Canada Released Document Accusing U.S. of Genocide, Biological Warfare During the Korean War
Investigations by DPRK & China into attacks of U.S. biological weapons in Jan-Feb 1952 have been mostly ignored for 70+ years, as were legal experts' determination the U.S. had committed genocide
“Whoever employs germ warfare incurs the responsibility of having his crime judged by mankind.” – From introduction to Canadian Peace Congress April 1952 pamphlet, “Documentation on Bacteriological Warfare”(PDF)
(This article first appeared at The Canada Files under a slightly different title. The version at Hidden Histories has added some new material. There is a new paragraph on the work of Canadian historians Stephen Endicott and Edward Hagerman. Sadly, these two great scholars died not long ago. This article can be seen as dedicated to their memory. There is also an expansion of the section concerning Cold War scholars’ claims the biological warfare charges by North Korea and China were an elaborate hoax.)
As the Zionist attacks on Palestinians in the Gaza Strip and West Bank achingly continue, it remains unclear when these attacks will end, despite the recent UN Security Council vote on a ceasefire. Nor is it known whether charges made in both the International Criminal Court and the United Nation’s International Court of Justice will hold Israel to account for its crimes against civilians and its more broad genocide. But it is instructive to recall that there’s precedent for Western-backed “democracies” being charged with genocide and other crimes against humanity, and getting away with it.
As early as seven years after the end of World War II, war crimes investigators, mostly from Western countries, charged the United States with genocide due to its indiscriminate attacks on civilians in the Korean War, including, notably, use of biological weapons (BW).
The U.S. was the primary Western combatant in the Korean War, but Canadian troops and naval forces played a significant role as well, as this United Nations Command posting attests:
“Between 1950 and 1953, over 26,700 Canadians served during the combat phase of the Korean War.”
Canadian forces were not without their own record of atrocities. The Canada Files has recently published two articles detailing Canada’s collaboration in the U.S. BW attacks and its role in the resulting cover-up.
The accusations of U.S. genocide associated with the Korean War are not discussed in the vast majority of histories of the period. Even so, there is ample evidence citing U.S./UN forces involved in the shooting of civilians, mass indiscriminate firebombing of Democratic Republic of Korea (DPRK) cities, and other war crimes. According to evidence gathered in early 1952, both DPRK and Chinese officials accused the U.S. of using bombs and constructed containers, to drop infected insects, feathers and other materials over inhabited areas, and in the rear of Chinese and DRPK armed forces, in a campaign of biological warfare. There were also accusations that tanks were affixed to low-flying U.S. Air Force planes to spray insects inoculated or dusted with cholera and plague.
In 2010, the CIA declassified hundreds of documents from the Korean War. They included at least two dozen formerly top-secret communications intelligence reports that corroborated the Chinese and DPRK accusations. The reports included copious citations from encrypted intercepts of Communist military communications that described in real-time attacks by biological weapons, in particular those that included use of infected insects as germ vectors.
In December 2023, upon request from The Canada Files, Library and Archives Canada released a collection of “Important Canadian documents on biological warfare, 1948-1952.” The collection included an April 1952 pamphlet circulated by the Canadian Peace Congress (CPC).
Titled “Documentation on Bacteriological Warfare”, the CPC pamphlet was largely drawn from an April 1952 release of documents by the World Peace Congress, which were issued in response to the worldwide controversy over the biological warfare charges against the United States. The WPC documents were released by its Secretariat in Prague, Czechoslovakia. The “documentation” included a collection of English translations from both DPRK and Chinese investigations into the January-March biological weapons (BW) attacks.
These reports have never been published online before. While they were largely ignored by Western scholars, they were discussed in some detail by Canadian historians Stephen Endicott and Edward Hagerman in Chapter One of their groundbreaking 1998 book, The United States and Biological Warfare: Secrets from the Early Cold War and Korea (University of Indiana Press). I failed to mention their work in the original version of this article at The Canada Files. Endicott and Hagerman’s work is very important and highly recommended.
Other documents in the WPC/CPC release included statements by investigating journalists and microbiologists, as well as extracts from two reports by the International Association of Democratic Lawyers (IADL), who visited both DPRK and China in March 1952 to investigate war crimes accusations, in addition to other pertinent materials.
CPC’s dissemination of the germ warfare documentation, as well as statements by CPC’s chairman, Dr. James Endicott, unleashed a firestorm of protest by establishment politicians and the press. Endicott, speaking during a visit to China, had criticized Canada’s support of the Korean War, and specifically called out Canada’s role in assisting the U.S. in its germ war program.
Endicott was a respected figure in Canadian society. Having spent over two decades as a missionary in China, in 1952 he was a top leader of Canada’s United Christian Church. Yet there were multiple calls to prosecute him for subversion for aiding, by his speech, DPRK and China in the war.
In 1950, Canada had passed a draconian law against anyone speaking out against allied forces fighting in the Korean War. As quoted in the Ottawa Journal on May 13, 1952 (pg. 2), the new law stated that a Canadian citizen could be prosecuted for “assisting, while in or out of Canada, any enemy at war with Canada or any armed forces against whom Canadian forces are engaged in hostilities whether or not a state of war exists between Canada and the country whose forces they are [fighting].” It is worth recalling that neither the U.S. or Canada, or any of the nations that sent troops to Korea, had officially declared war against the Korean workers’ republic.
The same newspaper article reported that then-Justice Minister Stuart Garson was giving “serious consideration” over prosecuting Endicott under the new statute. In the end, however, with a large showing of support for Endicott at public rallies, he was not charged. Endicott himself produced a pamphlet, “I Accuse,” later that spring, which drew heavily upon the material included in the CPC “Documentation” collection.
In the United States, a government campaign to suppress germ warfare accusations and documentation led to the wholesale seizure and destruction of any bulk or third-class mail deemed propaganda coming from Communist countries, including material regarding seemingly left-wing causes, even if the material originated from non-Communist countries. It can be assumed that the contemporary rarity of copies of the CPC pamphlet documenting use of biological warfare in Korea came in part from such intervention, though it’s not known to what degree any similar actions were taken in regards to Canadian mail.
The CPC Documentation material was released under the names of Mary Jennison and Bruce Mickleburgh, Executive Secretary and Public Relations Director, respectively, of the Canadian Peace Congress. In the introduction to the packet of documentary material, CPC officials stated:
The Bureau of the World Council of Peace has examined the charge [of biological warfare] and finds it valid. It undertook to inform public opinion and to work to safeguard all the peoples against the menace.
A competent and impartial International Commission is being established to gather all the evidence.
Pending the report of this commission we reproduce in this inadequate form some of the reports on the evidence which have already reached us.
This evidence, both scientific and legal, has convinced the executive of the Canadian Peace Congress that the crime has been committed.
The “competent and impartial” commission mentioned in the CPC preface would, by June 1952, take form as the “International Scientific Committee for Investigation of the Facts Concerning Bacterial Warfare in Korea and China,” led by renowned British scientist Joseph Needham.
A full summary of the material provided by CPC would take a rather long and comprehensive book chapter. What follows is some of the most important and historically relevant material reproduced in the CPC report. This includes material little seen by Western readers, and for the most part is unknown.
A Nobel Scientist’s Appeal
The materials the CPC presented included the “Report of the Commission of the Medical Headquarters of the Korean People’s Army on the Use of Bacteriological Weapons”; a report by the “Commission of Microbiologists, Entomologists, Parasitologists and Epidemiologists Working with the World Council of Peace”; extracts from the “Report of the Commission Enquiring Into the Bacteriological Attacks in North East China”; Extracts of the IADL reports on its investigations in the DPRK and China; a “Declaration of the Bacteriological War by All the Journalists Covering the Armistice Talks in Korea”; as well as clippings from the worldwide press and other sundry declarations and statements.
The pamphlet concluded with an appeal written by the world’s foremost nuclear physicist, in that era, who was also President of the World Council of Peace, Frédéric Joliot-Curie. Joliot-Curie was, along with his wife, Irene Joliot-Curie, and his in-laws, Marie and Pierre Curie, a recipient of the Nobel Prize.
Frédéric Joliot-Curie was blunt in his condemnation of U.S. germ warfare, writing:
“The use of bacteriological weapons is a clear violation of international law — in particular of the Geneva Convention of June 17th 1925.
They were employed by the Japanese armies in China. The U.S. General Staff, and public figures in the United States, had earlier made no secret of U.S. preparations and intention to use these weapons.” [Pg. 35, Documentation of Biological Warfare]
Today, Joliet-Curie’s appeal against U.S. germ warfare is rarely mentioned in biographical accounts, whether they appear in Wikipedia or Britannica. Nor is the appeal’s text readily available online. The Canada Files is pleased to reproduce, as part of the proffered CPC Documentation on Biological Warfare pamphlet, this historic statement. (Download the full document here.)
One reason for the suppression of Joliot-Curie’s appeal, as well as much of the other documentary evidence concerning the U.S. use of biological weapons, is that the various documents often reference the crimes of Japan’s biological warfare operations in World War II.
Today, there is greater understanding and historical interest in the criminal actions of Imperial Japan’s Unit 731 and similar departments in implementing both research and operations on the use of biological weapons on a scale previously unknown prior to World War II. Their crimes far outstripped the Nazis own BW experiments, which had been detailed at the Nuremberg trials. Unit 731 was responsible for fatal BW experiments upon thousands of prisoners, as well as spreading plague and other biological agents against Chinese military and civilians, leading to hundreds of thousands of deaths.
The U.S. not only hid the evidence of Japan’s use of biological weapons, it undertook a covert amnesty of all of Japan’s BW scientists and recruited them to work for the U.S. after World War II. This classified U.S. program remained secret for nearly 40 years, until revealed in the West by journalist John W. Powell in the early 1980s.
Long-neglected Evidence from the DPRK
One of the most important pieces of evidence in the Documentation pamphlet is the report by DRPK Army medical authorities. The DPRK’s own reporting on the germ war attack has been almost entirely ignored or downplayed in Western histories covering the subject. Western authorities have belittled DPRK healthcare expertise and efforts during the Korean War. In 1979, General Douglas MacArthur’s chief medical officer, Brigadier General Crawford Sams, stated in an interview for Washington University School of Medicine’s Oral History Project that his experience in Korea in the early years of the Korean War showed “the North Korean medical service was almost, almost non-existent.”
This is an example of the kinds of propaganda retailed continually about the status of the DPRK’s forces and social institutions. Recent scholarship on the formation of the organization of the medical systems inside the Korean People’s Army (KPA) demonstrates that it was highly sophisticated, if strained by the exigencies of World War II, and later the Korean War. The medical system organized in the north after the Japanese left the Korean peninsula was based on both Japanese and Soviet models of medicine and public health, and informed by experience working with the Chinese People’s Army during the struggle against both the Japanese and the Kuomintang.
In particular, as Professor Kim Seo-ho at the Research Institute of Comparative History and Culture at Hanyang University explained in a 2017 article for the Korean Journal of Medical History, the medical regime in the DPRK army prior to the outbreak of the Korean War was focused on prevention of infectious disease, including “a laboratory for medical experiments and raised laboratory animals”:
“The KPA military medical system was specialized in the fields of infectious disease prevention and preventive medicine. At the time, infectious disease in North Korea was mainly caused by bacteria and viruses in unsanitary living environments. The KPA set up a special anti-infectious disease department in consideration of the soldiers living in the collective facilities. The second characteristic of the KPA military medical system is preventive medicine. Since early 1946, North Korea has been interested in preventive medicine and has established various medical facilities and personnel. In line with this history of preventive medicine, the preventive department was installed in the KPA military medical system.”
Prior to the establishment of the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea in September 1948, the existing medical facilities in northern Korea were still quite impoverished. Official medical facilities relied on Japanese-trained physicians, mostly surgeons, as well as Japanese medical equipment. But with the creation of the DPRK, the Japanese equipment soon was replaced with Soviet-made products. As a result, inside northern Korea the “number of infectious disease patients in North Korea” had fallen by approximately fifty percent by 1947-48 from wartime levels. (See Table 4 in Kim’s article.)
Still, by the time the Korean War broke out in earnest in June 1950, there were still outbreaks of infectious diseases particularly typhoid, typhus, and smallpox. When during the course of the war, the DPRK was faced with new outbreaks of disease and the unusual appearance of insect disease vectors, the government had a medical and laboratory apparatus to assess the new challenges.
On January 29, 1952, KPA’s medical division received a report from Chinese People’s Volunteer forces fighting in the DPRK, that on the previous day U.S. aircraft had “dropped various insects – flies, fleas, ticks, spiders, arachnid flies.” The insects were found southeast of the Ichon district in Kanwon province. Most of the insects were destroyed as a public health matter, but “23 fleas, 35 flies, 5 ticks, 11 spiders and 6 nycteribiid flies… were brought to headquarters with the report.”
It seems likely that if the DPRK was interested in propagating a hoax falsely claiming the United States was using bacteriological or biological weapons, they would assure, one way or another, that these first insects sent to be examined would reveal evidence of biological agents. In fact, most insects tested showed no evidence of infectious material. But a few did, as described below. Additionally, with the insects appearing in the dead of winter, the entire incident seemed highly suspicious to DPRK military health officials.
According to the report of KPA’s medical division, the DPRK set up a commission of the military medical headquarters of the Korean People’s Army to investigate the incident. The KPA effort recruited its own Chief Epidemiologist, as well as both a bacteriologist and an entomologist from KPA headquarters. This early commission established that there was no evidence of any disease outbreak in nearby military or civilian populations from the late January attack.
The bacteriological evidence was nearly as negative. The captured fleas, “ticks,” spiders and arachnid flies carried no known pathogens. However, other species of flies were found to carry cholera. The commission noted that the appearance of the insects “was not a natural occurrence and can only be the result of artificial dissemination” (PDF pgs. 4-5, Documentation on Biological Warfare). Ticks are mentioned in quotes above because later investigators determined “ticks” was a mistranslation and the insects were really “red mites” or Trombicula akamushi, which are known to carry infection for tsutsugamushi fever. (See Report of the International Scientific Commission, Sept. 1952, pg. 176.)
The appearance of cholera also seemed unnatural to investigators. The KPA medical authorities concluded, “the appearance of cholera vibrion in different species of flies, in winter conditions and the non-existence of cholera in North Korea is evidence that they were infected with the aim of being used as bacteriological weapons” (Documentation, pg. 5).
As part of the vetting of the materials in CPC’s Documentation materials, this author’s research showed that while cholera was rare in the DPRK, it was not 100 per cent non-existent. More specifically, cholera at that time was endemic in the southern regions of the Korean peninsula, but not in the north. One outlier on cholera statistics surfaced in the article by Kim Seo-ho referenced above. The article’s Table 4 was a tabulation of infectious diseases in northern Korea from 1944-1948. While there were no cholera cases during most years, there was a seeming outbreak of some 1,200 cases in northern Korea in 1946.
As a matter of convergent validity regarding the appearance of cholera in northern Korea, in 1948 the U.S. Navy undertook a study, Epidemiology of the Diseases of Naval Importance in Korea, which examined the historical prevalence of cholera, smallpox, plague and other diseases on the peninsula. The study did not mention any cholera outbreak in northern Korea during 1946, though there were two such outbreaks in far southern Korea that year (in Pusan and Mokpo). On the other hand, the Navy report established that the DPRK did have a history of cholera outbreaks, with the latest being in the 1930s. Hence the reference of cholera’s “non-existence” in the DPRK most likely refers to the period since the end of World War II.
The DPRK investigations did not end with the data from the January 1952 Chinese Peoples Volunteers report. In the following table, reproduced from the CPC document, we can see that there were multiple bacteriological findings from insects reported dropped from U.S planes. Over a dozen sites had insects that tested positive for plague, cholera and typhus. Two sites showed no evidence of bacteria present.
According to the U.S. Navy epidemiological study cited above, plague had no historical presence on the Korean peninsula. Hence, its first appearance in the DPRK rang alarm bells for medical and military officials.
In the second part of the KPA Medical Division’s BW report, KPA officials referenced a tranche of insect specimens gathered on February 11, 1952. As with the samples gathered a few weeks earlier, many of the insects, including flies, ants, spiders and mosquitoes, carried no infectious germs. But not so the fleas. The KPA pathologists wrote:
“The insects dropped by enemy aircraft on February 11th, 1952 and found by Chinese People’s Volunteers in the Cheumdon region, among which were plague infected fleas, could only be used by the enemy as a bacteriological weapon.”
The repeated findings of plague and later inhalational anthrax in relation to both DPRK and Chinese sites, in each case associated with flyovers by low-flying U.S. military aircraft, seems to be powerful evidence of U.S. use of biological weapons. Plague was totally unknown in the DPRK, and inhalational anthrax, which surfaced in northeast China, had never been recorded in the region before.
The Chinese commission report
Along with the investigation by DPRK military medical authorities, in early 1952 there was a separate investigation by Chinese medical officials of the alleged germ warfare. The Chinese commission’s report — officially titled “Report of the Commission Enquiring Into the Bacteriological Attacks in North East China” — referenced many more experts than the DPRK report. This is likely because China itself was relatively free of military attacks outside of its northeast region, and its academic and medical establishment was relatively intact and free of wartime exigencies. The DPRK, on the other hand, was under near constant bombardment and the situation of the populace was often dire.
According to the Chinese commission, over a two-week period in mid-to-late March 1952, they made “on-the-spot surveys and enquiries at 21 places in the areas of Mukden, Antung, Kwantien and Fushun over which bacteria and virus carrying insects and other infected objects dropped by American aircraft were discovered.”
The Chinese report described the situation they found:
“Statistics compiled by the Northeast air defence organisation shows that 175 groups of American aircraft intruded over areas of Northeast China in the period of February 29 to March 21 [1952] in 955 sorties….
The inhabitants in many places testified before us that they themselves saw objects resembling bags dropped by American aircraft, that these burst on reaching a low altitude, and that immediately afterwards, large numbers of insects… and various objects such as tree leaves, birds feathers and balls of cottonwool were found on the ground. We also examined a bacteriological bomb which was dropped by American military aircraft…..
The localities in which these insects were discovered are in all cases areas over which American aircraft intruded or adjacent to such areas. No such insects have been discovered in other places at the same latitude and with the same temperature and geographical conditions….
The dispersion of these insects showed that they were densely massed in clusters and were concentrated in particular places….
The dispersion of those insects in such concentrated clusters in particular places is fundamentally different from the general even dispersion of local varieties of insects….
The places in which these insects appeared and the conditions under which they lived and moved about were unusual….
The insects were found at a much earlier date than it is natural for local insects to appear.” [Documentation pamphlet, pg. 14-16]
Chinese bacteriological studies had a number of positive results. Salmonella Typhi, which causes typhoid fever, was found on non-biting stable flies, sun-flies, and midges. “From the craneflies dropped by American aircraft a virus of acute encephalitis was isolated,” the report stated (pg. 17). In addition, anthrax bacteria were found on “feathers dropped by American airplanes.” It’s worth noting, in regards to the “feathers” charges, that years later it was shown that the U.S. was working on a biological bomb utilizing infected feathers at the Special Operations Division at Ft. Detrick as early as 1949.
The Chinese commission was staffed by a prestigious assortment of scientists from China’s medical establishment, including the Director of the Supervisory Committee of the People’s Relief Administration of China, the Vice President of the Red Cross of China, and the Secretary General of the Chinese Medical Association.
The CPC’s packet of documentation included an undated report by a Chinese “Commission of Microbiologists, Entomologists, Parasitologists and Epidemiologists Working with the World Peace Council.” This commission of scientists spoke to the forensic finding that many insects had tested negative for any infectious material or organism. Their opinion on this point is never mentioned in historical accounts, and speaks to an aspect of the germ war that is little commented upon.
This commission, which included the Director of the Entomology Lab at Sinica Academy, Peking (who had gotten his doctorate at Paris University); the head of the Biology Department of the Medical Faculty at the Medical College of China, at Mukden; the Director of the Department of Bacteriology at the Medical College of China, Mukden; and the Chief Consultant of the National Institute of Serums and Vaccines, Peking, commented upon the large presence of insects not hitherto known to be “disease carriers.” The scientists thought these insects might have been utilized as carriers or vectors meant to spread disease to other “natural foci” - many zoonotic diseases are known to spread via intermediate animal or insect or parasite vectors.
At the same time, the microbiologist admitted, “The reason for the use of precisely these types of [non-infected] insects is not clear. It is not unlikely that many insects might have been used to cover-up the dropping of real germ-carriers” (Documentation of Biological Warfare, pg. 12). This admission of scientific uncertainty does not fit the U.S. propaganda that the Communists were engaged in a diabolical hoax of false charges and falsification of evidence.
Charges of Deception
Both Chinese and DPRK evidence was examined by the representatives of the International Association of Democratic Lawyers, who arrived in the DPRK on March 3, 1952.
The IADL attorneys and jurists included representatives from Austria, Italy, Great Britain, France, China, Belgium, Brazil and Poland. These were not junior members in their field. The investigation was led by Heinrich Brandweiner, Professor of International Law at the University of Graz, Austria. He was assisted by Luigi Cavalieri, Advocate of the Supreme Court in Rome; Marc Jacquier, Advocate at the Court of Appeal in Paris; Zofia Wasilkowska, Judge of the Supreme Court in Warsaw; Ko Po-nien, Director of the Research Department of People’s Institute of Foreign Affairs, Peking, as well as attorneys from England, Belgium and Brazil. Their investigation included visits to a dozen different BW sites in the DPRK, and examination of evidence from ten further instances of alleged BW attack in China.
While these legal experts were not scientists, they were quite experienced in the assessment of forensic evidence, and in the evaluation of witness testimony. They concluded after their investigations that the U.S. use of bacteriological or biological weapons constituted both a war crime and an act of genocide.
By way of contrast, claims of falsification of evidence regarding the germ warfare allegations – claims that are given wide credence in U.S. academic and journalism circles – center on accusations that the DPRK and Chinese BW sites were artificially constructed, part of an elaborate “hoax” by Communist officials. In Kathryn Weathersby’s essay, “Deceiving the Deceivers: Moscow, Beijing, Pyongyang, and the Allegations of Bacteriological Weapons Use in Korea” (Cold War International History Project Bulletin 11, Winter 1998, pg. 182), Ms. Weathersby quotes a purported memo from Soviet Minister of the Interior, Lavrenty Beria, long-time secret police chief under Stalin, to G.M. Malenkov and the Presidium of the Central Committee of the CPSU. This memo claimed that prior to the March 1952 arrival of the IADL, “two false regions of infection were simulated for the purpose of accusing the Americans of using bacteriological weapons in Korea and China.” (Italics are added for emphasis.)
(Note: In Weathersby’s account, the IADL is called IADJ – the word “Jurists” being the term used for “Lawyers.”)
As anyone can see from the evidence cited throughout this article, there were far more than two sites investigated. The Beria note was a falsification undertaken to discredit his rivals in the Soviet bureaucracy. In the end, Beria was unsuccessful in his post-Stalin power grab, and was arrested and executed before the year was out. The fact that U.S. so-called historians would rely uncritically upon documents produced by Beria is testimony to their desperation to discredit the DPRK/China germ war charges. It is shameful that a generation of scholars and journalists have given credence to this fake “hoax” testimony.
Interestingly, Weathersby must have known that evidence coming from Beria had to have been problematic, or perhaps she had a blind spot that kept her from seeing the problems with the evidence. In her essay, she noted that Beria’s policies post-Stalin were “reckless.” They even amounted to “dangerous adventurism”. She cites Khrushchev’s accusations against Beria as “even more well-founded than previously known” (all quotes in this paragraph from Weathersby’s essay, page 179).
Yet Weathersby failed to mention the often-cited instances of Beria’s prosperity to use torture for false confessions, imprison those who opposed him, or to forge documents. If she had, her credulity surrounding the alleged twelve Soviet documents would have been exposed. As it was, the uncertain origin of the actual documents, which have never been seen by anyone except a Japanese journalist writing for a right-wing newspaper, led her to say her analysis was largely based on textual analysis.
I’ve shown elsewhere how the claims she makes from textual analysis are faulty. I want to add here that multiple instances of Beria’s falsification and/or manipulation of evidence and testimonies for his own political purposes. In the second volume of his memoirs, Khrushchev wrote about Beria, describing how the latter had destroyed via mysterious charges the head of the State Planning Committee, Nikolai Voznesensky: “You had to know Beria to see what he was like, to understand his craftiness and jesuitical qualities…. It all depended on Beria’s own interests, and he made skillful use of his opportunities” (Memoirs of Nikita Khrushchev, Vol. 2, Pennsylvania University Press, 2006 32).
Roy Medvedev’s 1989 book, Let History Judge (Columbia University Press), filled out the details on Beria’s campaign against Voznesensky. According to Medvedev, created an excuse for arresting Voznesenky in 1949 by “concocting a case about the loss of some secret papers in Gosplan” (pg. 785). While Voznesensky escaped Beria’s clutches then, he was arrested a year later, tortured and shot. Medvedev discusses elsewhere in his book another of Beria’s victims, Armenian Communist leader Nersik Stepanyan, who Beria slandered, “demanding his physical annihilation” (pg. 413). Still, for Weathersby, Beria’s elicited testimonies on the supposed BW “hoax” did not raise any suspicions. What’s disturbing is that many mainstream historians, coming into contact with Weathersby’s work, never questioned her approach or offered any sort of even mild critical analysis.
Charges of Genocide
Referencing the 1925 Geneva Protocol against the use of both poisonous gas and bacteriological weapons, the IADL final report stated:
“The use of bacteriological weapons is prohibited by the laws and customs of war….
The Statute of the International Military Tribunal has also termed the killing and extermination of civilian population a crime against humanity, without distinction whether there be a state of peace or a state of war...
The Convention of 9 December 1948 for the prevention and repression of genocide positively applies…
We consider that the facts reported above constitute an act of aggression committed by the United States, an act of genocide, and a particularly odious crime against humanity. It indeed hangs over the whole world as an extremely grave menace, the limits and consequences of which cannot be foreseen.” [Documentation on Biological Warfare, pg. 34]
From a perspective of 72 years after the IADL completed their investigation, it seems that the unforeseen consequences of this terrible episode include the continuing use of genocide as state policy, as we are seeing today conducted by Israel in occupied Palestine.
And scientific collaboration with genocide and biological warfare hasn’t just begun to be condemned, even by the mainstream. Consider the statement from the Fourth International Congress of Microbiology, held in Copenhagen in July 1947, that was included in the Documentation pamphlet materials (pg. 28). The Congress condemned “in the strongest possible terms all forms of biological warfare. The Congress considers such barbaric methods as absolutely unworthy of any civilized community and trusts that all Microbiologists throughout the world will do everything in their power to prevent their exploitation.”
There were ten Canadian participants at the Copenhagen Congress. One of them was Guilford B. Reed, who in both World War II and later during the Cold War was a major figure in Canada’s biological warfare program. Reed’s specialty was researching use of insect vectors to deliver disease to intended targets.
Reed’s collaboration with the germ warfare program was all too common among scientists of many different backgrounds in Canada, the United Kingdom, and the United States. These scientists were not heroes or scholars worthy of respect. They were architects of genocide, responsible not just for genocide against the DPRK or China, but by precedent with their Manhattan Project colleagues in the United States, responsible for setting the modern pattern of use of extermination and genocide by Western countries and their top allies, as we see from Israel today.
Great research! Keep it coming!
Very nice!