The Korean War Biological Weapon Allegations: Additional Information and Disclosures

ASIAN PERSPECTIVE, Vol. 24, No. 3, 2000, pp. 159-172 Commentary THE KOREAN WAR BIOLOGICAL WEAPON ALLEGATIONS: ADDITIONAL INFORMATION AND DISCLOSURES Milton Leitenberg A Fraudulent Case The most serious of all the post-World War II charges of bio­ logical weapons use was made by China, North Korea, and the USSR against the United States during the Korean War. Together with nuclear and chemical weapons, biological weapons are cate­ gorized as one of the three kinds of "weapons of mass destruc­ tion." The charges were summarized in a chapter in the volume The Problem of Chemical and Biological Warfare, published by the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute (SIPRI) in 1971.1 Although little remembered now, these charges produced enor­ mous political repercussions at the time, with extensive debate at the United Nations and international protests against the alleged U.S. use of biological weapons. In January 1998, the text, either complete or partial, of twelve internal documents from the archives of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (CPSU) were obtained. The documents provided detailed and authoritative evidence that the Korean War biological weapons (BW) allegations were con­ trived and fraudulent. One document dates from February 21, 1952; all the other documents cover the period from April 13 to June 2, 1953, the four months following the death of Stalin. It is 160 Milton Leitenberg clear that the documents obtained are only a fragment of the rele­ vant Soviet archive, but they describe, at least in part, the way in which the allegations were contrived by North Korean and Chi­ nese officials and Soviet advisers. The documents include direct communications between the Central Committee of the CPSU to both the Chinese and North Korean leaders, Mao Zedong and Kim II Sung, and replies by the latter. One document, dating from May 1953, opens with the following lines: For Mao Zedong: The Soviet Government and the Central Com­ mittee of the CPSU were misled. The spread in the press of infor­ mation about the use by the Americans of bacteriological weapons in Korea was based on false information. The accusations again the Americans were fictitious. Despite the clear and explicit formulation of that message, the currently existing knowledge of the nature of relations, con­ sultation, and decision making at the time between the govern­ ments of North Korea, China, and the USSR, provide very sub­ stantial reason to suspect that the more likely instigator of the charges was Moscow. However, it is impossible to resolve that basic question at the present time given the limited amount of material available. These documents, as well as this writer's detailed analysis of the attempts by various authors from the time of the occurrence of the events in 1951-1952 through the 1990s to resolve the ques­ tion of whether the charges were true or false, were published in 1998.2 The publications were made available to the most knowl­ edgeable living Russian specialists on the Soviet-era archival records dealing with the Korean War. To date, there have been no demurrals, nor have any denials been made by Russian or Chi­ nese officials. Almost simultaneously, the old and now discredited charges were reiterated, first in 1998 in a book published in the West, and then in the spring of 1999 by the North Korean ambassador to the United Nations, but very notably not by China or, of course, by Russia. The book, written by two Canadian academics, Stephen Endicott and Edward Hagerman, was essentially comprised of two portions. One part, a description of the U.S. biological weapons program during World War II and in the immediate post-war years, was based on declassified U.S. documents avail­ The Korean War Biological Weapon Allegations 161 able to researchers in the U.S. National Archives. The second por­ tion was a reiteration of all the old Chinese propaganda. The authors then attempted to link the two essentially by invocation and without the provision of any direct evidence whatsoever demonstrating a connection between the two parts.3 An insight also became available regarding at least a partial contribution to the genesis of the book. A third researcher who had been interested...