Biological Warfare

Report Outline
Biological Weapons in World Arsenls
Disease Agents as Offensive Weapons
American Defenses Against Biological Attack

Biological Weapons in World Arsenls

Communistd Germ Warfare Propaganda Offensive

Repeated charges from Moscow and Peiping that IV Americans are deliberately spreading pestilential diseases in Asia raise disturbing questions of the possibility of “germ warfare” in other quarters of the globe. Formal charges laid before the United Nations Disarmament Commission Mar. 14 by the Russian delegate, Jacob A. Malik, and the continuing chorus of denunciation from Communist sources, make it clear that a carefully calculated propaganda campaign of world scope is under way. The free nations now wonder uneasily whether this is another resort to the wellknown totalitarian technique of condemning others in advance for practices in which the accusers themselves are planning to engage.

The Federal Bureau of Investigation is at present inquiring into the possibility that an outbreak of anthrax among hogs in previously disease-free areas of Illinois, Indiana and Ohio has been the result of sabotage. And Canadian authorities are still searching for the source of a serious epidemic of foot-and-mouth disease among cattle in the Dominion's western provinces.

Maj. Gen. E. T. Bullene, chief of the Army Chemical Corps, told a congressional committee in March that technicians who conducted biological warfare research in Germany during World War II are now in Russia, along with their equipment. He said “intelligence information is that Russia is exploiting this potential intensively”. The Army has asked Congress for $17 million to expand the American research program in biological warfare.