in protests against the "remilitarization" of Japan.

The second important point is that as they occupied portions of Manchuria, Soviet military forces captured some members of Unit 731. After requesting that the US turn over additional senior officials from that organization and being denied, the USSR tried twelve former members of Unit 731 in a war crimes trial in December 1949 in the city of Khabarovsk. The USSR then requested that the United States release Gen. Ishii, together with Emperor Hirohito, to be put on trial as well, a request that the US government also rejected. At the time of the trial, on two occasions Gen. MacArthur's command falsely denied any knowledge of Japanese BW operations in China during the war. In reporting on the Khabarovsk trial, Pravda stated that the United States was "preparing for new crimes against humanity," i.e., bacteriological warfare. In the spring of 1950, before the outbreak of the war in Korea, there followed a series of Soviet media reports charging that the US was preparing for "bacteriological warfare.” The proceedings of the trial were published in English." The evidence obtained from those put on trial provided Soviet (and Chinese) officials with detailed technical descriptions of the BW delivery systems and methods that the Japanese had developed in China during the war. Three years later, these were precisely the methods that they alleged the United States to have used during the Korean War. The opening substantive chapter of the 1952 ISC Report is titled, "The Relevance of Japanese Bacterial Warfare in World War II."

The third link in the chain is that in the first five months of 1951, the Chinese press and radio made repeated references to Gen. Ishii and the Japanese wartime BW programs, the Khabarovsk trial, Gen. Ishii's subsequent employment by the United States, and the claim that the United States was preparing to use BW in the Korean War:" 10

On 9 January 1951, that MacArthur and his command had protected Japanese war criminals, particularly Ishii, and employed him and his colleagues;

On 7 March 1951, that Ishii had been hired by the American government "to supervise the manufacture of germ warfare weapons in America;"

On 22 March 1951, that “MacArthur is now engaged in large-scale production of bacteriological weapons for use against the Korean Army and people," and specifying the amount of money that MacArthur's headquarters had allegedly spent for their bacteria growth media;

On 30 April 1951, that "the American forces are using Chinese People's Volunteers as guinea pigs for their bacteriological experiments," and identifying a site near Kyoto where the BW agents were allegedly being produced. (The Kyoto site was a Japanese vaccine production facility that had survived World War II; during the Korean War, the United States did

in fact purchase Japanese-made vaccines for publichealth use in South Korea.) In the North Korean government's charges, the United States was also accused of using KPA and CPV prisoners of war for bacteriological warfare experimentation on "Kochzheko" island in collaboration with Japanese "bacteriological warfare criminals" (United Nations Security Council document S/2684; the reference is presumably to Koje Island).

This sequence culminated in the 8 May 1951 statement by the North Korean Foreign Minister that the United States was spreading smallpox in North Korea. There were further Chinese statements on May 19, May 24, and May 25, saying that the United States was "preparing to use germ warfare," and repeating in particular the charges that the US used POWs (in this case Korean) for BW "laboratory tests" and as "guinea pigs." After one last statement on 22 June 1951, the Chinese campaign ended, although some North Korean statements continued into July, and then they too ceased.

The last of these aspects is that concurrent with the above propaganda campaign in the spring of 1951, the Chinese government also initiated a campaign between 5 March and 13 May 1951 charging the United States with using poison gas in the Korean War." In addition to a series of media reports, this included an “Appeal" by Dr. Li Teh-Chuan, the director of the Red Cross Society of China, to the Executive Committee of the International League of Red Cross Societies meeting on 14 March 1951, formally accusing the United States of having used both bacterial weapons and poison gas:

After suffering repeated defeats in Korea. . . the American invaders have ignored world opinion and have openly violated international law by using poison gas on the Korean front . . . In the name of the Red Cross Society of China, I firmly protest to American authorities and all 100 million members of the Red Cross Societies in 68 countries throughout the world to raise their voices for justice and to take action to prevent the atrocity of using poison gas by the American imperialists in their war of aggression in Korea. 12

The Chinese alleged the use of "poison gas artillery shells" in addition to presumed delivery by aircraft, and announced that "poisonous shells have been collected and photographed." Radio Moscow and the New China News Agency reported that "Lt. Love Moss of the 24th Division, artillery, had admitted that the US was using gas." The only gas mentioned by name in the charges was chlorine gas. Chlorine is the least useful for military purposes as it is rarely lethal at the concentrations that can be achieved on the battlefield.

It was already noted that the charge of having used chemical weapons was stressed in the "Report on U.S. Crimes in Korea," produced by the International

Association of Democratic Lawyers. This report, however, states that chemical weapon use took place between 6 May 1951 and 9 January 1952. However, the Chinese campaign first began charging the US with CW use on March 5, and did so on ten occasions before 6 May 1951. In February 1952, the Soviet delegate to the UN, Jacob Malik, also accused the US of using chemical weapons in Korea. Chinese charges of US use of chemical weapons continued sporadically until May 1953. However, when the report of the second group, the International Scientific Commission, appeared only six months after the jurists' report, it did not contain any mention of alleged uses of chemical weapons. It also contained no mention whatsoever of alleged use of Chinese or Korean POWS for BW experiments.

There was never much question that there was no validity to the 1951 charges of chemical weapons use, and they were not repeated during the period of the major BW allegations in 1952. Those in the West who professed to believe the BW allegations into the 1960s and 1970s never mentioned the early accompanying allegations of chemical weapon use.

Two final points remain to be noted. In the late spring and early summer of 1950, just prior to the start of the war in Korea, there was also a campaign of allegations that the United States was dropping Colorado beetles in the German Democratic Republic (GDR), Poland, and Czechoslovakia in order to destroy their potato crops, "starve" their people, and induce the "economic collapse" of the countries. As biological warfare includes the use of disease agents or vectors that affect man, animals or crops, this too was a charge of the use of biological weapons. East German authorities released a report submitted on 15 June 1950, by Paul Merker, State Secretary in the GDR Ministry of Agriculture and Forestry, alleging that US aircraft had dropped Colorado potato beetles from May to June of 1950. No evidence was offered, but it was stated that the beetles had been found under the routes taken by US aircraft. Eastern European media printed photographs of "potato bug containers" allegedly attached to parachutes and balloons. In May 1951, the Czechoslovak Minister of Agriculture charged that "Western imperialists this year again are spreading the Colorado beetle in our fields, this time as far east as Slovakia." And in May 1952, Moscow claimed that one of the pilots from whom a confession had been obtained in Korea had also admitted to dropping Colorado beetles over East Germany in 1950. In the years that followed, Polish and GDR school children were regularly sent on excursions to Baltic beaches to search for the beetles.

In 1950, the USSR and the East European Communist parties also launched the Stockholm Appeal (or Stockholm Peace Petition) which demanded the "unconditional prohibition of the atomic weapon as a weapon of aggression." The Appeal, which also linked nuclear weapons with the two other categories of weapons of mass destruction-biological and chemical weapons-obtained

millions of signatures in Western Europe as well as in other parts of the world. During the 1952 campaign an "Appeal Against Bacteriological Warfare" modeled on it was issued on April 1.

Neither the People's Republic of China nor North Korea belonged to the United Nations. It therefore fell to the USSR to press the allegations in the UN, and it seems evident that it was the USSR that arranged for the international protests through Communist parties, the World Peace Council, and other front organizations. There also seems to have been substantial media coordination between the USSR and China, as well as coordination of a more instrumental sort.13 The propaganda campaign also combined with others going on concurrently: In early 1951, the Director of the USSR's Marx-Engels-Lenin Institute had launched a domestic "Hate the Americans" (or "Hate America") campaign, and the 22 February 1952 announcement of the BW allegations followed a day after the celebration of an "international day of the fight against colonialism." In the four weeks between mid-March and mid-April 1952, the Soviet press devoted one-quarter of its coverage to the BW allegations. In China, in roughly the same period, newspaper treatment of germ warfare was more extensive than that previously devoted to the entire Korean War. Notably, the U.S.-Japanese peace treaty was due for ratification on 28 April 1952.

U.S. Denials and U.N. Disputes

15

The first official US denial came on 4 March 1952, in response to the February 22 accusations by the North Korean Foreign Minister. US Secretary of State Dean Acheson said, "I would... like to state categorically and unequivocally that these charges are entirely false; the UN forces have not used, are not using, any sort of bacteriological warfare."4 Acheson repeated the denials on March 26 and on other occasions. General Matthew Ridgeway, Commander of the UN forces in Korea, denied the charges by mid-March, adding, "These charges are evidently designed to conceal the Communists' inability to cope with the spread of epidemics which occur annually throughout China and North Korea and to care properly for the many victims." And in an address to the US Congress on 22 May 1952, Ridgeway stated that "no element of the United Nations Command has employed either germ or gas warfare in any form at any time."16 UN Secretary-General Trygve Lie also denied the allegations. On 14 March 1953, after Soviet representative to the UN Malik introduced the bacterial warfare charges into the work of the UN Disarmament Commission, the US delegate, Benjamin Cohen, repeated the American denials. When the Soviet delegation distributed the "confessions" of captured US pilots in the UN General Assembly's First Committee, Gen. Omar Bradley, Chairman of the US Joint Chiefs of Staff, submitted a denial (on 25 March 1953), as did the commanding officers of the Marine Air Wings to which the pilots had belonged."

Of equal importance to the official US denials is the

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."19 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.26 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

27

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.

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

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."46

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