By Barry Sheppard
An article in the latest Scientific American, "Biological Warfare Against Crops", reveals that the US developed weapons that can only be described as weapons of mass destruction.
The article states: "The US developed a number of weapons systems, some of which can only be described as ingenious, designed to deliver anti-crop agents. One of the early weapons was a 500-pound [226.8 kilograms] bomb originally designed to release propaganda leaflets. Instead this extraordinary weapon was packed with bird feathers, which carried the fine dust of fungal spores.
"Perhaps not since pre-revolutionary America, when the British distributed smallpox-ridden blankets to Indians, have such benign objects served such deadly ends. The US performed field tests of the 'feather bomb' at Camp Detrick in Maryland and in the US Virgin Islands ...
"According to a declassified Camp Derick report, 'feathers dusted with 10% by weight of cereal rust spores ... will carry sufficient number of spores to initiate a cereal rust epidemic'.
"The horror of biological weapons is usually portrayed in terms of the intentional exposure of a human population to deadly diseases, such as anthrax or plague.... But a less obvious type of biological weapon has great destructive capability and gets little attention ... those that kill crops rather than people."
Such weapons can be tailored to attack "only the enemy's sources of staple foods", resulting in massive famine and death. "A food crop epidemic initiated by a biological attack might look like a natural outbreak, freeing the covert aggressor from blame and repercussion. And if a government requires public approval for maintaining hostilities, an overt assault against plants ... may be more psychologically acceptable than attacks on people ...
"In reality, though, the results could be appalling. A poor country in which millions of citizens are dependent on a staple crop such as rice and in which that rice crop is seriously damaged ... could well experience famine that would be at least as costly, in human terms, as an anthrax attack on a city.
"Malnutrition and starvation would ensue, with the poorest segment of the population being hardest hit. In addition to the direct effects of starvation, immune resistance to a wide range of common illnesses would be reduced, and the extent of pain and suffering could be every bit as bad as that resulting from an anthrax attack."
The perfect capitalist and imperialist weapon! The authors say that many of the details of US biological weapons capability are now declassified. "The US anti-crop program dealt with many diseases, such as late blight of potatoes and sclerotium rot, which attacks crops such as soy beans, sugarbeets, sweet potatoes and cotton. The main targets of the US program, however, were wheat in the western Soviet Union, especially the Ukraine, and rice in Asia, chiefly China.
"Between 1951 and 1969 the US stockpiled more than 30,000 kilograms of spores of ... the fungus that causes stem rust of wheat; that quantity is probably enough to infect every wheat plant on the planet." This disease "has excellent weapons potential because it retains its viability in cool storage for more than two years, and it spreads rapidly after being released ...
"The US chose blast disease ... as its main anti-rice agent, and had a cache of nearly a ton of dust-mote sized spores by 1966."
Besides the US, Britain, France, Germany and the USSR developed such weapons. Britain concentrated on various herbicides as well as anthrax.
"In the 1950s, some of those chemical plant killers found roles in battles with communist insurgents in Malaya and set the stage for the extensive use of chemical defoliants in the 1960s and 1970s by the US in Vietnam."
The Vietnamese people are still suffering birth defects and other illnesses caused by Agent Orange. US soldiers who fought in Vietnam were affected too.
In 1969, US President Richard Nixon announced that the US would unilaterally renounce the use of lethal biological agents and weapons. The authors quote an expert who told a US Senate committee why: "First, these weapons could be as great a threat as nuclear weapons; second, they could be simpler and less expensive to develop and produce than nuclear weapons, and crucially, the US offensive biological weapons program could be easily duplicated ... [and thus] was a substantial threat to our own security".
The program was probably not abandoned, but just made more secret. The goal of the announcement and the subsequent Biological and Toxin Weapons Convention was to deter other countries from developing such weapons.
Similar reasons were behind the treaty on the non-proliferation of nuclear weapons. The US intends to maintain a formidable nuclear arsenal, while pressuring other nations not to develop atomic weapons.
Biological weapons are more easily concealed, and much cheaper to produce than atomic weapons, so it is easier to hide their continued development. At the same time, Washington fears that others can also hide their work in this field, which is a reason to keep some sort of anti-crop program going, even if only for defensive purposes.
Before and after 1969, Cuba experienced a number of mysterious outbreaks of crop and livestock diseases. The Cuban government repeatedly pointed to Washington as being responsible.
Congress has approved, as part of its $23 billion appropriation for its fake "war on drugs", a program to develop anti-crop weapons against plants used to manufacture illegal drugs. There is talk of destroying coca crops in Colombia, in regions where growing that crop is an economic necessity for the peasants. As well, many of these regions are held by leftist guerillas, whom the US wants to eliminate under cover of the war on drugs.