I've heard another variation of this story. The broad outline is that the USG thought the Chinese/Soviets had some sort of mind-control/brainwashing technique that triggered these confessions. It was allegedly a large part of the impetus that led them to create their own ARTICHOKE/MKULTRA program. But in the end the CIA determined the only technique that was really necessary and used on the men for this purpose was sleep deprivation.
I'm not claiming either version of the events is true/false. Just relaying another I've heard.
> It was allegedly a large part of the impetus that led them to create their own ARTICHOKE/MKULTRA program.
This is a commonly repeated refrain, but it just exists to provide a comforting explanation for the fact that the U.S. security state decided to embark on a program of mind control experimentation on many unwitting and unwilling human guinea pigs. The truth is that as WWII wound down, we eagerly imported Nazi scientists who were already engaged in this kind of research, and ARTICHOKE/MKULTRA/etc were just the continuation of it for all the same purposes but under a different name.
Wasn't it somewhat of a natural progression? The world was making multiple major discoveries, tons of new developments in pharma and psychology research, the space race, plus how Telecom, satellites and radio communications impact on spying etc.
It makes sense that spies would dream up some super drug that makes people talk. The El Dorado miracle pill to solve hard human problems... you combine that with technological exuberance of the era and cold war pressure, it makes sense.
You don't need to have Nazi imports or any one motivation to explain why they tried.
The circumstances of them unethically testing it on civilians is another matter.
I keep hearing about this but I just don't see how its going to happen.
Russia is essentially finished if not now, then definitely due to their demographic collapse.
People thought China was the next big empire to take on the US but after their ongoing real estate collapse, the ongoing failure of belt and road, and their eventual population bomb leading to a demographic collapse that is probably worse than Russia how can anyone see them overtaking the US?
Originally I thought that maybe China can make up for its woes by way of immigration and assimilation with Bent and Road 'colonies' but having traveled to one of their closeest B&R partners(Pakistan) recently, none of their partners are in a good position themselves to help China out. Plus I don't think China is really open to immigration. In the end I suspect the 'friendships' with China will last only as long as the money keeps rolling in.
Who else is left on this planet that could take on the US? India? EU? Both have serious flaws that limit their reach.
How about the time when American pregnant women were given "vitamin cocktails" by their doctors which turned out to be radioactive to see if radioactive particles would be passing the placenta barrier? [1]
Or this Syphillis study? [2]
And then there was the time the US waged germ warfare against the Bay Area... [3]
> The US has been involved in a staggering amount of crime abroad in the last century.
You're not wrong. We've been incredibly shitty domestically and internationally.
> Perhaps more than all other countries combined.
Uhhhh, yeah, not really. The last century or two, humanity's hands have been pretty collectively bathed in blood.
I'd say easily the most bloody are those of the British, whose oppression and exploitation is unmatched in modern history for how pervasive, long-running, and brutal it was. I'd guess figures well into "hundreds of millions", possibly a billion or more across the several centuries. People look at Blackwater and their ilk and think it was some sort of new boundary being crossed. East India Company for two and a half centuries placed large swaths of the world's populace under corporate rule and had its own standing army and navy.
Japan committed so many wartime atrocities during WW2 it's difficult to summarize or account for them all, and estimates go as high as 30M killed.
Stalin's regime is estimated to have killed around 20 million people.
Mao could have been responsible for as many as 40 million.
Then there's all manner of dictators in the Americas and Africa (some propped up by America, of course), the various southeast asian regimes (Indonesia for example) and so on.
It’s a fair comparison. Frankly the Nazis are overrated.
Nazis: ~6 million
Soviet Union: ~20 million
China Cultural Revolution: ~30 million
Though the Soviet Union and China ones were more of a result of incredibly bad economic policies. The Soviets still killed ~1-2 million in Gulags directly.
Let’s also not forget the Japanese genocides against China. Nanjing, Unit 731…
There also is, of course, more recent ones that are little known. Cambodia took over a million and Rwanda close to that.
Comically absurd Soviet propaganda without actual evidence. As credible as anything published by the North Korean government. The winners of WW2 wrote the history books.
At least the CPP and China only fucked their own people - plus, the numbers are hugely inflated BS as you note, adding results of bad policies, and famines etc in societies torn by wars and poverty. Regarding those, one could include the British genocide of Irish and Indian people which used those as explicit tools even (as opposed to mere incompetence, not to mention ruling India wasn't their job in the first place).
In contrast, imperialism and colonialism fucked people over all over the world. And some of the later impact is masked, because they enabled locals to do the dirty job for them - to the tunes of tens of millions affected.
11 millions were killed, and 25 millions were starved to death by Soviets prior to the war. ("Svoboda" (Liberty, Ukrainian outlet in the USA) Oct 04 1941 [0]). Numbers are matching the (hidden and then destroyed) 1926 census, where Ukrainians were listed at 81 million and Russians at 77 million. Russians increased losses in WWWII from 12 to 42 millions to hide about 30 million of kills by Soviets.
After many revisions the total death toll at each of the concentration camps where the Holocaust occurred (which just so happened to only occur on ex-Soviet territory) adds up to a tiny fraction of 6 million, but the overall "6 million" Soviet propaganda term was never revised.
As far as the Holocaust goes, Hitler was inspired by America's white supremacy and genocide of native Americans, and the Holocaust was funded by numerous American companies (not just IBM.) So while Hitler and the Nazis definitely deserve the blame for that, the US' hands aren't entirely clean either.
I stopped reading when the author categorized "prisoners of war being told to read confessions over Chinese propaganda radio" as "testifying publicly", almost at the start of the piece:
> It was the propaganda version of an incendiary bomb. In 1952 U.S. Air Force and Marine flyers, shot down during the Korean War, testified publicly that they had been ordered to drop biological weapons (BW) on China and North Korea.
The two sentences feel intentionally written to obfuscate the fact that the statements were made under duress as POWs; it strongly implies that they testified, after the war, about dropping biological weapons.
Even if much of what he does discuss did happen (the US secretly pardoning Japanese units that did absolutely horrific experiments on people for chemical and biological warfare, for example, and of course we used a lot of horrific shit in Korea and Vietnam), there's so much that is unsourced / uncited mixed in.
Half the links in the text are to his own writing, another chunk are to other Medium blogs, with a sprinkling of newspaper clippings (because the newspapers were so trustworthy back during that time)...pass.
I really don't know what to think of HN these days. You're absolutely right, and yet this post is at the bottom being downvoted.
If the pilots knew, then a large number of support crew also would have known. But the only "testimony" we have is from captured PoWs, after how many decades of opportunities for deathbed confessions? Give me a break.
I ignore any kind of political discussion on HN after the dominant narrative on a couple of
Ukraine threads was straight Russian propaganda and "Ukraine is doomed" etc etc.
>it strongly implies that they testified, after the war, about dropping biological weapons.
It directly says it happened in 1952, and links to a newspaper clearly saying the 'confession' was made by captured American officers. How does it imply the exact opposite of what it says?
Yeah, this is just a weird ass conspiratorial article. I didn’t read the whole thing, but I kept scanning for FOIA documents and the like, and never found any. It’s just captured pilots said so in North Korean media. Well, that’s not very reliable source.
Did the US do a bunch of sketchy things in the 1950s and 60s? Absolutely. How do we know? We have the government documents. This guy has nothing, except sources of very dubious reliability and his own biases.
You should have kept reading. The article goes into quite a bit of detail on this debate and how the CIA was preparing before their confessions to explain that they were forced to say things. There is a rich story around many people and their different accounts.
After someone was tortured by police and he is safely home away from the police, we should listen to what he says. If he is no longer under coercion, it is more likely to be honest.
This guy alleges that the US were 'kind' on Japan (only light tribunal?) after the war because they wanted to acquire the bio-warfare knowledge of the Japanese.
There's some interesting analysis of WWII that posits that the nukes were completely unnecessary. Stalin was poised to invade Japan from the north so the US had to act fast.
The issue with this argument is that neither the bomb nor the imminent Soviet invasion ended the war. The bombs were certainly one of the largest factors that ended the war, but it also wasn't the sole factor that ended the war.
One piece that is always missing in these arguments is - what was the alternative? Blockade Japan into submission? Is hundreds of thousands of Japanese civilians dying of hunger better than being killed by an atomic weapon?
How about exploding the bomb in the sky, visible from the emperors palace and the whole city?
Or using it against an actual military target.
The message would have been clear, we can annihilate you if we want and you don't surrender. But they choose to go against the civilian population simply, because they wanted the data, of what a bomb does to a city. And that by that time bombing civilians was already pretty normalized anyway, so trying to save civilian life simply was not an issue.
I mean, the Allies literally bombed a major city with the first atomic weapon and Japan was like "yeah, not going to surrender". Then after the 2nd bomb, it still took days and a Soviet invasion to get them to surrender.
I'm not sure a demonstration would mean much if destroying a entire city didn't convince them.
The article I posted covers this (the section called Scale). When put into context, the destruction of Hiroshima just wasn't that impressive. We had already leveled 66 Japanese cities with conventional bombs. Hiroshima may have been a technical / scientific feat, but the end result paled in comparison to what we had already done before.
This is 1945, before the decades long alliance and best friendship between US and Japan, before Internet, computers, and most electronics. Americans can't even read the signposts in the streets, let alone find and interpret the results of extremely secret operations.
Are you implying that in 1945 there were no people who spoke Japanese and English and Japan itself didn't have decades of emmigration to all parts of the world? The US committed one of its greatest crimes against humanity during the war against the huge number of Japanese Americans in the US.
He's referring to the US government rounding up US citizens of Japanese descent and moving them to camps during WWII. It was a horrific thing the US government did. Unfortunately, because humans can be horrible, I would disagree it was one of the greatest crimes against humanity in history.
1945 was about halfway between now and when slavery was still widely accepted as the norm since time immemorial.
Statistically you would have to expect attitudes of what amounts to "humanity" to have only been about halfway from slavery to what there is now. Anything considered more modern would only have begun to exist to a much smaller extent at the time.
I think slavery was a bigger crime against humanity than the internment of Japanese, but regard them as both as among the most awful crimes the US has committed to humanity as a whole.
It wasn't meant to rank the worst things humans have ever done (outside of slavery no matter the country, that is almost always a distraction to justify awful things other's have done), but they are both among the most awful things the US has specifically done to the world.
Documents have a habit of burning to ashes if they have a chance of becoming evidence.
What this is referring to is the relative immunity Unit 731 got post-war in exchange for research results being handed over, which is a well-known historical fact.
That makes sense in a vacuum, but if some of, or all of the principal actors of a given institution run a tight ship it's entirely probable that there are various unknown secrets to which only they are aprised. There's nothing that forbids some key officer from literally burying information in a completely undocumented spot. In such a case, if the buried treasure is of any value whatever, it becomes a point of leverage. Some artifact that could be lost to the world forevermore or discovered, hinging on some nefarious negotiation.
Not to mention the reality that aside from some sense of justice, allowing any of these people their freedom is probably irrelevant in the larger scheme of things. Which is to say that it's a gambit for valuable, empirical knowledge which for all intents and purposes, I would surmise, couldn't be elsewise obtained due to the moral standards of the West, or some theatrics which will have little consequence.
It does make a lot of sense. In the most basic terms, almost no American spoke Japanese, let alone at a scientific level. Collaboration would be at the essence.
But I think the greater point that you are missing is that you can't walk over a country of 150 million people and achieve total power. Without large doses of good will, collaboration, and soft power, resistance gets in the way of every single goal an occupation has.
This is a constantly changing area of history, so we're on shaky ground. The diaries of the chamberlain to Hirohito were only published a couple years ago, for example. They implicate the emperor deeply in war-time decisions in a way that contradicts the post-war narrative of a hapless well-meaning buffoon misled by his underlings.
I suspect the real reason is close to the usually accepted story, though. Millions of Japanese thought the emperor was a living god. That's how many Americans viewed it then. It's a useful interpretive lens even now.
If the Emperor concedes and surrenders, all of his legitimacy transfers to whoever the Emperor says to listen to. MacArthur got the unofficial title gaijin shogun -- foreign Shogun, the shogun being the military dictator who ruled pre-Meiji Japan, in the name of the Emperor.
Dépose or kill the emperor and all bets are off. What would be institutionally legitimate in its place? How long to construct it? When you have an entire administration in place, it'd be awfully tempting to whitewash the imperial institution. Which is exactly what MacArthur did. Speaking of which, the personality of Douglas MacArthur dominates this whole topic. He had carte blanche. Complete unlimited authority. And he exercised it, often in ways not anticipated in Washington. He was an eccentric man and quite opaque as to his decision-making.
Genuine question: I thought it was well understood that his decision making was guided by a fear of Russian expansion, and that conservative measures (such as keeping the Emperor in place and several important politicians) were aimed at quickly reestablishing the country to avoid communist impetus from arising. Is this not the case?
Yes, you have it right. Japan collapsing politically would invite Soviet "aid" in the occupation of Japan. A partition like Germany was to be avoided. I just meant that you won't find anything from MacArthur clearly explaining it that way, as his retconned history, which became the accepted history, had a largely blameless imperial institution, so no justificatiom for its retention was really necessary.
I think perhaps the narrative, the evidence on-hand, primary sources, etc. could all be considered and as a body of historical evidence we could say the understanding from our perspective continues to evolve; but there's no world in which the history changes. Events, causality, arrow of time, etc.
I think you are being too pedantic about the word “change”. No one assumed he meant someone went back with a time machine and literally changed history.
History is not the past - it’s the study of documents from the past. So history changes for two main reasons (1) the uncovering of documents that were not previously available for study and (2) new, more convincing synthesis of the existing body of documents.
> ...the post-war narrative of a hapless well-meaning buffoon...
It was clear from the start that the Emperor's involvement was being whitewashed. The Australian judge at the Tokyo trials, William Webb, argued publicly that Hirohito should be prosecuted, but it seems he could gather no political support. Since the trial, several books have covered this ground. This article by one such author gives a bit more context on the politics of the trials. (https://www.abc.net.au/news/2018-11-12/tokyo-trial-70th-anni...)
I wonder why we didn't try the same thing in the War on Terror?
Capture high-ranking Islamic clerics, give them a choice: "Go on TV and explain to everyone that Allah's will is for all good Muslims to throw down their weapons and surrender to the Americans. If you refuse, we'll put you on trial for war crimes."
[1] In this post I'm not taking a position on the morality or legality of the US taking such an action, either in WW2 or the War on Terror. I'm merely noting that:
- The US did this sort of thing with the Emporer in WW2, and it seemed to work.
- The US didn't do this sort of thing in Afghanistan / Iraq, and those wars were definitely same kind of overwhelming success story that WW2 was. (I don't dispute some key objectives were obtained: Saddam Hussein and Osama bin Laden were eventually killed; and there has no been 9/11 level terrorist attack on US soil since 9/11 itself.)
This reminds me of Gulf War I when Iraqi TV was displaying what they claimed was the wreckage from a downed America fighter jet. It was shell halves from an American cluster bomb, a CBU-58 I think.
If you don't have a medium login (like me) you can read the full article archived[1]
A bit tangential to the central thesis, but John Marks' 1979 classic The Search for the Manchurian Candidate, referenced by TFA, is online[2].
Chapter 8, Brainwashing[3], has interesting details about CIA-friendly journalist Edward Hunter's PR campaign to frame "brainwashing" (a term he coined) as a uniquely communist form of political indoctrination via technological means.
> In September 1950, the Miami News published an article by Edward Hunter titled " 'Brain-Washing' Tactics Force Chinese into Ranks of Communist Party." It was the first printed use in any language of the term "brainwashing," which quickly became a stock phrase in Cold War headlines. Hunter, a CIA propaganda operator who worked under cover as a journalist, turned out a steady stream of books and articles on the subject. He made up his coined word from the Chinese hsi-nao—"to cleanse the mind"—which had no political meaning in Chinese.
> American public opinion reacted strongly to Hunter's ideas, no doubt because of the hostility that prevailed toward communist foes, whose ways were perceived as mysterious and alien. Most Americans knew something about the famous trial of the Hungarian Josef Cardinal Mindszenty, at which the Cardinal appeared zombie-like, as though drugged or hypnotized. [...] Americans were familiar with the idea that the communists had ways to control hapless people, and Hunter's new word helped pull together the unsettling evidence into one sharp fear.
Marks then touches on the bioweapon allegation without further examination:
> The brainwashing controversy intensified during the heavy 1952 fighting in Korea, when the Chinese government launched a propaganda offensive that featured recorded statements by captured U.S. pilots, who "confessed" to a variety of war crimes including the use of germ warfare.
You can not have "Government by the people, for the people" when you allow some people to keep secrets from other people under the guise of "national security"
Self governance is incompatible with states secrets, and only leads to abuse, corruption, and tyranny.
History is full of known abuses, and for every known abuse there is the potential for LOTS of unknown abuse.
One can say "well congress will hold them accountable" but along time ago congress passed a law to declassify everything around JFK assassination, yet multiple presidents after bring pressured by the CIA for "national security reasons" have refused to release all kinds of document in direct violation of that law.
the CIA, any other agency with the power to "classify" things, is a direct and ever present threat to not only liberty but the underpinning of democracy everyone claims to support.
Another problem with state secrets is that the class of people with access to secrets is usually biased toward specific groups, races, or creeds, and said secrets are used to keep the group in a position of power.
I wonder to what extent governance itself becomes a myth at mega-nation scales. The system may behave as if governed, but if it decides not to could anyone stop it?
I would agree, that is why we were setup to have power distributed not just in 3 branches, but 50 states, and the people themselves.
The more consolidated the power becomes the less we the people are able to govern ourselves.
The presidential elections should be the least important in any time we are not at war, but it seems now everyone looks to not only the Federal government, not one branch and one person in one branch of the federal government to fix all the nations problems.
"The President" has become a title of nobility, which is a sad place to find ourselves.
Some level of secrecy for purely operational matters is natural. You don't want to give out the keys to your secure communications system or publish your military dispositions in real time.
On the other hand, the existence of programs like this cannot and should not be granted a veil of secrecy. It's a sad irony that the US presents itself as the champion of a rules-based international order, human rights etc., while refusing to submit itself to the jurisdiction of the International Criminal Court or sign any treaty that might be even slightly disadvantageous.
I can understand that limited position, however then we get into the proper role, size, and make up of government.
The foundation of the US was there was not to be a standing army, in fact they made it unconditional. Only allowing for a defensive navy.
Of course likely most things in the constitution it was quickly ignored and/or "interpreted" to mean something else allowing for massive expanding on both power and size of the federal government
This expansion causes pressure to keep more and more things secret for "operational matters" then before long everything is "operational matters" and need to be secret.
One of the primary reasons the CIA gives for not wanting most things declassified it because it would give away "current capabilities, or operational programs" thus this CIA is already abusing this classification (operational matters ) to keep lots of historical records classified.
>>while refusing to submit itself to the jurisdiction of the International Criminal Court or sign any treaty that might be even slightly disadvantageous.
Nor Should they and any government official that did that should be tried and convicted of Treason. The US Constitution is the final say for our government, not an international court. I reject globalism of that type.
Free Trade with all nations, entangling alliances with none, including entangling our legal systems
The idealized United States required compromises from day 1. Among the things the Continental Army did, instead of standing down, was suppress a tax revolt in western Pennsylvania.
(... and that's before we get into much messier issues with the government-as-constructed such as what led to the Civil War. The United States is arguably currently on version 4 of its federal government, depending on how you slice "major releases").
> the CIA, any other agency with the power to "classify" things, is a direct and ever present threat to not only liberty but the underpinning of democracy everyone claims to support.
The part I put in italics is too stringent. National security quite obviously necessitates classification. E.g., Turing's classified Enigma team was definitely less of a threat to democracy than, say, the WWII equivalent of an HN public bikeshedding marathon about how best to use the newly discovered codebreaking to win for the allies.
What matters is what happens when we discover abuses. E.g., AFAICT nobody from the CIA has been held accountable for what was documented (when not redacted) in the Torture Memos that came out of Feinstein's office. That kind of lack of accountability is a threat to democracy.
But it in no way implies that nothing should ever be redacted.
yes it does imply that, The reason they have never been held accountable is because of the redactions, because they punish "whistleblowers" more than people that abuse the system, the power under which they can do that punishment is the secrecy laws themselves
You fail to see they irrevocably connected, the root cause of the abuse it the secrecy, anything other than eliminating the authority, is simply putting a band aid over a bullet hole
How would we be able to weaponize human rights abuses in other countries if the world knew we were deploying bioweapons? Censhorship, propaganda, and secrecy is the answer.
Biological weapons are not used by the US due to practicality, not morality.
1. It's difficult to manufacture biological agents in large quantities.
2. It's hard to store biological agents for long periods of time, since living things tend to die.
3. It's hard to disperse biological agents over a large area. Spray tanks require flying at low altitude at slow speeds, or multiple deployments at high speeds. Munitions with bursters are problematic because the explosive burster tends to destroy much of the biological agent that you're trying to spread.
4. It's easy to protect troops in the field from biological agents and all major countries maintain and exercise the capability to do so.
5. Biological agents are slow acting and unreliable in their effect.
Long after the Korean War, the Soviet microtoxin program overcame many of these problems. The Americans took a different approach and focused on improving nerve agents, with the most recent development (that I know of) being a multi-part agent called GB-2.
"Known binary agents include the following: GB binary (sarin, GB2): DF is located in 1 canister, while OPA is in a second canister. The isopropyl amine binds to the hydrogen fluoride generated during the chemical reaction. After deployment of the weapon, the 2 canisters rupture and the chemical mixture produces GB."
The US destroyed it's chemical weapons stockpile in the 1990's and 2000's. After the fall of the Soviet Union, there's no use case for chemical weapons and precision weapons are more profitable.
If the evidence presented in this article are true, then it's likely because of the 'test trial' usages in the Korean War that it was confirmed to be impractical.
Plus, considering there's substantial evidence that McArthur was close to nuking Manchuria, it seems likely he would have been willing to try something slightly less escalatory and much easier to hide and plausibly deny.
No it wasn't Bruce Ivins, the anthrax powder in the envelopes was a highly sophisticated preparation and Ivins didn't have access to the necessary technology (electrospray aerosolization of pure spores in a specific solution designed to make them maximally aerosolizable when dry).
If you look up 'electrospray technology for vaccine production' c. 1999 you'll find the culprits. In West Jefferson, Ohio, acting under CIA government contracts delivered to Battelle Memorial Institute.
...Incidentally this is also why the aerosolizable route to vaccination was abandoned, if you look up the history, the technology used to make a stable dry inhalable vaccine was far too likely to be used to make bioweapons..
(1999) Dry powder inhalation as a potential delivery method for vaccines
That's why you've never heard of it since. You can encapsulate live bioweapon viruses and bacteria as well as vaccine particles using that technology, which of course the Russia, China, America, Israel, India, etc. are all well aware of.
I wish they would quit lying about it, and just admit what they've been up to.
> on a military front the dispersal mechanisms more or less ensured that both sides of the conflict would end up infected
This would be fine if you fired them far behind the front. The problem is chemical weapons “are less effective than an equivalent [mass] of conventional, high explosive munitions (or, at levels of extreme escalation, tactical and strategic nuclear weapons)” [1]. That’s why the only folks who deploy them anymore are those without modern militaries fighting non-modern adversaries.
I don't know those labs get up to, but given that institutes of virology aren't exactly thick on the ground, I think it's pretty plausible that it was a lab leak.
And if it was a lab leak, then what was being researched? If it was benign, there would be published explanations.
And if you wanted a bioweapon that you could use with genome targeting, you'd want something exactly like COVID (re: how is mostly benign among bats). You'd want it to sleep until it found its target.
It's a pretty fantastical conclusion to reach, but it's about as hard to believe as the alternatives, at least until there's evidence backing them. I'm not ruling it out until they figure out which ecosystem change lead to the transmission event (e.g. perhaps a hawk that keeps horseshoe bat populations in check went extinct and the virology lab thing is truly a coincidence).
So my point was that it's a good choice for that kind of research. It's already weaponized, one needs only figure out how to target it.
I tend to believe it was a lab leak, but the bioweapon angle never made sense to me. It made more sense as a model to study HIV since I think it uses the furin cleavage site from there.
Bioweapons are just too non-selective to be useful as far as I can see, and even if you do have a cure in your back pocket, they can easily mutate or you may have issues distributing cures to your own people. Lest we forget, some covid vaccines were developed in an incredibly short time, it was testing, production & distribution that took us a year to get people vaccinated.
That said, I have wondered if it's theoretically possible for a bioweapon to target people by lifestyle. Given some of the rhetoric coming out of Russia, they could, say, make something to target the HIV-positive segments of society. I can only hope such things are actually completely impractical.
This one may have been a leak of unfinished product rather than a release. The vaccine was already in development at that time. A lot of people made a ton of money.
Most likely, the SARS-CoV-2 virus spread from the "Vector" laboratory in Novosibirsk, where research was being conducted on the "Sputnik V" vaccine.
Evidence:
* The name "Sputnik V" (Fifth Follower) suggests that the vaccine was developed following something, IMHO it was a biological weapon, and that it was the fifth attempt to create a vaccine. It is highly unlikely that Russia could have created and tested five vaccines within a month.
* After an explosion[2] occurred in the biosafety level 4 laboratory "Vector" on September 16, 2019, rapid response soldiers entered the facility and conducted floor-by-floor inspections for signs of fire. They forcibly entered the laboratory without proper protection and also stole equipment from the premises. One such incident was captured on video [0][1] (note the soldier pouring water from a bucket behind the laboratory director during an interview).
* Shortly thereafter, an epidemic of an unknown respiratory virus, causing severe complications, broke out in Siberia, leading to overwhelmed hospitals. SARS-CoV-2 has a high fatality rate when combined with swine flu (IFR 5.4%), but without it, the mortality rate is relatively low, and the symptoms are mild, making it difficult to detect.
* Russia has started deleting videos related to the laboratory explosion at the "Vector" facility and the subsequent epidemic. This suggests that they consider these videos as evidence that could harm Russia.
* It is highly likely that infected soldiers carried the virus into China when the World Military Games began in Wuhan in October 2019[3].
That's interesting but can you link the Russian soldiers to the bioweapons research lab in Wuhan where the first known spread there occurred? (The so called wet market red herring)
It seems highly implausible that Russian solders landed infected in Wuhan without spreading it everywhere around the airport and personnel. We were told the first known spread occurred near the wet market where the bioresearch lab is located.
In general I'd agree. But I think there's also an interesting angle to consider. You are only really considering bioweapons as a tool for mass killing. But in modern society, lengthy disabling could arguably be even more effective and the creator might even think themselves more 'ethical' or merciful. This would not only completely cripple a target's economy, but also similarly cripple their armed forces. It would also spread panic and damage morale. All of that from a relatively negligible mortality rate, which also minimizes the worst case scenario of it coming back home.
The one reason I think this improbable is because it would make no sense for the US to fund the research relatively transparently through a third party and carry out the research in China of all places. We have a million off the books labs and other areas where such could be done, and also without any transparency in funding or operation. It just looks like a typical case of human hubris. 'We'll never leak this if we take the proper measures' even though there's an absurdly high rate of lab leaks, from labs all over the world - including at the highest biosecurity levels. [1]
Though impossible to measure, it really seems as though the net change in global biosecurity from gain of function and similar research is extremely negative.
Why would the US work with its biggest rival to generate new WMDs where they would have to trust their biggest adversary to deliver the WMD? Why would they use limited and public NIH money as opposed to an almost infinite and (in some parts) very secret military budget?
Because this type of research was banned in the US. Fauci was the highest paid federal employee for a reason. Labs were setup in Ukraine and other parts of the world with funding coming through NIH.
Do we really know what the current capabilities are. It would be top secret. It's been decades of research. I would expect many of these issues have been worked around.
I used to think AI was fictional pipe dream. Yet it came to be.
> 1. It's difficult to manufacture biological agents in large quantities.
Yet the covid vaccine was manufactured in huge quantities in short time.
> 2. It's hard to store biological agents for long periods of time, since living things tend to die.
The covid vaccine was kept cold storage of -60, and it was good for 18 months.
>3. It's hard to disperse biological agents over a large area.
This would not be an issue for a respiratory virus, that targets a specific ethnic group.
> 4. It's easy to protect troops in the field from biological agents and all major countries maintain and exercise the capability to do so.
Yet almost everyone got infected by covid.
> 5. Biological agents are slow acting and unreliable in their effect.
Covid was fast acting. Yet not that deadly. So i suppose if it was more deadly this too would fall.
The problem with #3 is that viruses will happily evolve and hop species. Covid for example spread to farmed mink, then to wild populations. Even random zoo animals were catching it.
targeting a specific ethnic group would be extremely challenging. afaik, ethnicity is actually responsible for surprisingly little genetic variation. maybe you could e.g. come up with a spike protein that's 25% better at binding an ACE2 receptor variant that 80% of ethnic group X has vs. only 30% of ethnic group Y, but that's not going to make Y immune.
(Metal Gear superweapon that eventually begins to decay and loses its specific-person targeting ability to the point where Snake needs to die to save the rest of the world)
Biological agents are not used by the US because it went all in on nukes. Frankly, the US having an official policy of "biological attacks will be met by nukes" is better than having a bioweapon program as deterrence.
The birth of the US biological warfare program took place at around the same time as the birth of the US nuclear weapons program, but the former is far less well known - because the nuclear weapons were actually used, and the biological weapons were not. At the same time, Nazi Germany had also developed a massive chemical weapons program based on the novel nerve agents, sarin and tabun (developed as organophosphorus pesticide agents but found to be far too toxic for use on crops), at the same time. Nazi Germany never used these agents (though Goebbels apparently called for their use against the Normandy invasion by US allies, but Hitler feared retaliation by similar means so nixed it).
A not-too-bad overview of some of this history is in "The Biology of Doom" by Ed Regis, but it was written with CIA cooperation and hides a lot of facts, such as the scale of the insect-borne disease vector program (i.e. things like spreading fleas infected with bubonic plague, or distributing insect pests to destroy crops, or the chemical destruction of cropland by Agent Orange in Vietnam).
Regis claims the US biological warfare program wasn't sufficiently advanced to launch attacks on Korea, but the US had also collected all the data from the Japanese biological warfare program from Shiro Ishii, of notorious Unit 731, and this wasn't revealed until the 1970s. Best evidence points to a fairly experimental biowarfare assault being launched on North Korea, with poor results. Quite psychotic, but that's America in the 1950s for you.
The offensive biowarfare program ran from 1942 (see 'Merck Report') to 1969 when Nixon closed it down (publicly anyway) after a massive sheep kill caused by US Army testing of VX agent outside Dugway Utah. Look up "Shady Grove" etc, for example, which demonstrated you could infect the entire eastern seaboard with a few jets loaded with liquid suspension of anthrax spores:
That's by Jonathan Tucker, longtime researcher of this subject. Died somewhat mysteriously in 2011 right before being put in a position to expose a lot of shady behavior related to the 9/18 and 10/9 anthrax attacks:
Governments just hate having their history of recklessly stupid biological warfare research exposed. P.S. here's the most likely source of the those anthrax attacks:
Oh, and the ~ $12 trillion economic damage Covid epidemic which killed about as many people as the Holocaust was caused by idiots in a Chinese virus lab who got their technology and funding from the USA. Oops...
Now we have synthetic DNA to develop gain of function in viruses that can target segments of population such as the elders and those with comorbidities. We can follow up on that with proprietary MRNA shots formulated to take down targeted individuals in a one two punch.
> Bioweapon labs in Ukraine is one of Putin's stated reasons for the Invasion. Allegedly work was being done on targeting specific ethnicities, like slavs. Ukraine was a very politically corrupt country, for a long time. Would not surprise me if this was true.
This is one of Putins and his supporters Krokodil inspired fever dreams that never existed, Russia also said they wouldn’t invade the day before they did.
They have also been saying that Ukraine is using black magic witch battalions to be attack them, do you believe?.
1) Gain of function research was being done in China by Ecohealth Alliance, funded under a program headed by Fauci. The most logical motivation for this is bioweapon research. Testimony to this fact was solicited by Rand Paul in congress. Covid was made in a lab.
2) The US did send Al Qaeda prisoners to Black sites in Eastern Europe for enhanced interrogation (torture).
This establishes a previous willingness to skirt international rules.
3) Given the geopolitical situation, I do think that the government in Ukraine would do almost anything the West asked of them.
Absolute gibberish. But on a meta level it's really scary how seemingly directed
disinformation by a hostile power is so effective in a large population in the western world and we still don't have any effective way to combat it at all. It's like the potential of a third world war and a significant part of our civilian population's are allied with the enemy.
Your opinion appears to be a fever dream that has no basis in reality. What you posted in no way shape or form follows or proves anything that you posted previously.
If biological weapon would not be deployed, then why Ukraine need it at all? There is no other hostile country populated by Slavs AND separated by ocean from Ukraine, to be a target for such weapon.
Can you give us a logical reason why Ukraine needs a weapon for mass-suicide?
Other nations may want a such weapon, but why Ukraine may want it to such extent to participate in development of such suicidal weapon?
> Can you give us a logical reason why Ukraine needs a weapon for mass-suicide?
Because it's part of Russias propaganda and disinformation campaign against Ukraine, which has heated up recently a head of the counter offensive because they know they are losing in that space.
Well, every weapon can be used for mass-suicide, so not much different in that respect.
Few reasons:
1. Even without an antidote a weapon that could kill a significant portion of the population is a useful weapon. It acts as a deterrent from being attacked. Mutual assured self destruction is a powerful deterrent.
2. As political leverage. Eg. North Korea is able to leverage its nuclear weapons to extort the international community.
3. If you believe Biological warfare is where warfare is headed, you want to be at the forefront of that research.
Reading this, my meta conspiracy theory is that conspiracy theories are rarely false, it's just that talking about them at all disqualifies you from being invited to participate in them. Your option is either to be a practical conspirator by joining in, or remain on the outside as a just theorist.
I think you might be unaware of how many conspiracies there are. Any major event at any point in history most likely has a conspiracy attached. This goes exponential the closer you get to present day.
I thought medium.com content wasn’t allowed to be posted? Or at least anytime I post anything from medium, it is shadowbanned or whatever the term for not allowing comments..
CIA: Oh we totally did that in the 40's, 50's, 60's, 70's, 80's, 90's and we totally tried to cover it up for decades but hey we totally stopped now! Proof? We said we stopped didn't we? Why do you need proof?
Anyone who thinks we're still not doing it is a fool. COVID19 is in all likelihood bioweapons research gone wrong. It doesn't take much sleuthing to uncover the Eco Health Alliance application DARPA to test furin cleavage sites on bat corona viruses. DARPA told them "no" and yet here we are. Saying what I'm saying will get you labeled a conspiracy theorist. Would be a shame if there were ever people that conspired and we used that heuristic to dismiss people.
But that's OK with me, conspiracy theories are having a phenomenal few years! We should may consider changing the name to "spoiler alerts".
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[ 2.8 ms ] story [ 199 ms ] threadI'm not claiming either version of the events is true/false. Just relaying another I've heard.
This is a commonly repeated refrain, but it just exists to provide a comforting explanation for the fact that the U.S. security state decided to embark on a program of mind control experimentation on many unwitting and unwilling human guinea pigs. The truth is that as WWII wound down, we eagerly imported Nazi scientists who were already engaged in this kind of research, and ARTICHOKE/MKULTRA/etc were just the continuation of it for all the same purposes but under a different name.
It makes sense that spies would dream up some super drug that makes people talk. The El Dorado miracle pill to solve hard human problems... you combine that with technological exuberance of the era and cold war pressure, it makes sense.
You don't need to have Nazi imports or any one motivation to explain why they tried.
The circumstances of them unethically testing it on civilians is another matter.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
I'd forgo Christmas and Birthday gifts for the next 10 years to have this happen!
I've been hearing that for decades. It's not like people don't already know about the US' largely lamentable foreign policy.
Russia is essentially finished if not now, then definitely due to their demographic collapse.
People thought China was the next big empire to take on the US but after their ongoing real estate collapse, the ongoing failure of belt and road, and their eventual population bomb leading to a demographic collapse that is probably worse than Russia how can anyone see them overtaking the US?
Originally I thought that maybe China can make up for its woes by way of immigration and assimilation with Bent and Road 'colonies' but having traveled to one of their closeest B&R partners(Pakistan) recently, none of their partners are in a good position themselves to help China out. Plus I don't think China is really open to immigration. In the end I suspect the 'friendships' with China will last only as long as the money keeps rolling in.
Who else is left on this planet that could take on the US? India? EU? Both have serious flaws that limit their reach.
Or this Syphillis study? [2]
And then there was the time the US waged germ warfare against the Bay Area... [3]
[1] https://www.washingtonpost.com/archive/politics/1993/12/21/r...
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tuskegee_Syphilis_Study
[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Sea-Spray
You're not wrong. We've been incredibly shitty domestically and internationally.
> Perhaps more than all other countries combined.
Uhhhh, yeah, not really. The last century or two, humanity's hands have been pretty collectively bathed in blood.
I'd say easily the most bloody are those of the British, whose oppression and exploitation is unmatched in modern history for how pervasive, long-running, and brutal it was. I'd guess figures well into "hundreds of millions", possibly a billion or more across the several centuries. People look at Blackwater and their ilk and think it was some sort of new boundary being crossed. East India Company for two and a half centuries placed large swaths of the world's populace under corporate rule and had its own standing army and navy.
Japan committed so many wartime atrocities during WW2 it's difficult to summarize or account for them all, and estimates go as high as 30M killed.
Stalin's regime is estimated to have killed around 20 million people.
Mao could have been responsible for as many as 40 million.
Then there's all manner of dictators in the Americas and Africa (some propped up by America, of course), the various southeast asian regimes (Indonesia for example) and so on.
Nazis: ~6 million
Soviet Union: ~20 million
China Cultural Revolution: ~30 million
Though the Soviet Union and China ones were more of a result of incredibly bad economic policies. The Soviets still killed ~1-2 million in Gulags directly.
Let’s also not forget the Japanese genocides against China. Nanjing, Unit 731…
There also is, of course, more recent ones that are little known. Cambodia took over a million and Rwanda close to that.
In contrast, imperialism and colonialism fucked people over all over the world. And some of the later impact is masked, because they enabled locals to do the dirty job for them - to the tunes of tens of millions affected.
The Nazis thought they were fucking their own people. Every oppressive power uses this excuse.
0: http://web.archive.org/web/20160709210523/https://www.svobod...
After many revisions the total death toll at each of the concentration camps where the Holocaust occurred (which just so happened to only occur on ex-Soviet territory) adds up to a tiny fraction of 6 million, but the overall "6 million" Soviet propaganda term was never revised.
> It was the propaganda version of an incendiary bomb. In 1952 U.S. Air Force and Marine flyers, shot down during the Korean War, testified publicly that they had been ordered to drop biological weapons (BW) on China and North Korea.
The two sentences feel intentionally written to obfuscate the fact that the statements were made under duress as POWs; it strongly implies that they testified, after the war, about dropping biological weapons.
Even if much of what he does discuss did happen (the US secretly pardoning Japanese units that did absolutely horrific experiments on people for chemical and biological warfare, for example, and of course we used a lot of horrific shit in Korea and Vietnam), there's so much that is unsourced / uncited mixed in.
Half the links in the text are to his own writing, another chunk are to other Medium blogs, with a sprinkling of newspaper clippings (because the newspapers were so trustworthy back during that time)...pass.
If the pilots knew, then a large number of support crew also would have known. But the only "testimony" we have is from captured PoWs, after how many decades of opportunities for deathbed confessions? Give me a break.
It directly says it happened in 1952, and links to a newspaper clearly saying the 'confession' was made by captured American officers. How does it imply the exact opposite of what it says?
Did the US do a bunch of sketchy things in the 1950s and 60s? Absolutely. How do we know? We have the government documents. This guy has nothing, except sources of very dubious reliability and his own biases.
Of course they would have prepared. They knew what was coming.
If one believes these confessions THEY MUST ALSO believe confessions obtained under police torture, right?
This guy alleges that the US were 'kind' on Japan (only light tribunal?) after the war because they wanted to acquire the bio-warfare knowledge of the Japanese.
And the Japanese tested bio-bombs.
My understanding is that the US were worried about the communists and Japan's stability in general and decided not to unduly rock the boat.
https://foreignpolicy.com/2013/05/30/the-bomb-didnt-beat-jap...
I don't know how accurate this is, but its a good read.
Or using it against an actual military target.
The message would have been clear, we can annihilate you if we want and you don't surrender. But they choose to go against the civilian population simply, because they wanted the data, of what a bomb does to a city. And that by that time bombing civilians was already pretty normalized anyway, so trying to save civilian life simply was not an issue.
I'm not sure a demonstration would mean much if destroying a entire city didn't convince them.
1945 was about halfway between now and when slavery was still widely accepted as the norm since time immemorial.
Statistically you would have to expect attitudes of what amounts to "humanity" to have only been about halfway from slavery to what there is now. Anything considered more modern would only have begun to exist to a much smaller extent at the time.
It wasn't meant to rank the worst things humans have ever done (outside of slavery no matter the country, that is almost always a distraction to justify awful things other's have done), but they are both among the most awful things the US has specifically done to the world.
What this is referring to is the relative immunity Unit 731 got post-war in exchange for research results being handed over, which is a well-known historical fact.
Not to mention the reality that aside from some sense of justice, allowing any of these people their freedom is probably irrelevant in the larger scheme of things. Which is to say that it's a gambit for valuable, empirical knowledge which for all intents and purposes, I would surmise, couldn't be elsewise obtained due to the moral standards of the West, or some theatrics which will have little consequence.
But I think the greater point that you are missing is that you can't walk over a country of 150 million people and achieve total power. Without large doses of good will, collaboration, and soft power, resistance gets in the way of every single goal an occupation has.
Nonsense. Quote "the Military Intelligence Service (MIS) trained and graduated nearly 6,000 linguists—the majority of whom were Japanese Americans." Source https://encyclopedia.densho.org/Military%20Intelligence%20Se...
I suspect the real reason is close to the usually accepted story, though. Millions of Japanese thought the emperor was a living god. That's how many Americans viewed it then. It's a useful interpretive lens even now.
If the Emperor concedes and surrenders, all of his legitimacy transfers to whoever the Emperor says to listen to. MacArthur got the unofficial title gaijin shogun -- foreign Shogun, the shogun being the military dictator who ruled pre-Meiji Japan, in the name of the Emperor.
Dépose or kill the emperor and all bets are off. What would be institutionally legitimate in its place? How long to construct it? When you have an entire administration in place, it'd be awfully tempting to whitewash the imperial institution. Which is exactly what MacArthur did. Speaking of which, the personality of Douglas MacArthur dominates this whole topic. He had carte blanche. Complete unlimited authority. And he exercised it, often in ways not anticipated in Washington. He was an eccentric man and quite opaque as to his decision-making.
Genuine question: I thought it was well understood that his decision making was guided by a fear of Russian expansion, and that conservative measures (such as keeping the Emperor in place and several important politicians) were aimed at quickly reestablishing the country to avoid communist impetus from arising. Is this not the case?
I think perhaps the narrative, the evidence on-hand, primary sources, etc. could all be considered and as a body of historical evidence we could say the understanding from our perspective continues to evolve; but there's no world in which the history changes. Events, causality, arrow of time, etc.
It was clear from the start that the Emperor's involvement was being whitewashed. The Australian judge at the Tokyo trials, William Webb, argued publicly that Hirohito should be prosecuted, but it seems he could gather no political support. Since the trial, several books have covered this ground. This article by one such author gives a bit more context on the politics of the trials. (https://www.abc.net.au/news/2018-11-12/tokyo-trial-70th-anni...)
Capture high-ranking Islamic clerics, give them a choice: "Go on TV and explain to everyone that Allah's will is for all good Muslims to throw down their weapons and surrender to the Americans. If you refuse, we'll put you on trial for war crimes."
[1] In this post I'm not taking a position on the morality or legality of the US taking such an action, either in WW2 or the War on Terror. I'm merely noting that:
- The US did this sort of thing with the Emporer in WW2, and it seemed to work.
- The US didn't do this sort of thing in Afghanistan / Iraq, and those wars were definitely same kind of overwhelming success story that WW2 was. (I don't dispute some key objectives were obtained: Saddam Hussein and Osama bin Laden were eventually killed; and there has no been 9/11 level terrorist attack on US soil since 9/11 itself.)
A bit tangential to the central thesis, but John Marks' 1979 classic The Search for the Manchurian Candidate, referenced by TFA, is online[2].
Chapter 8, Brainwashing[3], has interesting details about CIA-friendly journalist Edward Hunter's PR campaign to frame "brainwashing" (a term he coined) as a uniquely communist form of political indoctrination via technological means.
> In September 1950, the Miami News published an article by Edward Hunter titled " 'Brain-Washing' Tactics Force Chinese into Ranks of Communist Party." It was the first printed use in any language of the term "brainwashing," which quickly became a stock phrase in Cold War headlines. Hunter, a CIA propaganda operator who worked under cover as a journalist, turned out a steady stream of books and articles on the subject. He made up his coined word from the Chinese hsi-nao—"to cleanse the mind"—which had no political meaning in Chinese.
> American public opinion reacted strongly to Hunter's ideas, no doubt because of the hostility that prevailed toward communist foes, whose ways were perceived as mysterious and alien. Most Americans knew something about the famous trial of the Hungarian Josef Cardinal Mindszenty, at which the Cardinal appeared zombie-like, as though drugged or hypnotized. [...] Americans were familiar with the idea that the communists had ways to control hapless people, and Hunter's new word helped pull together the unsettling evidence into one sharp fear.
Marks then touches on the bioweapon allegation without further examination:
> The brainwashing controversy intensified during the heavy 1952 fighting in Korea, when the Chinese government launched a propaganda offensive that featured recorded statements by captured U.S. pilots, who "confessed" to a variety of war crimes including the use of germ warfare.
1: https://archive.is/8stAi
2: https://www.druglibrary.org/schaffer/lsd/marks.htm
3: https://www.druglibrary.org/schaffer/lsd/marks8.htm
Self governance is incompatible with states secrets, and only leads to abuse, corruption, and tyranny.
History is full of known abuses, and for every known abuse there is the potential for LOTS of unknown abuse.
One can say "well congress will hold them accountable" but along time ago congress passed a law to declassify everything around JFK assassination, yet multiple presidents after bring pressured by the CIA for "national security reasons" have refused to release all kinds of document in direct violation of that law.
the CIA, any other agency with the power to "classify" things, is a direct and ever present threat to not only liberty but the underpinning of democracy everyone claims to support.
The more consolidated the power becomes the less we the people are able to govern ourselves.
The presidential elections should be the least important in any time we are not at war, but it seems now everyone looks to not only the Federal government, not one branch and one person in one branch of the federal government to fix all the nations problems.
"The President" has become a title of nobility, which is a sad place to find ourselves.
On the other hand, the existence of programs like this cannot and should not be granted a veil of secrecy. It's a sad irony that the US presents itself as the champion of a rules-based international order, human rights etc., while refusing to submit itself to the jurisdiction of the International Criminal Court or sign any treaty that might be even slightly disadvantageous.
The foundation of the US was there was not to be a standing army, in fact they made it unconditional. Only allowing for a defensive navy.
Of course likely most things in the constitution it was quickly ignored and/or "interpreted" to mean something else allowing for massive expanding on both power and size of the federal government
This expansion causes pressure to keep more and more things secret for "operational matters" then before long everything is "operational matters" and need to be secret.
One of the primary reasons the CIA gives for not wanting most things declassified it because it would give away "current capabilities, or operational programs" thus this CIA is already abusing this classification (operational matters ) to keep lots of historical records classified.
>>while refusing to submit itself to the jurisdiction of the International Criminal Court or sign any treaty that might be even slightly disadvantageous.
Nor Should they and any government official that did that should be tried and convicted of Treason. The US Constitution is the final say for our government, not an international court. I reject globalism of that type.
Free Trade with all nations, entangling alliances with none, including entangling our legal systems
(... and that's before we get into much messier issues with the government-as-constructed such as what led to the Civil War. The United States is arguably currently on version 4 of its federal government, depending on how you slice "major releases").
The part I put in italics is too stringent. National security quite obviously necessitates classification. E.g., Turing's classified Enigma team was definitely less of a threat to democracy than, say, the WWII equivalent of an HN public bikeshedding marathon about how best to use the newly discovered codebreaking to win for the allies.
What matters is what happens when we discover abuses. E.g., AFAICT nobody from the CIA has been held accountable for what was documented (when not redacted) in the Torture Memos that came out of Feinstein's office. That kind of lack of accountability is a threat to democracy.
But it in no way implies that nothing should ever be redacted.
You fail to see they irrevocably connected, the root cause of the abuse it the secrecy, anything other than eliminating the authority, is simply putting a band aid over a bullet hole
Was it wrong to keep D-Day invasion plans secret? The argument is that you couldn't even function as a military without some secrets.
1. It's difficult to manufacture biological agents in large quantities.
2. It's hard to store biological agents for long periods of time, since living things tend to die.
3. It's hard to disperse biological agents over a large area. Spray tanks require flying at low altitude at slow speeds, or multiple deployments at high speeds. Munitions with bursters are problematic because the explosive burster tends to destroy much of the biological agent that you're trying to spread.
4. It's easy to protect troops in the field from biological agents and all major countries maintain and exercise the capability to do so.
5. Biological agents are slow acting and unreliable in their effect.
Long after the Korean War, the Soviet microtoxin program overcame many of these problems. The Americans took a different approach and focused on improving nerve agents, with the most recent development (that I know of) being a multi-part agent called GB-2.
Cannot find much information about anything like that via google.
"Known binary agents include the following: GB binary (sarin, GB2): DF is located in 1 canister, while OPA is in a second canister. The isopropyl amine binds to the hydrogen fluoride generated during the chemical reaction. After deployment of the weapon, the 2 canisters rupture and the chemical mixture produces GB."
Maybe officially.
Plus, considering there's substantial evidence that McArthur was close to nuking Manchuria, it seems likely he would have been willing to try something slightly less escalatory and much easier to hide and plausibly deny.
The FBI agents assigned to that investigation themselves admit they are not sure Bruce Ivins was their man. Nor if he was, that he acted alone.
Even if it was just him, no evidence of motivation was ever found.
Truly one of our nation's great unsolved mysteries.
If you look up 'electrospray technology for vaccine production' c. 1999 you'll find the culprits. In West Jefferson, Ohio, acting under CIA government contracts delivered to Battelle Memorial Institute.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Jefferson
The truth is often a painful thing.
...Incidentally this is also why the aerosolizable route to vaccination was abandoned, if you look up the history, the technology used to make a stable dry inhalable vaccine was far too likely to be used to make bioweapons..
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/10194842/
(1999) Dry powder inhalation as a potential delivery method for vaccines
That's why you've never heard of it since. You can encapsulate live bioweapon viruses and bacteria as well as vaccine particles using that technology, which of course the Russia, China, America, Israel, India, etc. are all well aware of.
I wish they would quit lying about it, and just admit what they've been up to.
I am interested in trying to follow along though.
This would be fine if you fired them far behind the front. The problem is chemical weapons “are less effective than an equivalent [mass] of conventional, high explosive munitions (or, at levels of extreme escalation, tactical and strategic nuclear weapons)” [1]. That’s why the only folks who deploy them anymore are those without modern militaries fighting non-modern adversaries.
[1] https://acoup.blog/2020/03/20/collections-why-dont-we-use-ch...
That part? Really?
If you're downvoting, provide a citation...
The questionable part is whether humans are attempting to use them as weapons, or if they're solely wielded by nature.
And if it was a lab leak, then what was being researched? If it was benign, there would be published explanations.
And if you wanted a bioweapon that you could use with genome targeting, you'd want something exactly like COVID (re: how is mostly benign among bats). You'd want it to sleep until it found its target.
It's a pretty fantastical conclusion to reach, but it's about as hard to believe as the alternatives, at least until there's evidence backing them. I'm not ruling it out until they figure out which ecosystem change lead to the transmission event (e.g. perhaps a hawk that keeps horseshoe bat populations in check went extinct and the virology lab thing is truly a coincidence).
So my point was that it's a good choice for that kind of research. It's already weaponized, one needs only figure out how to target it.
Auto downvoting things like this though at this stage is just absolutely pathetic.
Smart, educated people are the most susceptible to influence campaigns so it should not be shocking.
Bioweapons are just too non-selective to be useful as far as I can see, and even if you do have a cure in your back pocket, they can easily mutate or you may have issues distributing cures to your own people. Lest we forget, some covid vaccines were developed in an incredibly short time, it was testing, production & distribution that took us a year to get people vaccinated.
That said, I have wondered if it's theoretically possible for a bioweapon to target people by lifestyle. Given some of the rhetoric coming out of Russia, they could, say, make something to target the HIV-positive segments of society. I can only hope such things are actually completely impractical.
Evidence:
* The name "Sputnik V" (Fifth Follower) suggests that the vaccine was developed following something, IMHO it was a biological weapon, and that it was the fifth attempt to create a vaccine. It is highly unlikely that Russia could have created and tested five vaccines within a month.
* After an explosion[2] occurred in the biosafety level 4 laboratory "Vector" on September 16, 2019, rapid response soldiers entered the facility and conducted floor-by-floor inspections for signs of fire. They forcibly entered the laboratory without proper protection and also stole equipment from the premises. One such incident was captured on video [0][1] (note the soldier pouring water from a bucket behind the laboratory director during an interview).
* Shortly thereafter, an epidemic of an unknown respiratory virus, causing severe complications, broke out in Siberia, leading to overwhelmed hospitals. SARS-CoV-2 has a high fatality rate when combined with swine flu (IFR 5.4%), but without it, the mortality rate is relatively low, and the symptoms are mild, making it difficult to detect.
* Russia has started deleting videos related to the laboratory explosion at the "Vector" facility and the subsequent epidemic. This suggests that they consider these videos as evidence that could harm Russia.
* It is highly likely that infected soldiers carried the virus into China when the World Military Games began in Wuhan in October 2019[3].
[0]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_w7SAeNcXA8
[1]: https://web.archive.org/web/20200407175030/https://www.youtu...
[2]: https://edition.cnn.com/2019/09/17/health/russia-lab-explosi...
[3]: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7813667/
It seems highly implausible that Russian solders landed infected in Wuhan without spreading it everywhere around the airport and personnel. We were told the first known spread occurred near the wet market where the bioresearch lab is located.
The one reason I think this improbable is because it would make no sense for the US to fund the research relatively transparently through a third party and carry out the research in China of all places. We have a million off the books labs and other areas where such could be done, and also without any transparency in funding or operation. It just looks like a typical case of human hubris. 'We'll never leak this if we take the proper measures' even though there's an absurdly high rate of lab leaks, from labs all over the world - including at the highest biosecurity levels. [1]
Though impossible to measure, it really seems as though the net change in global biosecurity from gain of function and similar research is extremely negative.
[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_laboratory_biosecurity...
The conspiracy theorists are here to downvote lol.
Some historians say that the English defeated Napoleon at Waterloo because many French soldiers (including Napoleon) had diarrhea.
An important difference between French and English soldiers was that the former boiled water for tea, while the French preferred wine.
https://www.historynet.com/napoleonic-wars-soldiers/
I used to think AI was fictional pipe dream. Yet it came to be.
> 1. It's difficult to manufacture biological agents in large quantities.
Yet the covid vaccine was manufactured in huge quantities in short time.
> 2. It's hard to store biological agents for long periods of time, since living things tend to die.
The covid vaccine was kept cold storage of -60, and it was good for 18 months.
>3. It's hard to disperse biological agents over a large area.
This would not be an issue for a respiratory virus, that targets a specific ethnic group.
> 4. It's easy to protect troops in the field from biological agents and all major countries maintain and exercise the capability to do so.
Yet almost everyone got infected by covid.
> 5. Biological agents are slow acting and unreliable in their effect.
Covid was fast acting. Yet not that deadly. So i suppose if it was more deadly this too would fall.
(Metal Gear superweapon that eventually begins to decay and loses its specific-person targeting ability to the point where Snake needs to die to save the rest of the world)
What would you describe this as? This was proposed to the US military. Then it was executed by the Chinese military.
A not-too-bad overview of some of this history is in "The Biology of Doom" by Ed Regis, but it was written with CIA cooperation and hides a lot of facts, such as the scale of the insect-borne disease vector program (i.e. things like spreading fleas infected with bubonic plague, or distributing insect pests to destroy crops, or the chemical destruction of cropland by Agent Orange in Vietnam).
Regis claims the US biological warfare program wasn't sufficiently advanced to launch attacks on Korea, but the US had also collected all the data from the Japanese biological warfare program from Shiro Ishii, of notorious Unit 731, and this wasn't revealed until the 1970s. Best evidence points to a fairly experimental biowarfare assault being launched on North Korea, with poor results. Quite psychotic, but that's America in the 1950s for you.
The offensive biowarfare program ran from 1942 (see 'Merck Report') to 1969 when Nixon closed it down (publicly anyway) after a massive sheep kill caused by US Army testing of VX agent outside Dugway Utah. Look up "Shady Grove" etc, for example, which demonstrated you could infect the entire eastern seaboard with a few jets loaded with liquid suspension of anthrax spores:
https://www.jstor.org/stable/3092154
That's by Jonathan Tucker, longtime researcher of this subject. Died somewhat mysteriously in 2011 right before being put in a position to expose a lot of shady behavior related to the 9/18 and 10/9 anthrax attacks:
https://www.washingtonpost.com/local/obituaries/biological-w...
Governments just hate having their history of recklessly stupid biological warfare research exposed. P.S. here's the most likely source of the those anthrax attacks:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Clear_Vision
Oh, and the ~ $12 trillion economic damage Covid epidemic which killed about as many people as the Holocaust was caused by idiots in a Chinese virus lab who got their technology and funding from the USA. Oops...
Now we have synthetic DNA to develop gain of function in viruses that can target segments of population such as the elders and those with comorbidities. We can follow up on that with proprietary MRNA shots formulated to take down targeted individuals in a one two punch.
MKULTRA ended in name only. NATO now has a sixth operational domain of cognitive warfare that uses social media and other advanced tools. https://www.projectcensored.org/18-the-human-mind-as-new-dom...
This is one of Putins and his supporters Krokodil inspired fever dreams that never existed, Russia also said they wouldn’t invade the day before they did.
They have also been saying that Ukraine is using black magic witch battalions to be attack them, do you believe?.
1) Gain of function research was being done in China by Ecohealth Alliance, funded under a program headed by Fauci. The most logical motivation for this is bioweapon research. Testimony to this fact was solicited by Rand Paul in congress. Covid was made in a lab.
2) The US did send Al Qaeda prisoners to Black sites in Eastern Europe for enhanced interrogation (torture). This establishes a previous willingness to skirt international rules.
3) Given the geopolitical situation, I do think that the government in Ukraine would do almost anything the West asked of them.
Your opinion appears to be a fever dream that has no basis in reality. What you posted in no way shape or form follows or proves anything that you posted previously.
... aren't Ukrainians almost all Slavs?
Top $ paid to officials, military aid grants to the country, US security assurances.
The research could be done by outside companies, just used Ukraine as a black site to get around existing international laws.
Can you give us a logical reason why Ukraine needs a weapon for mass-suicide?
Other nations may want a such weapon, but why Ukraine may want it to such extent to participate in development of such suicidal weapon?
Because it's part of Russias propaganda and disinformation campaign against Ukraine, which has heated up recently a head of the counter offensive because they know they are losing in that space.
Few reasons:
1. Even without an antidote a weapon that could kill a significant portion of the population is a useful weapon. It acts as a deterrent from being attacked. Mutual assured self destruction is a powerful deterrent.
2. As political leverage. Eg. North Korea is able to leverage its nuclear weapons to extort the international community.
3. If you believe Biological warfare is where warfare is headed, you want to be at the forefront of that research.
We aren't on the brink of anything, Russias not capable of fighting a WWIII, they can't even take Kyiv in over a year.
I think you might be unaware of how many conspiracies there are. Any major event at any point in history most likely has a conspiracy attached. This goes exponential the closer you get to present day.
Anyone who thinks we're still not doing it is a fool. COVID19 is in all likelihood bioweapons research gone wrong. It doesn't take much sleuthing to uncover the Eco Health Alliance application DARPA to test furin cleavage sites on bat corona viruses. DARPA told them "no" and yet here we are. Saying what I'm saying will get you labeled a conspiracy theorist. Would be a shame if there were ever people that conspired and we used that heuristic to dismiss people.
But that's OK with me, conspiracy theories are having a phenomenal few years! We should may consider changing the name to "spoiler alerts".