State Actors and Germ Warfare: Historical Perspective

Two thousand years ago the Greeks and Romans used human and animal corpses with great effect to poison wells of drinking water. The practice of throwing the bodies of plague victims over the walls of cities was also prevalent in the past. This strategy was employed by the Tartars against the Genoese in the Crimea War in 1346. It forced the Genoese to flee immediately and the spread of the disease to Italy became inevitable. Four centuries later infected bodies were used against besieged cities in the Russo- Swedish War of 1710.1 Another method was employed by the British in their war against the American Indians, known as Pontiac rebellion (1763). Two hostile Indian Chiefs were given two blankets and a handkerchief, infected with the smallpox virus, as gifts.2

No nation has used germs intentionally and successfully against the personnel of another rival nation in the 19th century, though the Germans had injected the horses of Romanian cavalry with ‘glanders’ in 1914.3 Some allegations were made during World War I that the horses exported from America to Europe had been infected with diseases.4 Since then a great deal of research and experiment was devoted by various states to perfecting various techniques of use of living pathogen broadly speaking, biological weapon (BW). Post-war research was largely a continuation of Japanese, German and British policy during the World War II. The Germans, however, did not go beyond the stage of experimentation and sometimes war prisoners (PoWs) were subjected to the tests.5 The British had been concerned that the Germans might use biological weapons and consequently launched an intensive research programme. Britain’s military was even putting together a bombing plan for the use of anthrax against six German cities: Berlin, Hamburg, Stuttgart, Frankfurt, Aachen, and Wilhelmshaven.6