Introduction
In November 2016 during the 8th Review Conference of Biological Weapons Convention (BWC) the USA totally rejected all proposals regarding inspections of American bio laboratories and underlined its unacceptance of creating this kind of verification mechanism in BWC.
Experts in the international expert community pay attention to the rising American bioscience activities abroad. It is alarming that the US puts large sums of money in construction of dual use biological laboratories in other countries, delivers special equipment and its own military bio scientists.
For the sake of struggle against local infectious diseases, Washington forces some developing countries to accept American bio aid assistance. It seems to be quite friendly, but as a result, the newly constructed lab or an old reconstructed one is totally controlled by the US military. The local authorities are not even aware of the actual experiments being conducted there, how the results are being used and the danger that infectious samples, strain or deadly viruses pose; this is an area of total blackout for the host states. From the legal point of view, a domestic healthcare organization must control the experiments, receive the results and define further activities. However, the doors of these labs are closed for locals and are heavily guarded by US soldiers.
Bioscience Experimentation for Military Purposes and Implications
Biological warfare is the deliberate spreading of disease amongst humans, animals, and plants. Biological weapons (BW) introduce a bacteria or virus into an environment for hostile purposes that are not prepared to defend it from the intruder. As a result, this agent can become very effective at killing plants, livestock, pets, and humans (depends on the purpose of the weapon). There is a huge variety of genetically or traditionally modified bacteria and viruses to withstand antibiotics, that could be used as biological weapons, but some of the most common types today are bacteria, rickettsiae, viruses, toxins, and fungi. When compared to the cost of a nuclear weapons programme, biological weapons are extremely cheap. It is estimated that 1 gram of toxin could kill 10 million people.
The use of biological weapons is not a new phenomenon, whereas the modern outlook of the military intensification has brought the greatest threats ever. The first recorded use of biological agents is the Romans using dead animals to foul the enemies’ water supply. This had the dual effects of decreasing enemy numbers and lowering morale. For example during:
• 1346-1347 – the Mongols catapulted corpses contaminated with plague over the walls into Kaffa (in Crimea), forcing besieged Genoans to flee. Some historians believe that this event was the cause of the epidemic of plague that swept across medieval Europe killing 25 million.
• 1710 – Russian troops allegedly used plague-infected corpses against Swedes.
• 1767 – During the French and Indian Wars, the British give blankets used to wrap British smallpox victims to hostile Indian tribes.
• 1916-1918 – German agents used anthrax and the equine disease glanders to infect livestock and feed for export to Allied forces. Incidents include the infection of Romanian sheep with anthrax and glanders for export to Russia, Argentinean mules with anthrax for export to Allied troops, and American horses and feed with glanders for export to France 1937.
• 1939 – Nomonhan Incident – Japanese poisoned Soviet water supply with intestinal typhoid bacteria at former Mongolian border. This was the first use of biological weapons by Japanese.
• 1937 – Japan begins its offensive biological weapons programme. Unit 731, the BW research and development unit, is located in Harbin, Manchuria. Over the course of the program, at least 10,000 prisoners were killed in Japanese experiments.
• 1940 – The Japanese dropped rice and wheat mixed with plague-carrying fleas over China and Manchuria
• 1942 – U.S. begins its offensive biological weapons programme and chooses Camp Detrick, Frederick, Maryland as its research and development site.
• 1945 – Only known tactical use of BW by Germany. A large reservoir in Bohemia is poisoned with sewage.
• 1951 – In a test of BW dispersal methods, biological simulants are sprayed over San Francisco.
• 1966 – The United States conducts a test of vulnerability to covert BW attack by releasing a harmless biological simulant into the New York City subway system.
• 1969 – President Nixon announces unilateral dismantlement of the U.S. offensive BW program.
• 1970 – President Nixon extends the dismantlement efforts to toxins, closing a loophole which might have allowed for their production.
• 1978 – In a case of Soviet state-sponsored assassination, Bulgarian exile Georgi Markov, living in London, is stabbed with an umbrella that injects him with a tiny pellet containing ricin (a highly toxic, natural protein).
• 1979 – Outbreak of pulmonary anthrax in Sverdlovsk, Soviet Union.
• 1992- Russian president Boris Yeltsin acknowledges that the outbreak was caused by an accidental release of anthrax spores from a Soviet military microbiological facility.
• 1985-1991 – Iraq develops an offensive biological weapons capability including anthrax, botulium toxin, and aflatoxin.
The military use of the bioweapons during a conflict allows the receiving state to respond with other strategic weapons, whereas the process of research that potentially increases the level of threat perception makes the states more vulnerable during peacetime. The vulnerabilities maximize its anxiety due to the much hidden intensions of the threat posing state. Living in the ambiguous environment states indulge in the arms race by developing their own, which leads to permanent instability between the states.
Incidents of Infections in US Project 112 and US Bioscience Laboratories
Tens of thousands of military personnel and civilians were potentially exposed to chemical or biological substances through Department of Defense (DOD) tests since World War II. DOD conducted many of the biological weapons tests as part of its Project 112 test program, while many other tests were conducted under separate efforts.1 In 2004, DOD reported it had identified 5,842 service members and estimated 350 civilians as having been potentially exposed during Project 112.2 Moreover, since June 2003, the non-DOD sources—including the Institute of Medicine—have identified approximately 600 additional names of individuals who were potentially exposed during Project 112.3
| Table 1: Number of U.S Service members Identified as Having Been Potentially Exposed during Project 112 | |
| Total number of Project 112 names identified as of December 2007 | 6,440 |
| DOD’s 2003 Report to Congress | 5,842 |
| Number of names identified since DOD’s 2003 report | 598 |
| Institute of Medicine research (394 names) | |
| Veterans’ inquiries (165 names) | |
| GAO research (39 names) |
Despite international agreements that regulate activities in the field of biological research on this subject, just as on the subject of chemical weapons, the US remains a country of double standards. It is not reliably known what kind of research, especially research related to deadly viruses, is being carried out by the American military, or where.
Following the terrorist attacks in New York in September 2001, biological threats were used to frighten America. The situation with the sending of letters containing powder with spores of anthrax was blown up to the level of public hysteria. It happened approximately a week after the attacks on the World Trade Center in New York, which created the illusion that there was a link between the two events, united by the theme of the threat of ‘Islamic fundamentalism’. Ten years later, in 2011, declassified FBI documents showed that the spores of anthrax were developed at the US Army Medical Research Institute of Infectious Diseases.
In ten years, the number of American laboratories engaged in developing ways to protect against bioterrorism, according to the official version, has grown from 20 to 400. Secret biological centers have appeared in Africa and Latin and America, biological laboratories of unknown function have opened in Ukraine and Georgia, and it also opened a biological centre in Kazakhstan in 2015. The majority of these activities are being supervised by the Pentagon.
Furthermore, the growing network of clandestine US bioscience laboratories angered the Russian authorities who charged Pentagon with expanding a network of biological weapons laboratories in Europe. The 2016 Russian national security strategy document described the United States and NATO as threats and warns of the “uncertainty about instances of foreign states’ possession of biological weapons and their potential for developing and producing them.” The strategy document also provoked that “the network of U.S. military-biological laboratories on the territory of states adjacent to Russia is being expanded.” 4 Without any doubt this is an emerging area of silent war gamming where tomorrow (if not today) a full-fledged military response could be seen between the two powerful nuclear capable states.
| Table 2: Number of Non-Project 112 U.S Service members Identified by DOD as of December 2007 | |
| Number of names in OUSD (AT&L) task order database | 8,979 |
| Number of names in OUSD (AT&L) task order database that have been identified as having been potentially exposed to a chemical or biological substance | 7,120 |
| Number of names in OUSD (AT&L) task order database that have not been exposed to any chemical or biological substances | 1,859 |
| Number of names awaiting entry into database | 844 |
| Total | 9,823 |
Many reports from different sources keep on saying the US is developing a new generation of weapons that undermine and possibly violate international treaties on biological and chemical warfare. The Defense Department has been continuously expanding worldwide its military biological infrastructure. These facilities have sprung up in many countries, and in recent years they are being created increasingly closer to Russian borders. For instance, the US Richard G. Lugar Public Health Research Center in Tbilisi is actually a high level biological research laboratory overseen by the US Defense Threat Reduction Agency.
The Central reference Laboratory near Almaty, Kazakhstan, is also operational which is part of the Cooperative Biological Engagement Program led by the US Department of Defense. There is another smaller US-controlled lab at a military base in the town of Otar in western Kazakhstan on the Caspian Sea.
In 2013 a Chinese Air Force officer accused the US government of creating a new strain of bird flu that afflicted parts of China as a biological warfare attack. People’s Liberation Army Senior Colonel Dai Xu also said that the United States released the H7N9 bird flu virus into China in an act of biological warfare. “At that time, America was fighting in Iraq and feared that China would take advantage of the opportunity to take other actions”, he said. “This is why they used bio-psychological weapons against China. All of China fell into turmoil and that was exactly what the United States wanted. Now, the United States is using the same old trick. China should have learned its lesson and should calmly deal with the problem”.
Ukraine is of particular interest to the US military where the Mechnikov Anti-Plague Research Institute in Odessa is sited. In 2013 alone, US-sponsored bio-laboratories were opened in Vinnitsa, Ternopil, Uzhhorod, Kiev, Dnepropetrovsk, Simferopol in Crimea, Kherson, Lviv and Lugansk. In April 2011, a Central Reference Laboratory supported by the US Department of Defense Cooperative Biological Engagement Program (CBEP) was inaugurated in Azerbaijan. The practice of using such facilities in other countries shows they operate outside of national control. The secrecy is tight and quite often the laboratories are managed by former military or special services officials.
| Table 3: U.S Veterans Who the Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) Has Notified of Their Potential Exposure as of December 2007 | |||||
| OUSD (P&R) | Project 112 | OUSD (AT&L) task order | Total | ||
| Number of names DOD has provided to VA | 6,739 | 6,440 | 7,531 | 20,710 | |
| Names with no numeric identifier (e.g., social security number or service number) | 666 | 385 | none | 1,051 | |
| Names of veterans known to be deceased | 2,157 | 733 | 500 | 3,390 | |
| Possible number of veterans to be notified (i.e., veterans who have an identifier and are not documented as deceased) | 3,916 | 5,322 | 7,031 | 16,269 | |
| Number of notification letters mailed by VA | 319a | 4,438 | 2,987 | 7,744 | |
| Percentage of veterans sent notification letters for those known not to be deceased and for which VA has a numeric identifier | 8% | 83% | 42% | 48% |
Furthermore, on June 11, 2015 a Russian Foreign Ministry statement said that, ‘the US is obstructing international efforts to eradicate biological weapons, seeking to involve other nations covertly in research on weaponized diseases… America’s record of handling bioweapons is poor’.5
In 2015, accusations of mishandling biological weapons voiced by the Russian Foreign Ministry referred to a report that mentioned the US military shipment of a live anthrax by mistake. Pentagon also admitted sending samples of the highly dangerous disease to at least 51 labs in 17 US states and three foreign countries.6
The delivery “posed a high risk of outbreak that threatened not only the US population, but also other countries, including Canada and Australia. Of great concern is the shipment of bacteria to a US military facility in a third country, the Osan Air Base in South Korea,” the Russian ministry also said in a statement. It added that an anthrax outbreak incident occurred earlier in 2001, also involved a US military lab.7
| Table 4: Number of U.S Civilians Potentially Exposed as of December 2007 | |
| Civilians identified during OUSD (P&R)’s investigation | 882 |
| Civilians identified during OASD (HA) investigation of Project 112 | 327 |
| Civilians identified during OUSD (AT&L)’s chemical and biological office task order | 715 |
| Total number of civilians identified as being potentially exposed | 1,924 |
Issues of Compliance against Bioscience Research
The Road to Hell is paved with Good Intensions, isn’t it?
The BWC does not currently have compliance details. Negotiations towards an internationally binding verification protocol to the BWC took place between 1995 and 2001 in a forum known as the Ad Hoc Group. The microbiological activity of the member states under the developed protocol would have been subject to on-site inspections by an independent authority. In 2001, the US refused to sign up and has not changed its stance since then. Due to the refusal of the US to approve the verification mechanisms, the effectiveness of the BWC is questioned. Is there any logical explanation to this tough stance? Yes, definitely there is – its name is ‘non-transparent military bioscience activity abroad’ under cover of declared peaceful goals.
In November 2016 during the 8th Review Conference of Biological Weapons Convention (BWC) USA totally rejected all proposals regarding inspections of American bio laboratories and underlined the un-acceptance of creating such kind of verification mechanism in frames of BWC. Furthermore, recent developments have raised concerns that the US may be pursuing research that is outlawed by the BWC. Such concerns are expressed in the Russian Federation’s 2016 National Security Strategy. The document lists biological weapons as primary threats to Russia.
Lessons for Pakistan and Other States
Pakistan should not stay aloof and should closely monitor these alarming signals that should attract attention of Pakistani government, Ministry of Foreign Affairs, SPD and other related institutions. There is a direct necessity to place all American bio companies represented in Pakistan under strict control and prevent creation of any types of dual-use labs with any type of assistance from US.
This set of questions can also be put in the agenda of bilateral relations with other countries which have such laboratories on its sovereign territory. Among them are Peru, Uganda, Georgia, Ukraine, Kazakhstan, Armenia, Azerbaijan and Pakistan’s close neighbor—Tajikistan.
Washington is sponsoring renovation and re-equipment of scientific center ‘Bio Preperaty’ in Tajikistan. This lab is directly dealing with strains of deadly anthrax and other extremely dangerous materials. Besides that, US so-called specialists have shown interest in the National Institute of Hazardous Infections in Tajikistan and two other crucial institutions: Center for Tropical Diseases, and Main Germ Laboratory.
To receive the famous American bio-aid-finance assistance Tajikistan has to provide them with full-scale authorization for work in the country. It is not mentioned directly but it includes extraction of dangerous microorganism strains and uses the results of experiments for their own purposes.
Moreover, surprisingly Washington is also trying to involve Uzbekistan in its well known worldwide system of bio research. By now under US finance 10 bio labs in this country have been reequipped and united in a joint network. According to an agreement with Uzbekistan, US experts are demilitarizing the old bio weapons facilities in the country. However, it is alarming that they were granted full-scale access to the anthrax infected animal burial grounds on Uzbek part of Vozrozhdenie Island in Aral Sea and the samples are sent to US.
Thanks to former USSR republics US enlarges its bank of pathogens leather for particular region and inhabitants living there. There is evidence that Georgia has gratuitously transmitted to US three large anthrax, plague and cholera strain collections. Kazakhstan also granted strains of plague and anthrax. It is also known that American experts in Uzbekistan are trying to get access to National Database of Strains, covering their interest with a program of creating vaccines against virtuous diseases.
These days another popular area of international efforts is war against terrorism. Without any surprises the US also exploits this topic for its own purposes just like the phenomenon of creating Daesh/ISIS and then using it against the Muslim World. In the same way, based on the propagated threats of health, the US buy licenses on scientific inventions regarding human survival in extreme conditions and by intellectual rights on antidotes against lethal infections (in few cases invented by the former USSR scientists).
Conclusion
What conclusions can be drawn out of all this?
Washington masterfully manipulated the developing countries when convenient, exploits their assets to extract all necessary knowledge. It seems to be a common strategy and sphere of bioscience is just another example in a long line, what is alarming is that one country receives something very crucial at the cost of vulnerability for another country.
The described worldwide network of US controlled biosciences labs provides the American experts with unique opportunity to conduct research and experimentation prohibited by the Biological Weapons Convention in local environment. I am not trying to establish here that the use of alien US bioscience labs established on foreign territories are meant for bio weapons or undesirably directed to devastate the host country, its economy or a whole region. The problem is that such activity in case of a human failure can easily lead to an extremely dangerous epidemic in a whole region with dramatic consequences in many neighboring countries.
There are serious concerns about effectiveness of American control and prevention system in biosphere. Some examples of critical failures in American bio labs inside and outside US can be found in an article published by USA Today that mentioned, “between 2010 to 2014, there were 644 different incidents registered including infecting the labors and personnel.”8 The above mentioned GAO analysis of DOD data is another example of it.
The US duplicitous commitments on WMD conventions are posing grave threats to international peace and security. Furthermore, the US path towards clandestine activities for hazardous biological epidemics makes peaceful nations vulnerable to Washington’s agenda of biological warfare. It is important for all those states to get legal and political accountability over the bioscience activities with which the US maintains such bilateral bioscience cooperation. In case of a catastrophe the host states would be affected directly by compromising the safety and health of their nations in case of any hazardous incident. Moreover, any such incident could ignite a pure military action by the neighboring states against the host state who deliberately allowed US clandestine bioscience research in the pretext of biological weapons. After all, among other things Russian and Chinese will likely be the last islands of opposition that the wave of democracy will land upon, but when it does, the US Military Force desires to have unique weapons at its disposal in order to swiftly bring the changes it seeks. Bio-weapons will likely be the ultimate choice.
End Notes
1 “United States Government Accountability Office (GAO), Report to Congressional Requesters—Chemical and Biological Defense—DOD and VA Need to Improve Efforts to Identify and Notify Individuals Potentially Exposed during Chemical and Biological Tests”. Available online at: http://www.gao.gov/cgi-bin/getrpt?GAO-08-366 (Accessed on January 22, 2017).
2 Ibid.
3 Ibid.
4 Bill Gertz, “Russia Says U.S. Expanding Bioweapons Labs in Europe,” (January 13, 2016). Available online at: http://freebeacon.com/tag/vladimir-putin/ (Accessed on January 15, 2017)
5 “US encircling Russia with bioweapons labs, covertly spreads them – Russian FM” (June 11, 2015). Available online at: https://on.rt.com/g6nx37 (Accessed on December 25, 2016)
6 The report is available on the link: http://rt.com/usa/264717-pentagon-live-anthrax-sent/ (Accessed on January 22, 2017).
7 “US encircling Russia with bioweapons labs, covertly spreads them – Russian FM”, Ibid.
8 The detailed analysis can be found at: http:/usatoday.com/topic/9EE9E5DE-B702-4FBC-9E5D-LB595ADCF938/BIOLABS// (Accessed on January 10, 2017).
