Anthrax

History

The first efforts to employ anthrax as a weapon were made by the Germans during the First World War. Several covert programs were initiated to infect Allied livestock supplies in Romania, Mesopotamia, and Argentina. The prospect of biological warfare was sufficient to cause it to be included with chemical weapons in the 1925 Geneva Protocol banning gas and germ warfare. Nevertheless, weaponized anthrax was tested by the British army over the summer of 1942–1943 at Gruinard Island, Scotland. Results indicated that both aerial bombs and artillery shells would suffice to spread the disease throughout swaths of pastureland or small cities, though postconflict decontamination would be virtually impossible, thus rendering the sites uninhabitable for decades. In China during 1941 and 1944, the Imperial Japanese Army’s Unit 731 also tested anthrax delivery systems, including the Uji bomb, a small aerial bomb using a porcelain case to hold its payload.

The combination of lethality and the durability of the microbial spores made anthrax a favored choice of biological weapons programs in the United States, the Soviet Union, and other countries in the Cold War. Centered at Fort Detrick, Maryland, the U.S. Army’s Biological Warfare Laboratory oversaw the testing and production of various agents and delivery systems, including anthrax. Various tests using live animals and human volunteers were conducted through the 1950s and 1960s, verifying the efficacy of anthrax as a multivector infectious agent, deliverable through aerosol or aerial bomb, contaminated food, and direct skin-to-skin contact. In 1969, President Richard M. Nixon declared a halt to all biological weapons programs in the United States and ordered Fort Detrick to complete its transition to peaceful biological research under the direction of the U.S. Army Medical Research Institute of Infectious Diseases (USAMRIID).

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