John Chuckman
COMMENT POSTED TO AN ARTICLE BY THE SAKER IN THE UNZ REVIEW
“Looking at the Military Aspects of Biological Warfare”
Not the clearest article, but an important fact stands out for me: bio-weapons are rather unpredictable. Just shifts in the wind, for example, can represent a problem.
Were they more predictable, I think it likely the US would have used them a good deal in all its colonial wars since the end of WW II. Other states, too. Britain, the Soviet Union, and still others are known to have worked with such weapons.
Fear of attribution in such dark matters might play a role in prevention. But it sure didn’t in the use of napalm or white phosphorus or cluster bombs or Agent Orange or fire-bombing or nuclear weapons – all of which have been openly used with no apologies. The Pentagon has embraced landmines too.
The US certainly has developed and kept bio-weapons in the recent past. Remember the anthrax attack and scare of 2001? That was military-grade anthrax.
It is claimed that the US did use some kind of bio-weapon in North Korea and perhaps in the adjoining area of China during the Korean War. I’ve seen references to that several times in the past.
I don’t know, but the US was certainly utterly ruthless in that war. Three years of carpet-bombing killed one-fifth of the country’s entire population, and that’s a number from a Pentagon source.
Of course, that hellish experience has a lot to do with North Korea’s sacrificing a great deal to develop nuclear weapons and its not wanting to give them up.
The US Cavalry is said by some sources to have used small-pox laden blankets, given as gifts, in its Indian Wars of the 19th century. I don’t know whether that is proved, but the Cavalry did many other ruthless acts, including the wiping out of entire villages.
I tend to be a stickler for proof, so when I read an article like Philip Giraldi's recent one on who made coronavirus, I am very interested but take no position. That was a superb article, by the way.
When it comes to matters of war, I think we always have to keep in mind that wars and the people who run them are not rational. So, the use of bio-weapons may not be precluded by rational considerations about their predictability and spread.
Not only are a fair number of psychopaths (eg, Curtis LeMay) and extreme narcissists (eg, Douglas MacArthur) involved in the military, but just hate itself is a form of temporary insanity.
Giraldi gave the excellent example of the Stuxnet computer virus, a very dangerous weapon believed developed by the US and Israel. It was used against Iran, and it leaked out to other places, creating some serious hazards (There has been considerable speculation that the escaped Stuxnet virus contributed to the disaster at the Fukushima nuclear power station). Clearly, the warlords hating Iran didn’t care.
It is an odd coincidence that a group of American military had visited the region of China where coronavirus broke out, and you certainly can understand some Chinese being very suspicious about it.
Some pretty vicious hatreds pour out of the US anymore towards China and Russia and Iran.
