Hamblin 1

Diseases were the largest killer during and after WWI

• cholera, dysentery and typhoid fever spread by contaminated water and flies
  
• smallpox, plague and diphtheria spread through the air from a sick person (and tuberculosis the same way but more slowly)
  
• sexually transmitted diseases syphilis and gonorrhea, treatable with penicillin
  
• typhus spread by lice and fleas
  
• malaria spread by mosquitoes, little treatment available

why is this significant:

• civilian death from disease is a big part of war
• people began to imagine disease as a weapon--what if somebody did this on purpose
• disease is now somewhat controllable-vaccination available for smallpox, limited antibiotics
  

the World Health Organization sought to organize science for human good on a world scale, but in the awareness science had been used for war

treatments for diseases were not available to everyone

• penicillin manufacture was only developed during the war and the small supply was rationed only to soldiers
• the only other antibiotics that had been invented were sulfa drugs, which are effective only against some bacteria
• many deadly diseases were viral with no treatment (except in some cases vaccination)
  
• Egyptians accused Britain of withholding treatments for cholera

disease could be a weapon

• the Soviet Union (Russia) after the war publicly accused the Japanese of developing bombs to spread typhus and plague
• note the steps involved: research--figure out how to do something, development and testing--figure out how to make that a usable weapon, production and stockpiling, use
• neither the US nor the Japanese admitted this was true in the years immediately after the war
  
• but it was true--the scientists who had worked on developing such bombs shared their knowledge with the US army in return for not being prosecuted for war crimes (as did the Nazi developers of rockets including Werner von Braun)
• the army saw biological weapons as important in the same way as rockets
  
• the US had developed a plan to disrupt the Japanese rice crop

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• biological weapons were banned by a treaty in 1972
  

research continued after the war on weapons of civilian death

• could one disrupt nature to cause large-scale death?
• expectation that a future war would be a total war where industrial capacity and therefore civilian lives would be a key target
• some policymakers believed biological weapons would be as important as scarce atom bombs
• some critics and to some extent the public feared that biological weapons already existed and threatened life on earth
• in fact the military had no clear policy about development and use of biological weapons, though they were funding research
• weapons of civilian death also included chemical weapons and spreading radioactive material (radiological contamination)
  

radiological contamination was the weapon that got the most interest in the military immediately after the war

• waste from making fuel for atomic bombs could also be used as a weapon
• radioactive material was taken up by plants
• sufficient concentration would cause radiation sickness
  
• the US army did careful studies of deaths due to radioactivity in Hiroshima and Nagasaki as well as research on the effects of radioactivity on soldiers and hospital patients and in the environment
  
• they learned that radiological contamination would be very difficult to clean up
• whether this should be a major weapon for the future was controversial within the military