Historical Context and Overview - Deadly Cultures: Biological Weapons Since 1945 - page 4

would involve extensive use of chemical weapons (CW) and BW. Be-
cause of these fears, many countries started to develop BW as a deterrent
and for retaliation, if not for first use. These included Canada, France,
Germany, Hungary, Italy, Japan, the Soviet Union, the UK, and the US.
Thus most belligerents entered World War II with at least exploratory BW
programs, and most (with the notable exception of Germany) increased
their activities significantly during the war.
Despite these efforts, no European or North American country other
than the UK mass-produced a usable BW during the war, and in the case
of the UK, the weapon was unsophisticated—five million cattle cakes of
linseed meal laced with anthrax spores. The intent was to disseminate the
cattle cakes into German fields through the flare chutes of bombers, and
thereby to cripple German domestic animal production, in retaliation if
the Germans used such unconventional weapons against the Allies. The
Germans did not use unconventional weapons, the cattle cakes remained
unused, and the stockpile was destroyed after the war. Neither CW nor
BW were used in combat in the European theater.
In Asia, however, the situation was different. Japan made extensive
use of BW (and CW) against China, targeting both troops and civilians.
The methods were unsophisticated, involving the release of live plague-
infected rats or fleas and the contamination of wells or foodstuffs with
agents of intestinal disease. Despite the unsophisticated methods, tens or
hundreds of thousands of Chinese are thought to have been killed by
Japanese BW, including thousands used as human guinea pigs for infec-
tious-disease experiments.
In addition to marking the start of a major BW arms race, the period
before 1945 saw the first major international effort to ban biological war-
fare. The Geneva Protocol, signed in 1925 (entered into force in 1928),
banned the use of both BW and CW in warfare. This prohibition is re-
garded as having entered the realm of customary law, binding on all
states regardless of whether they are parties to the Protocol.
Biological Weapons after 1945
This topic begins in 1945, picking up the narratives where they left off in
Geissler and Moon. The world was in a very fluid state then. A global war
had just been fought, killing millions, leaving millions homeless, and