A Higher Form of Killing by Robert Harris & Jeremy Paxman

Author:Robert Harris & Jeremy Paxman [Robert Harris and Jeremy Paxman]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Random House
Published: 2002-02-20T16:00:00+00:00

This sensational story appeared in the San Francisco Examiner from an apparently unimpeachable source, the former deputy chief of US Naval Intelligence.

But despite the tone of certainty which informed this and many other reports, Western intelligence on Soviet biological warfare preparations has been woefully inadequate. Much of the information on Soviet plans came from clues picked up in Soviet scientific literature. By watching the award of academic honours, and by noticing obvious gaps in series of published papers, Western scientific intelligence could judge what fields of chemical or biological research Soviet military scientists had entered. The picture was slowly and painstakingly built up to the point where testimony from defectors or agents could provide the final ray of light. The information was inevitably patchy, sometimes contradictory and always inadequate. Even after twenty years of intelligence on the subject the most that could be said was that ‘the Soviet potential for biological operations is believed to be strong, and could be developed into a major threat’13 (authors’ emphasis).

There seems little doubt that the Soviet Union did conduct extensive research into germ warfare in the late 1930s and early 1940s. It was felt legitimate to conclude that such research was unlikely to have stopped at some arbitrary point after the Second World War. But firm intelligence to suggest the nature of the work was notably lacking.

For most of the post-war years military microbiologists developed ‘retaliatory’ germ weapons against threats they did not know to exist, and then attempted to develop defences not against the weapons of a potential future enemy, but against the diseases they themselves had refined.

The Soviet Union said virtually nothing about their preparations for chemical and biological warfare. Indeed the only official statement that the country possessed even chemical weapons was made before the Second World War began, when a Soviet General was quoted as saying:

Ten years or more ago, the Soviet Union signed a convention abolishing the use of poison gas and bacteriological warfare. To that we still adhere, but if our enemies use such methods against us, I can tell you that we are prepared – fully prepared – to use them also, and to use them against aggressors on their own soil.14

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