The US Biological Weapons Program - Deadly Cultures: Biological Weapons Since 1945 - page 9

CHAPTER 2
The US Biological
Weapons Program
JOHN ELLIS VAN COURTLAND MOON
For more than two decades after 1945, the US pursued a
biological weapons (BW) program. Believing that the USSR was develop-
ing a BW capability, the US felt it had no choice but to prepare to wage bi-
ological warfare if it became necessary or militarily desirable to do so. The
BW effort was bolstered by arguments from deterrence theory and by
the conviction that the US must be prepared to retaliate. The Cold War
conditioned the US to see the USSR as a formidable and determined en-
emy whose evil intentions would lead to development of every possible
weapon to secure world domination. This perception was strengthened
by the culture of secrecy. BW advocates argued that it was a flexible
weapon system, relatively cheap to develop and maintain and easy to
hide. However, despite efforts to build a major program, achievements in
preparedness were not impressive. The reasons are several: the weapon
was not a top priority of either the political or military establishment, the
organizational structure was diffuse, the program lacked the focus and di-
rection necessary for success, and it was driven by the flawed logic of re-
taliation in kind.
The program also had to contend with the general revulsion against
BW, reflected in the 1925 Geneva Protocol and reinforced in 1946, when
the United Nations identified as especially heinous “atomic and all other
major weapons adaptable now and in the future to mass destruction.” 1 In
1969 the secretary general of the UN unhesitatingly classified chemical
and biological weapons (CBW) as means of mass destruction. 2
In 1945, however, BW were viewed differently. On 24 October, George
W. Merck, chairman of the US Biological Warfare Committee, submitted
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