Biological Warfare, Biological Weapons Quotes

This is a very important quotation. It is often cited by preventive war hawks to show that deterrence might not be a sufficient inhibitor against an extreme ideological enemy. In this case it was political philosophy that would make the enemy willing to have the majority of its population die to reach the ideological objective. More fearful is the prospect of the Theocracy of Iran where the leaders may believe that nuclear jihad is a commandment of God. More critical is the Islamic theology which says that if most of the Iranian Muslim population die in a nuclear war that they start all those people will be martyrs and immediately go to God’s Paradise. Thus, even the dead Muslims are not victims and the nonbelievers should be killed. For extremely fanatical Muslims nuclear war can be a logical and holy course of action.

Germany had some world class physicists. Our scientists, military intelligence people, and political leadership assumed that the Germans were also seeking to develop the Atomic Bomb. Ironically, it turned out that they were not, and what Truman reported in this quotation was untrue (although that was not fully known at the time.) Einstein and several of the scientists who were early pioneers in modern physics were Jewish, and Hitler referred to the study of nuclear fission and fusion as “Jewish Science.” As a result, the German government did not commit the resources to the development of an atomic bomb. Instead, they were betting on the development of the Jet Airplane which they succeeded in deploying against the Allies at the end of the war. But they did not have enough or enough pilots left alive to fly them, and Germany was overrun by the Allied Troops. Prior to Truman’s erroneous report about the German development of an atomic bomb, there had only been one piece of evidence that the Germans were not developing one. An OSS secret agent, Moe Berg, had talked with Werner Heisenberg, at a Swiss scientific conference during the war. He was going to assassinate the greatest of the German physicists if Berg thought he was working on a nuclear device. Berg concluded from his discussions that Heisenberg did not know enough about nuclear fission to have been working on that. Berg did not kill Heisenberg, and reported that he did not think the Germans were developing a bomb as if they were Heisenberg would have been deeply involved. However, the American intelligence people and the American scientists, did not trust Berg’s analysis and conclusion. Berg was not a trained scientist. He was a professional baseball player—the NY Yankee backup catcher to Bill Dickey. He was a college graduate, a brilliant guy and a very fast learner who had studied physics books and papers before his assignment. Berg turned out to have been right, but that was not confirmed until a few years after the war. Truman had relied on an incorrect intelligence estimate when he made this quotation. It was not the first such error of intelligence analysis in American history and it would not be the last.

The second atomic bomb had just been dropped.

Statement to Secretary of State Dean Rusk just after they had been given a military briefing on every Russian city that would be wiped out with a nuclear bomb if war should break out, 1961.

The $2 Billion was enormous at that time—the equivalent of $26 Billion in 2010 dollars. This was the first time that all but a handful of Americans knew of the huge sums that had been invested in the Manhattan Project. What made the quotation even more memorable is how President Truman, who himself had only learned about the Manhattan Project with the death of President Roosevelt, framed the event—as a contest between us and Germany as to who would build an atomic bomb first. Actually, although almost no one in the US government realized it then, the Germans had NO PROGRAM of nuclear weapons development at all. Hitler did not trust the Theoretical Physics and Theory of Relativity because Einstein and other Jewish scientists had been instrumental in its development. He derogatorily referred to it as “Jewish Science”. Germany bet its scientific efforts on the V2 Rockets and the Jet Airplane, both of which they were successful with but too late to have any material effect on the war. Ironically, even after most of the great German physicists were run out of Germany, there were still two of the greatest who may well have been capable of nuclear weapons development. But neither Werner Heisenberg or Otto Hahn were inclined to engage in that kind of research, and neither of them were even asked whether or not they thought it was possible. The anti-Semitic Nazis just assumed that it could not be. Truman and his associates did not find out for another year or more that there was no laboratory race. There was one OSS spy, Moe Berg, who had actually talked to Heisenberg in the midst of the war, and concluded that he not only was not working on an atomic bomb, but was not up on the latest pre-war critical research needed to develop a bomb. Hahn knew and had created the first chain reaction for which he later won the Nobel prize but he was a chemist and didn’t really understand the Physics and mathematics involved in making a weapon and was a confirmed pacifist. Ironically, his colleague, Lise Meitner who had done the physics and mathematics on that experiment was Jewish and had to flee Germany. In Denmark she gave the results to Niels Bohr, who shared then with Leo Slizard and Einstein when Bohr came to the United State and that initiated the famous letter that was sent to FDR which triggered the Manhattan Project. The German first nuclear reaction was used by the Americans because the politicians listened to the scientists, while in Germany, the politicians gave no credence to their scientists and their experiments in nuclear fission.

This was his last publication. He died of a heart attack as the magazine was being printed. Since this was written one other possible use of nuclear weapons has been suggested—namely, retaliation for a biological attack. From a policy point of view, maintaining an arsenal of biological weapons for retaliatory purposes is dangerous and use for retaliation of biological weapons is not very controllable and arguably less humane than a nuclear weapon. His point however still holds. We have to have a national defense policy against many threats and we have to have defense policies that handle all these without nuclear tactics is insufficient to handle any of the threats without causing more problems and we have other weapons and techniques that are just as, if not more, effective. They and systems under development have the major role in our current defense policy.

3rd Earl Russell of Kingston