The shift of the bases over to civilian research completed the purification of the United States’ motives and places. However, because the purification had as its foundation the relocation of biothreats, the threats must actually go somewhere. Paranoia must be sustained by
161 Homan, “Military Rebuffed.” 162
Kirk Scharfenberg, “U.S. to Dump Anticrop Stock Into Monacy River in ‘71,” Washington Post-Times
Herald, December 19, 1970, A5.
163 Stuart Auerbach, “Shift of Germ Warfare Sites to Civilian Use Proposed,” Washington Post-Times Herald,
December 28, 1969, 26; “U.S. Studies Detrick As A Research Center,” Washington Post-Times Herald, February 24, 1971, C2.
164 Victor Cohn, “Germ Warfare Site to Close,” Washington Post-Times Herald, January 28, 1971, A7; “Pine
Bluff Arsenal Facility Shifted to Civilian Research,” Washington Post-Times Herald, April 15, 1971, A3.
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the existence of an object of suspicion, even if the object is a hypothetical one. Biothreats do not come from here; instead, we defend against such threats that come from people not like us, actors who do not follow our “rational restraints,” actors who are from elsewhere. Starting in the winter of 1969, a new group of stories about biothreats emerged in the press which served to reinforce the logic of defense by both reminding the public of its formerly well-justified paranoia and offering it new objects of suspicion. The stories about military base decontaminations serve as a link back to a more dangerous time when the military ran the kinds of tests which drew the ire of the public in 1969. Simultaneously, they serve as a link forward to the terrors that have not yet been visited on us, the horrors of “surprise” and the weapons pursued by the irrational. On the whole, however, biological and chemical weapons faded from the journalistic conversation. There were, for example, three times as many CBW-related articles in the Washington Post in 1969 as in the entire period between 1970 and 1980. Thus, the stories that follow are finer threads than those above, but, as a result, the themes are far more distinct than in 1969 when the political conversation was awash with ambiguity and tension.
During 1969, the two most recirculated stories of domestic accidents were the 1968 Skull Valley Sheep Kill and the dramatic, international incident caused by the nerve gas leak on Okinawa. Given the relatively long tenure of the United States’ practice of testing and stockpiling germ and chemical agents, these incidents were not isolated and investigative journalists in the 1970’s uncovered a host of similar activities from decades past. An interview with a retired General in 1975 revealed that, while at Detrick in the 1950’s, he had fallen ill to pneumonic plague.166 Further, he claimed that such an infection was business as usual at Detrick and, indeed, his fellow soldiers frequently had fallen ill to Q Fever, Tularemia, and Venezuelan
166 Bill Richards, “Plague Case At Ft. Detrick Hushed in ‘59,” Washington Post-Times Herald, September 25,
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Equine Encephalitis (all diseases researched by biological weapons researchers). In addition to accidents, more details about the vast Army testing program were brought to light during the 1970’s. In a front-page article from 1976, the Post explained that during the 50’s and 60’s the US carried out a series of BW simulations in US cities, at least some of which may have caused civilian deaths.167 In Mechanicsburg, Aspergillus fungus (which can be fatal to humans) was dispersed into the air. In 1952, Ft. McClellan saw a doubling of Pneumonia cases after an army test there. In Key West, the pneumonia cases increased by a factor of ten (including a seven-fold increase in pneumonia deaths). New York and San Francisco were also sites for large “vulnerability” tests. Dispersants were sprayed into the air in San Francisco and a light bulb filled with bacteria was dropped in a New York City subway. Though the bacteria used in those tests were considered to be “harmless”, military scientists admit that it could cause pneumonia.
This set of tests is then dwarfed by a front-page piece by George Wilson with the dramatic and self-explanatory title, “Army Conducted 239 Secret, Open-Air Germ Warfare Tests.”168 Importantly, this is not a piece of investigative journalism, but merely an open testimony by Army officials on Capitol Hill in the Spring of 1977. Under the shield of Nixon’s 1969 policy, this news is shocking but, of course, merely more evidence that Nixon’s review was necessary and the public’s former paranoia was both warranted and no longer necessary. These stories recirculated in the 1980’s as the Army continued to declassify its research.169 When the Army revealed these tests during the 1970’s, Senator Richard Schweiker (later the Secretary of
167 John Cummings and Drew Fetherson, “Germ War Test in Cities: Army Admits Simulated Attacks Army
Tested Germ Warfare Methods on Cities,” Washington Post-Times Herald, December 22, 1976, A1.
168 George Wilson, “Army Conducted 239 Secret, Open-Air Germ Warfare Tests: Army Conducted Outdoor
Germ Warfare Tests,” Washington Post-Times Herald, March 9,1977, A1.
169 George Lardner Jr., “Army Report Details Germ War Exercise In N.Y. Subway in ‘66,” Washington Post-
Times Herald, April 22, 1980, A9; “Germ War Testing Was Held in Area,” Washington Post-Times Herald, June 9,
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Health under President Regan) called for deeper investigation into similar programs of testing.170 The story about Schweiker’s investigation emphasized the ‘unimaginability’ of BW research as the Senator wondered “what we hoped to learn”. He also echoed the moral tone used by Nixon, calling the tests “a devastating repudiation of the ideals of human liberty that the Army and other organs of government are charged with defending.” Senator Schweiker’s comments reinforced Nixon’s and Thant’s former claims that such research was always irrational and suicidal.
Even as these stories reinforced the irrationality of offensive warfare, they also served to reinforce the necessity of defensive research. One of the most dramatic events that emerges in these stories about former sins is the discovery of United States’ relationship with Japan’s Biological Warfare program during World War II.171 After World War II, the U.S. government gave asylum to Japanese researchers who had conducted human experimentation with germ agents. One of the Japanese Prime Minister’s officials called the work “regrettable,” explaining that it had been done under “extraordinary wartime conditions.”172 These extraordinary conditions are meant to explain without forgiving not only the “gruesome” experiments, some of which were done on American POWs, but the strange post-war partnership between the Japanese scientists and the American military. According to the story, this partnership with the Japanese was necessary because their program had generated real data about how humans react to prototype germ weapons, experiments which, according to the story, the United States would not
170 “Sen. Schweiker Seeks Probe of Germ War Tests,” Washington Post-Times Herald, December 28, 1976, A3.
171
P. Chen, “Japan Confirms Germ War Testing In World War II,” Washington Post-Times Herald, April 8, 1982, A19; Philip J. Hilts, “Pact With Japan Hid Results Of Germ War Tests on POWs,” Washington Post-Times
Herald, October 31, 1981, A3. 172 Hilts “Pact”
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have done.173 Thus, even as the US’s own research had gone awry, there remained some boundaries which were not crossed.
Senator Schweiker’s inquiry and the stories about Japan both pointed to the presence of research which was at once unthinkable and real. This real but unthinkable past is the point of departure from which the rhetoric of defense demands we look forward to a not-yet-real but imaginable future. Thus, we must guard against ‘technological surprise’ by thinking like the enemy. This is the way in which biological research of a defensive nature ultimately relies upon offensive research. Even as the stories about Nixon showed him as squaring off against the military, the rhetoric of his policy totally embraced military logic. As General Austin Betts explains in condemning Nixon’s ban on biological warfare:
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 denied us the knowledge of what it takes to defend against any agent that our technology might conceive.174
This sentiment is indistinguishable from the sentiment offered by the National Security Council in elaborating the new program into defensive biological research. This need to think like the enemy, to imagine our own destruction, became of central import in the struggle against risk and for safety. By showing how misguided we were in the past, the rhetoric of defense uses the past to relocate danger into the imagination. Thankfully, the Japanese (and, below, the Soviets) serve to stand in for this imagination. I say thankfully because, as I demonstrate below, this new, imaginative danger relocates risk everywhere and ultimately eliminates the possibility for biosafety, leaving only a hope of preparedness.
173 This is, of course, not strictly true. While the United States does not seem to have experimented on POWs,
experiments were done on American citizens. The most publically known example of such experimentation was done under Project Whitecoat in which just over 2,000 U.S. Army soldiers submitted to various biological agent testing. Many of these were conscientious objectors of the Seventh-Day Adventist faith.
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While it is possible to imagine risk without a clear enemy, the Soviet Union provided a clear object of suspicion for the remainder of the Cold War. When The Biological Weapons and Toxins Convention was signed, a space opened for stories about how both the United States and the Soviet Union were honoring their promises. As explained above, the United States very publically began destroying stockpiles and converting bases (even as some labs, like the CIAs, seem to have continued business as usual).175 At the same time, stories emerged about the Soviet Union working at cross purposes. In these new stories, the Soviet Union was no longer deserving of the benefit of skepticism. They became the enemy the military had been warning us about all along. Further, these stories rearticulated the unthinkable consequences of biological weapons; one story, in trying to contextualize the danger created by the Soviet’s continued research, explained that:
One expert has estimated that 10 airplanes, each loaded with 10,000 pounds of dry biological warfare material, could scatter enough bacteria over the United States to knock out one-third of the population.176
In the 1980’s, this narrative recirculated and took on a new shape as the risk posed by the Soviet Union was compounded by terrifying advances in biotechnology. In 1984, the Post published a series of articles that brought together conclusions by the Defense Intelligence Agency and a Soviet Scientist from behind the Iron Curtain. In the first article, the Soviets are implicated in the large-scale acquisition of various technologies which could be used for BW. In the second piece, a Soviet scientist who developed a mathematical model for predicting disease epidemic behavior worried that his model could be used to control for the spread of a BW agent. These articles demonstrate the ambiguity of defensive research, at least when it is done in the Soviet
175 As mentioned in note 234, the CIA continued research into biological weapons after Nixon’s ban. See
Anderson and Whitten, “Soviets” and Lardner “CIA prolonged.”
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Union.177 For instance, suspicion is raised in the purchase of certain decontamination equipment because it can be used to aerosolize not only decontaminants but also contaminants. One suspects that the National Institute of Health’s purchase of such equipment generally raises no eyebrows.
Because the defensive research grows out of the basic assumption that there might be weapons that we have not yet imagined, an unchecked paranoid attitude quickly becomes capable of imagining situations against which we could never defend. There is evidence already in the 1970’s that such a moment has come. Defense is a logic of horizons created by our own scruples and rationality, however nature and the progress of science outstrip both. On August 16th 1970, the Post published the remarks of Nobel Prize winning geneticist, Joshua Lederberg, made at the disarmament talks in Geneva. In his talk, Lederberg cited recent research done at the University of Wisconsin to synthesize genes and speculated about the kind of experiments that might be done by those who wish to make dangerous diseases more deadly. Such work, even if done in secret would eventually come to light and be accessible by anyone who might want to proceed on such a path. Lederberg argued that no kind of monitoring system would be enough to protect us against biological threats, and only the robust growth of the public health system could hope to save us. At length, Lederberg explains:
Even after agreement to eliminate biological weapons, we will still remain very vulnerable to a form of biological warfare that is beyond the reach of any covenant that we can make. This is the warfare practiced upon us by nature, the unremitting barrage of infection by old and by new agents that still constitute a very large part of the perils to normal and healthy life…[w]e must expect that there are many additional viruses already
177 This is not to suggest that the stories are products of pure imagination. There exist numerous reports by
Soviet defectors which would seem to confirm that the Soviet Union’s military infrastructure was not honoring the Biological Weapons Treaty. The best known of these are arguably Sergei Popov and Ken Alibek, both of whom were debriefed in the 1990’s and became part of the American conversation through PBS’s NOVA series on “Interviews with Biowarriors,” Transcripts available at http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/bioterror/biowarriors.html.
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indigenous to primate and human populations in primitive areas and to which the inhabitants of advanced countries are extremely vulnerable.178
Lederberg demonstrates here the ways in which the logic of defense was already coextensive with the logic of public health. We need not imagine the danger created by enemies, but merely look to the frailties and weaknesses present in our bodies and populations. Eliminating our human bio-enemies will not be enough; biosafety will take nothing less than a world without disease (and such a world is surely impossible). The rhetoric of defense found in public health a paranoid partner with which to relocate biothreat risks. Together, they relocated biothreats to everywhere.