities, international law and disarmament—and their sponsorship on a world scale by the World Peace Council, reflect their value to Moscow as a new propaganda theme. Each year, the self-styled "peace" movement has made some issue the basis for a world-wide campaign: in 1950 it was the Stockholm Appeal, in 1951 the Five Power Peace Pact.48

In 1957, Maarten Schneider, in the Netherlands, also came to the conclusion that the allegations were purely propaganda; in other words, a fabrication.49

Aside from the two commissions, both organized by international Communist support organizations, there were two principal Western supporters of the BW allegations. Both men had long associations with China, where they had spent much of their lives, including the World War II years, and were very sympathetic to China. Dr. James Endicott, a Canadian minister, was born in China, the son of a missionary, and had himself been a missionary in that country from 1925 until the late 1940s. He was the Chairman of the Canadian Peace Commission and went to China in 1952 at the invitation of the Chinese government to attest to the allegations in the same manner as the two commissions had. He was the only person to claim that the US had carried out BW aerosol spraying, allegedly for a period of three weeks, on the basis of information provided to him by Chinese officials. His son, Stephen Endicott, a historian, has continued his father's defense of the allegations.50

The second individual, John W. Powell, was also born in China. His father had founded The China Weekly Review (CWR) in the 1920s. Powell spent the World War II years in China, and in 1945, at age 25, became the editor and publisher of the CWR. The paper's position during the Korean War was that South Korea had invaded North Korea. Powell remained in China until June 1953, when he returned to the United States.51

In 1971, the first major academic study of the allegations was published in the set of Stockholm International Peace Research Institute volumes on chemical and biological warfare. In that context, the purpose of the analysis was "not. . . to try to reach a

conclusion one way or another, but to recount the history. .. and to illustrate the very difficult problems of verifying allegations of use" of BW.52 It therefore focused entirely on an examination of the two commission reports, their mode of operation and their descriptions of "evidence." The result was to state that one could draw no conclusions at all from the materials presented in either report-and therefore certainly not the one both commissions had chosen because neither group had any independent knowledge of the provenance of what was shown or told to them. They had simply accepted everything on faithor more accurately speaking, according to their political preferences. Cookson and Nottingham, in a briefer examination, had used a somewhat similar method of analysis and wrote, "as to whether BW was or was not used, it is impossible to say definitively. The present writer's opinion is that it was not," and "[t]he whole thing has been written off almost unanimously as Communist propaganda."53

But it was simply too difficult for many people to accept exactly what that meant. When a Dutch Marxist wrote a paper in 1977 essentially summarizing and reiterating all the material in the two commission reports and accepting their conclusions entirely, he too noted that "[t]he mainstream of Western public opinion has up to now considered the Sino-Korean claims as mere propaganda," but then added: "However, few commentators have gone through the pains of formulating what this means." He did then outline in a few brief lines what that would mean, operationally, but could not accept the implications.54 Halliday and Cumings in their 1988 book on the Korean War found themselves in the same dilemma:

If one is to believe the Western case, it is also necessary to take it through to its logical conclusion, which is that the North Koreans and the Chinese mounted a spectacular piece of fraudulent theatre, involving the mobilization of thousands (probably tens of thousands) of people in China and Korea; getting scores of Chinese doctors and scientists and myriad lesser personnel, as well as Zhou Enlai and other senior Chinese figures, to fake evidence, lie and invent at least one extremely recherché medical fraud. Needham himself acknowledged at the time that “a patriotic conspiracy”—that is, a gigantic fraud-was a possibility.55

However, in later private communications in 1979 and 1986, Needham maintained his initial position that the United States had used BW in Korea; in 1986 he wrote that "everything that has been published in the last few years has shaken the very 3 percent of doubt which I had before and has instead abolished it. So now I am 100 percent sure."56 Halliday and Cumings concluded that "[a]s the evidence stands, the issue is open." In a much longer chapter on the Korean War BW allegations in their 1989 book on Unit 731, Williams and Wallace also

accepted the validity of the allegations.57

Three additional serious analyses appeared, in 1984, 1989, and 1992. The first was published by a US military historian, Charles Cowdrey. Cowdrey did not believe that the US had used BW, but he interpreted the purpose of the allegations in a different way. He mentioned the international and negotiating utilities of the allegations, but he emphasized the public-health requirements of the war in the rear areas adjacent to the battlefront, both in North Korea and in China, with:

thousands of soldiers marched out to collect insects. For days, police shepherded civilians on similar hunts. Germ warfare charges apparently proved themselves in practice as a way of getting things done. ... Internally... the germ warfare appeals served a practical purpose in a mass campaign of preventive medicine aimed at forestalling any recurrence of the conditions of 1951.58

Cowdrey felt that the primary purpose of the allegations had been domestic, to mobilize the Chinese population in a large-scale anti-epidemic public health campaign. It was an argument that senior US government officials had made in 1952 in denying the BW allegations.

In 1989, Mark Ryan included a section on the BW and CW allegations in a book on China's anticipation of nuclear weapon use by the United States during the Korean War. Ryan's main concern was to consider whether the Chinese charges were an indirect way of deterring the US from using nuclear weapons in that conflict. This argument had been summarily proposed in 1957 and in 1962 by Henry Kissinger and Alice L. Hsieh. In 1957, Kissinger wrote:

The Communist skill in psychological matters is also demonstrated by the Chinese Communist charge during the Korean War that we were engaging in bacteriological warfare. This was probably a device to keep us from using atomic weapons or from bombing Chinese territory.59

In 1962, Hsieh again argued essentially the same motive, acknowledging the hypothesis to A.M. Halpern:

In 1952, Chinese Communist references to the atom bomb were incidental to the propaganda campaign against bacteriological warfare, thus suggesting that this campaign was designed to inhibit even further any possible American plan for use of the atom bomb, to allay domestic anxiety with respect to the bomb, and to maintain the spirit of resistance.60

Ryan was convinced that Chinese military officials took the BW charges "seriously," although he notes regarding the CW allegations that "at no point did this alleged chemical weapons use become the subject of a high visibility, coordinated media campaign, as in the case of biological weapons." Ryan too was perplexed by the

operational implications of the allegations being false:

...if the BW charges were concocted by the Chinese from start to finish, it would seem at first appearance to represent a conspiratorial project of enormous proportions, involving the coordinated preparation and submission of knowingly false physical evidence and testimony from hundreds of Chinese scientists and technicians. Particularly problematical is how the teams of scores of prominent Chinese experts in pathology, entomology, zoology, epidemiology, etc. (most of whom had received their education and training in leading European and American universities) sent to Korea and north China to document and battle BW could have been led or induced to fabricate the many and detailed reports and statements they produced. Even if this had been done, why have not any of the individuals involved ever subsequently disclosed, either purposefully or inadvertently, aspects of such a fabricated campaign? Also, if the charges were falsely concocted, it seems to imply an additional conscious deception (mainly in the form of planting evidence, securing depositions, etc.) of thousands of more ordinary soldiers, farmers, and townspeople, and then continued efforts to deceive hundreds of foreign travelers, delegations, and correspondents who visited the affected areas and viewed the collected evidence and depositions."1

Ryan then put forth the following conclusion:

It seems that the Chinese BW campaign, regardless of whether it was totally or partially fabricated or whether it sprang from a reaction to real or imaginary phenomena, must be considered a success, or even a masterstroke, in the realm of international politics and psychology. Given the nature of the weapons, the problem of the proof or disproof of allegations, and the not unreasonable grounds for suspicion of actual or imminent US use of BW, the campaign was both a direct and practical means to help forestall or terminate any experimental use of BW, and a way to reinforce international condemnation of these and other weapons of mass destruction.62

The most recent analysis was written by a historian, John Ellis van Courtland Moon. Like Ryan, he made extensive use of declassified US documents dealing with the state of preparedness and executive-level decisionmaking on the utilization of chemical or biological weapons by the United States after 1945, but came to markedly different conclusions. Moon was absolutely convinced that the United States had not used BW in the Korean War. Moon emphasized the denials by senior US officials, the US requests for an investigation of the charges by the ICRC or WHO, and the fact that NSC 62, the policy statement that the United States would not use chemical, biological or radiological weapons except in retaliation, was in effect from 17 February 1950 until 15 March 1956 when it was superseded by NSC 1562/1.