It looks like you're using an Ad Blocker.
Please white-list or disable AboveTopSecret.com in your ad-blocking tool.
Thank you.
Some features of ATS will be disabled while you continue to use an ad-blocker.
This is an recent exclusive report made by Al Jazeera and is found US 'used plague bomb' in Korea War
It is a crime the US has always denied - dropping germ bombs on North Korea.
But in 1952 the bubonic plague, never known before in North Korea, broke out across the country.
It claimed at the time that the United States was to blame. But the allegations were brushed aside as propaganda.
Sixty years later however, new evidence has emerged that bioweapons may indeed have been used.
The US has always vehemently denied these claims, dismissing them as crude and outlandish communist propaganda from a secretive and totalitarian state.
Nevertheless, the accusations have refused to go away. Pyongyang continues to press for an apology for an "outrage" that the US insists never happened.
Professor Mori Masataka has been trying to unravel the truth about alleged germ warfare.
In a specially extended edition, People & Power set out to investigate this extraordinary story.
Our journey began in North Korea where we were given unprecedented access to follow a leading Japanese academic, Professor Mori Masataka, who has been trying to unravel the mystery for the last twenty years.
-snip-
But neither he nor People & Power's location producer, Tim Tate, were under any illusions.
North Korea is one of the world's most secretive states and is usually impenetrable to journalists. Everywhere our cameras went, government officials went too, strictly monitoring where and what we could film.
In a vast museum in the centre of Pyongyang, Mori explored a room given over to what the North Koreans claim is direct evidence of US germ warfare – including specimen jars filled with flies, mosquitoes and fleas all allegedly injected with deadly pathogens.
-snip-
All this could have been phony, of course, and that is how the US has always responded to such claims, especially to filmed "confessions" from 36 captured US airmen – also screened in Pyongyang's museum – in which they give the North Koreans apparently detailed accounts of their participation in the US "germ" raids.
Accounts that, it must be said, were all retracted on the air crew's' return home to the US after the war.
Mori knows that testimony from North Korean citizens will not be enough to convince a sceptical world that the US used germ warfare in Korea.
"A scientific investigation or medical or biological investigation should be carried out. I think it is definitely necessary that a non-political purely-scientific organisation should be sent to North Korea to investigate", Mori says.
As it happens, within months of the original allegations being made back in the 1950s, North Korea invited an international commission to visit the country.
Composed of scientists from France, Italy, Sweden, the Soviet Union and Brazil, and led by Joseph Needham, a distinguished – if left-leaning - British embryologist, the commission toured the affected areas, interviewed the sick and the dying and carried out a detailed analysis of their infections.
The resulting 600-page report included results of post-mortem on the victims: these identified bubonic plague, cholera and anthrax.
It concluded that germ warfare had been deployed exactly as the North Koreans claimed.
Yet despite its apparent wealth of scientific evidence, it was again dismissed by the US as communist disinformation.
Unit 731
They revealed that the US had bought the expertise of Unit 731, a Japanese army biological warfare team, which conducted human experiments in the 1930s and 1940s to perfect the technology of bacteriological warfare: in World War 2, the Japanese military had dropped thousands of "germ bombs" across Northern China, killing millions of civilians.
A third crucial document – marked "Top Secret" – showed that in September 1951, the US Joint Chiefs of Staff issued orders to begin "large scale field tests… to determine the effectiveness of specific BW [bacteriological warfare] agents under operational conditions."
If these "field tests" were indeed undertaken, then they may have drawn again on the expertise of the Japanese biological warfare team.
In Japan, People & Power found home video footage from one of the former members of that team, shot just before his death, in which he claimed that its leaders had indeed assisted the US in mounting "an attack" in Korea.
2
Also, Harris tried to water down the issue of confession given by U.S. airmen under captivity. Col. Frank H. Schwable was the chief of the First Marine Air Wing. After having been captured, Schwable and Major Roy Bley made "confessions" stating that "the joint Chiefs of Staff had directed U.S. forces to carry out planned germ warfare and that the order was part of a directive given to General Ridgway in October 1951" (New York Times, February 23, 1953).
The Sunday Herald March 9th 2003
The documents also show that the British government feared the US would use biological weapons during the Korean war, which was in progress at the time. "American colleagues of long-standing had become very offensively minded," one report notes, "and the general attitude was that the sooner they could terminate the Korean war the better. The services in the United States had developed a most aggressive outlook the emphasis was now entirely on anti-personnel and anti-crop weapons."
University of Missouri - Of Bugs & bombs
The general plan for bacteriological warfare in Korea was directed by the United States Joint Chiefs of Staff in October, 1951. In that month the Joint Chiefs of Staff sent a directive by hand to the Commanding General, Far East Command (at that time
General Ridgway), directing the initiation of bacteriological warfare in Korea on an initially small,experimental stage but in expanding proportions
Just because you are paranoid does not mean they are not trying to get you!
Originally posted by DJW001
reply to post by MischeviousElf
Bubonic plague, anthrax and cholera are all naturally occurring, bacteria-borne diseases. Cholera is not at all uncommon in a war zone, where water is not treated properly.
No matter how much investigation one does, one will have to do much better than a clip from a North Korean propaganda film.
Why should there be any documents proving that the US DIDN'T do something?
Is there supposed to be a thick file labelled: "Secret: Things We Didn't Do?"
A classified document could definitely prove that the US DID do something.
The absence of a document that proves they DIDN'T do something?
That doesn't even make sense.
Online Google Version for All
At The Midpoint of the Korean War, In December 1951, The U.S. Secretary of Defense ordered that "actual readiness be achieved in the earliest practicable time" for offensive use of Biological weapons. Within weeks, the chief of staff of the U.S. Air Force reported that such capabilities are "Rapidly Materialising". It was shortly after these Top Secret Letters had passed between the top American Generals that North Korean and Chinese armies charged the United States with beginning large scale biological warfare experiments in north Korea.