Did the U.S use biological weapons during the Korean War?
- John Zek
- May 20
- 6 min read
Swirling around the discussion of Frank Olson’s death is the claim that he was murdered in part because of his knowledge of the use of BW during the Korean War.
Given the covert nature of BW over the history of the Cold War there have been many allegations of their use.
I have personal experience, when I visited Russia I was told about the Colorado beetle that ate the potato plants of my host’s garden and how some claim this is a BW from the U.S.
The historical debate of the use of BW in the Korean war is probably one of the fiercest. Given the knowledge of BW capability by the U.S and the protection/employment of Japanese war criminal scientists and the brutality of the war it does not fall outside of reason to assume it happened. But as scholars point out, the Soviets were effective in their disinformation campaign (See Chapter 4 for a longer discussion of the BW disinformation campaign conducted by the Soviets). The evidence from both sides that make it difficult to answer definitively.
The Claim
The Korean War was a seesaw of incredible wins and catastrophic losses; it included indiscriminate massacres of civilians perpetrated mostly by the South Korean government (and by the U.S such as the No Gun Ri massacre that saw marines machine gun fleeing refugee ) and aerial bombings that flattened all of the major cities in Korea. The use of BW in such a brutal war does not fall out of the realm of possibility, and the unpredictable and rapid pace of the war almost brought the use of nuclear weapons by the U.S, who were afraid of losing the whole peninsula. General Mcarthur famously proposed detonating nuclear weapons to create “belt of radioactive cobalt” to halt Chinese advances and by September 1951 a top secret memo by the U.S chief of staff began recommended the use of BW.
On February 22, 1952, Bak Hun Yung the North Korean foreign minister issued an official statement alleging that the U.S had conducted entomological warfare by dropping bacteria laden insects in over 69 sorties over North China. What happened next is what many claim as proof that the BW had occurred, a massive epidemic prevention campaign by the Chinese and NK army; over 3 million doses of plague vaccine were administered, 20,000 medical workers were organised into brigades to inoculate them, and citizens worked to clear millions of tonnes of rubble and rubbish as part of a public health campaign.
William Burchett, an Australian journalist writes
“’They circled low,’ said our C.P.V. informant, ‘and it looked as if brownish smoke was coming from their tails. After they had gone, we found clusters of flies and fleas on the snow-covered hillsides. In one place there were over 1,000 fleas in a square metre of snow’.”
By mid-1952 38 captured American airmen were brought to the media to describe their complicity in dropping BW across Korea and denouncing the U.S as "imperialist, capitalist Wall Street war monger.” (And if you will remember this incident sparked the whole ‘brainwashing’ panic for the CIA).
An investigation by the U.N was proposed, the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) was suggested to do the investigation but denounced the Soviets as a ‘lackey of US imperialism ’ and had lost integrity due to it’s silence of WWII war crimes. The World Health Organization was also floated but immediately knocked down, as Jeffery Lockwood biologist and author of Six-Legged Soldiers: Using Insects as Weapons of War comments:
“The WHO was a branch of the United Nations, so the Americans were essentially proposing that their personal physician should be the referee.”
Neither were allowed to investigate, the ICRC was blocked from visiting the area and instead created a scientific commission with the backing of the World Peace Council. This commission produced over 600 pages of evidence in their two-month investigation, as Lockwood describes:
‘The major problem with the report… was not the evidence was too weak but that it was incomprehensibly strong. The case was lavish beyond belief, with the accusers wallowing in insects, bomb fragments, microbial slides, autopsy reports, eyewitness testimonies and POW confessions.’
Regis points out two main issues: that BW is important for its covert nature and that the US army had spent so much to keep their BW experiments top secret. He argues
“And then, suddenly, in the middle of all this camouflage, cover, secrecy, and concealment, U.S fighter planes start dropping biological payloads out over a known war zone in broad daylight?”
For decades after the war debates over the evidence raged and it all seemed to have been laid to rest in 1998 when there emerged 12 de-classified documents that a Japanese researcher in Moscow had transcribed from the Presidential archives. Among them were memos between Soviet chief of Police Levrenty Beria and the various ministers at the time in 1953 who were dealing with the wake of Stalin’s death, one from Beria reads:
“two false regions of infection were simulated for the purpose of accusing the Americans of using bacteriological weapons in Korea and China. Two Koreans who had been sentenced to death and were being held in a hut were infected. One of them was later poisoned.”
Another from the ambassador of the USSR to China starts:
“For Mao Zedong “The Soviet Government and the Central Committee of the CPSU were misled. The spread in the press of information about the use by the Americans of bacteriological weapons in Korea was based on false information. The accusations against the Americans were ficticious.”
Not long after these memos were sent the Soviets did drop their allegations of BW use, which had puzzled the Americans at the time.
The main critics Stephen Endicott and Edward Hagerman have attacked the authenticity of the documents and as the historian Kathryn Weathersby admits ‘We therefore do not have such tell-tale signs of authenticity as seals, stamps or signatures that a photocopy can provide.’
Despite this she explains that dates, persons and events are verifiable from other sources and ‘their contents are so complex and interwoven that it would have been extremely difficult to forge them.’
Endicott continues by arguing that this was during the factional power struggle after Stalin’s death and that Beria was creating false allegations against his rival. Endicott seems to want it both ways, that is, they are argue that the documents are fake but even if they were real they are faked by Beria.
Lockwood takes a more middle road approach discussing other alternative viewpoints: that the Koreans realized an impending BW attack made the accusations as a way to attract international media attention so as to ward off a real attack or that the allegations were created by the Chinese and Koreans to internally mobilize their populations against a real health crisis, the latter at least explains the vast resources deployed by the Koreans and Chinese during a desperate war. Nicholson Baker writer of Baseless: My Search for Secrets in the Ruins of the Freedom of Information Act puts out a more intriguing theory forward in his book, suggesting that the Americans did small-scale drops of uninfected lab animals and bugs as part of a psychological warfare operation.
This theory better explains two key issues. The bevy of documented attacks reported by farmers was true, they had seen ‘attacks’ but this was all simulated by the U.S who were conducting attacks in broad daylight as a way to terrify the population and hamper Korean and Chinese back lines.
[1] A communist backed organization.
[i] https://cissm.umd.edu/sites/default/files/2021-10/NonProliferationReview_False%20allegations%20of%20biological%20weapons%20use%20from%20Putin%20s%20Russia.pdf page 2 & 8.
[ii] https://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/inatl/daily/sept99/skorea30.htm
[iii] https://newrepublic.com/article/158008/germ-warfare-book-nicholson-baker-baseless-review
[iv] https://archive.org/details/unitedstatesbiol00endi/page/200/mode/2up page 200
[v] Ibid 166-167
[vi] https://www.revolutionarydemocracy.org/archive/KoreanWar.pdf page 238
[vii] https://ia803008.us.archive.org/32/items/KillingHope/Killing%20Hope.pdf page 26
[viii] Six-legged soldiers : using insects as weapons of war page 169
[ix] Ibid page 169
[x] Ibid 188
[xi] https://archive.org/details/biologyofdoomhis00regi/page/228/mode/2up?q=korea page 228
[xii]https://web.archive.org/web/20131102130806/http://www.wilsoncenter.org/sites/default/files/Bulletin_11_Korea.pdf page 182
[xiii]https://web.archive.org/web/20131102130806/http://www.wilsoncenter.org/sites/default/files/Bulletin_11_Korea.pdf page 183
[xiv] Ibid 176
[xv] https://www.yorku.ca/sendicot/12SovietDocuments.htm
[xvi] Six legged soldiers 190
[xvii] https://www.thenation.com/article/culture/nicholson-baker-baseless-review/
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