Various toxic syndromes, Various bacteria
Category C includes emerging pathogens and pathogens that are made more pathogenic by genetic engineering, including hantavirus, Nipah virus, tick-borne encephalitis and haemorrhagic-fever viruses, yellow-fever virus and multidrug-resistant bacteria.
Does not include time and place of production, but only indicates where agents were applied and probably resulted in casualties, in war, in research or as a terror agent. B, bacterium; P, parasite; T, toxin; V, virus.
In North America, it was not the government but a dedicated individual who initiated a bioweapons-research program.
Sir Frederick Banting, the Nobel-Prize-winning discoverer of insulin, created what could be called the first private biological weapon research centre in 1940, with the help of corporate sponsors. Soon afterwards, the US government was also pressed to perform such research by their British allies who, along with the French, feared a German attack with biological weapons (Moon, 1999, even though the Nazis apparently never seriously considered using biological weapons (Geissler, 1999)). However, the Japanese embarked on a large-scale program to develop biological weapons during the Second World War (Harris, 1992, 1999, 2002) and eventually used them in their conquest of China. Indeed, alarm bells should have rung as early as 1939, when the Japanese legally, and then illegally, attempted to obtain yellow-fever virus from the Rockefeller Institute in New York.
The father of the Japanese biological-weapons program, the radical nationalist Shir... Ishii, thought that such weapons would constitute formidable tools to further Japan's imperialistic plans. He started his research in 1930 at the Tokyo Army Medical School and later became head of Japan's bioweapon program during the Second World War (Harris, 1992, 1999, 2002). At its height, the program employed more than 5,000 people, and killed as many as 600 prisoners a year in human experiments in just one of its 26 centers.
The Japanese tested at least 25 different disease-causing agents on prisoners and unsuspecting civilians. During the war, the Japanese army poisoned more than 1,000 water wells in Chinese villages to study cholera and typhus outbreaks.
Japanese planes dropped plague-infested fleas over Chinese cities or distributed them by means of saboteurs in rice fields and along roads. Some of the epidemics they caused persisted for years and continued to kill more than 30,000 people in 1947, long after the Japanese had surrendered.
Ishii's troops also used some of their agents against the Soviet army, but it is unclear as to whether the casualties on both sides were caused by this deliberate spread of disease or by natural infections (Harris, 1999). After the war, the Soviets convicted some of the Japanese biowarfare researchers for war crimes, but the USA granted freedom to all researchers in exchange for information on their human experiments.
In this way, war criminals once more became respected citizens, and some went on to found pharmaceutical companies. Ishii's successor, Masaji Kitano, even published postwar research articles on human experiments, replacing 'human' with 'monkey' when referring to the experiments in wartime China.
Although some US scientists thought the Japanese information insightful, it is now largely assumed that it was of no real help to the US biological-warfare-program projects. These started in 1941 on a small scale, but increased during the war to include more than 5,000 people by 1945.
The main effort focused on developing capabilities to counter a Japanese attack with biological weapons, but documents indicate that the US government also discussed the offensive use of anti-crop weapons.
Soon after the war, the US military started open-air tests, exposing test animals, human volunteers and unsuspecting civilians to both pathogenic and non-pathogenic microbes.
Nobody really knows what the Russians are working on today and what happened to the weapons they produced. Although the Soviets signed the BWC, Moscow secretly continued with its biological-weapons program. In fact, starting from around 1972, the Soviets initiated an enormous second-generation biological-weapons program, known as Biopreparat, which employed around 60,000 personnel throughout the entire country (May 23, 2018).
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Bioweapons released along the coasts of Virginia and San Francisco infected many people, including about 800,000 people in the Bay area alone. Bacterial aerosols were released at more than 200 sites, including bus stations and airports. The most infamous test was the 1966 contamination of the New York metro system with Bacillus globigii, a non-infectious bacterium used to simulate the release of anthrax to study the spread of the pathogen in a big city. But with the opposition to the Vietnam War growing and the realization that biological weapons could soon become the poor man's nuclear bomb,
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