Historic Uses OF WMD in Battle: Events in History

[Mark Conley]

its the way i sign most of my replys 1217. of course, it could be this way too or this :roll: or this or this :? but most of the time i just sign them this way

 

[Spartan]

Someone (forget who) stated that there was pretty much no use of biological warfare in WWII. Actually, the Japanese used alot of it. They infested chinese civillians with plague and had a plan to bomb sandiego with Submarines modified to carry planes. The bombs would be "dirty" and would contain the bubonic plague. Not to mention the poisoning of the rice mentioned by Eric. There are a ton of different examples of Bio warfare used by Japan, you just have to look around for it. I read some of these examples in Flyboys, and saw plenty on the history channel. Like I said, you've just got to look around.

 

[Mark Conley]

yep:

The Japenese Army and political Unit 731 carried out a number of biological warfare type experiments on the chinese people. This unit was heavily involved with the production, testing, and evaluation (often by visisection on live subjects) for most of the common ones they developed: typhus, bubonic plauge, and botulism were some if not all.

One thing about the Unit: a lot of the Major players in most of the really horrific things were given a general amnesty by the US military in exchange for the information they developed.

http://www.arts.cuhk.edu.hk/NanjingMassacre/NMU731.html

this site offer quite a few links that pretty much cover this groups activitys.

 

[1217]

its the way i sign most of my replys 1217. of course, it could be this way too or this :roll: or this or this :? but most of the time i just sign them this way

Okay

 

[Gunner13]

Mark,

Thanks for the links on the Bari Harbor incident and Unit 731. I knew about Unit 731 and what happened after WWII (I have a buddy whose 1/2 Japanese and he is still in contact with the Japanese side of the family - they weren't part of Unit 731), but had no knowledge of Bari Harbor.

In reference to Unit 731 and the US actions after WWII, you have to remember that the Cold War was full on by that point and the US was looking for any edge it could get against the Soviets. That doesn't make it right (because we should have tried and hanged the members of Units 731 for war crimes), but it does give you an understanding of why the US Government did what it did then.

Thank goodness the US and NATO dumped Bio as a weapon and went for Bio defense only. Lots of bad stuff happened in that arena, including the live agent tests in the US

 

[Mark Conley]

Yes:

I still remember the anthrax outbreak in sverdlosk, soviet union, when all those civilians downwind from the weapons facility died from anthrax, as the result of "Bad Meat". They finally came clean about it almost 25 years later. The cold war was a pretty yucky period for everyone, including the soviets. And lets not even get into the weapons where the producers were biological, but the product was a chemical toxin. They were called mycotoxins, by the way, and violated no known chemical or biological warfare agreement we had with them at the time.

:?

 

[silent driller]

I took a quick look at some of the Agent Orange website and most of them are run by lawyers seeking plaintiffs for lawsuits or anti-US rant pages. I was not able to find any mention of scientific studies that link Agent Orange to birth defects. I am definitely not saying that it is not possible or didn't happen, just pointing out that you can find anything on the web and most of that is not true (just look at Snopes.com).

That would seem to disqualify, for now, Agent Orange as a WMD, unless you are a tree of course

Call it a weapon of mass defoliage!

 

[soldierzhonor]

1000 BC. Arsenic smoke was used by the Chinese.

600 BC. During a siege of the city, Solon of Athens poisoned the drinking water of Kirrha.

184 BC: In a sea battle, Hannibal of Carthage hurled clay pots full of vipers onto the decks of enemy ships.

Dating back to at least the 1100s, there are many examples of hurling the bodies of plague or smallpox victims over city walls.

1400s: Leonardo da Vinci proposed an arsenic-based anti-ship weapon.

1495: The Spanish offered wine spiked with the blood of leprosy patients to the French near Naples.

1650: Polish artillery general Siemenowics fired spheres filled with the saliva of rabid dogs at his enemies.

In 1763, British officers came up with a plan to distribute smallpox-infected blankets to Native Americans at Fort Pitt, Pennsylvania.

During the Civil War, future Kentucky governor Luke Blackburn, MD, sold Union troops clothing contaminated with smallpox and yellow fever.

Near the end of the Civil War, Grant's army was stalled outside Richmond during the siege of Petersburg, Virginia. There was a plan -- not acted upon -- to attack the Confederate trenches with a cloud of hydrochloric and sulfuric acids.

In world war 1 1 million of the 26 million casualties suffered by both sides were from chemical agents.

In 1935, Fascist Italy invaded Ethiopia. Ignoring the Geneva Protocol, which it signed seven years earlier, Italy used chemical weapons with devastating effect. Most effective was mustard gas dropped in bombs or sprayed from airplanes. Also effective was the mustard agent in powdered form, which was spread on the ground.

The Japanese invasion of China featured both chemical and biological attacks. The Japanese reportedly attacked Chinese troops with mustard gas and another blistering agent called Lewisite (named for its U.S. inventor, Captain W. Lee Lewis, who called it "the stuff beside which mustard gas becomes a sissy's scent"). In attacking the Chinese, Japan also spread cholera, dysentery, typhoid, plague, and anthrax.

Germany used a cyanide-based gas to massacre Jewish civilians in concentration camps.

In 1945, 2 atomic bombs were dropped by the United States on Nagasaki and Hiroshima, Japan killing tens of thousands. The fallout killed scores times that more.

In 1967, the International Red Cross said mustard gas and possibly nerve agents were used by the Egyptians against civilians in the Yemen civil war.

Nov 1980, Iraq gases Iran during the war between the 2 countries. Iraq uses Mustard Gas and Tabun. UN investigative teams verify the use of the gas.

Aug 25th 1988, Iraq uses mustard, cyanide, and nerve agents against Kurdish civilians killing 5,000 in Halabja, Iraq.

Heres a few. some I didnt have dates for so I didnt include them. Iraqis after the Gulf War were complaining of depleted Uranium rounds causing birth defects and causing deaths. The soldiers who witnessed the explosions being tested during the manhattan project, and some others from other countries.

 

[Mark Conley]

Time to poke the fires on this topic a little...

Believe it or not, incindery or flame type weapons were at one time classified by the US Army as a chemical weapon., so napalm, flame throwers, and such were probly the most extensively used chemical weapons in any war.