This page was created by Michitake Aso. 

Bodies and Structures 2.0: Deep-Mapping Modern East Asian History

Biological Warfare During the Korean War

During the Cold War, what was a biological invasion and how it would happen were questions that caused anxiety and fear. This type of warfare involved the intentional use of microbes, and the living and non-living vectors that carry them, to weaken or kill humans considered enemies. In the context of total war, biological warfare was also directed at the animals and plants that helped sustain those people.

The fear of invasion has been explored in the US context but less so for other societies, especially in the “Third World,” which was the site of so many types of invasions. Traditional understandings of invasions, or unwanted border crossings, in Vietnamese society have revolved around humans including Mongols, Chinese, and French armies. But biological warfare techniques developed in the twentieth century meant that non-human nature, and the environment itself, could become an invasive threat. Vietnamese medical doctors and cadre became concerned about insidious invasions that would go undetected until after it was too late to resist them and they had to grapple with several questions: What were the geographies of invasion? At what scale could they happen? What would an invasion look like? How could an invasion be differentiated from “natural” processes? Who, and what, would invade? How, in short, could invasions be mapped? And then, perhaps most importantly, how could these invasions be stopped?

In December 1952 and January 1953, Việt Minh representatives attended a series of lectures and an exhibition where they learned the specifics of biological weapons use in Chinese and North Korea. A simplified version of this information is presented in a Việt Minh pamphlet but the reports collected at this time were extremely detailed and the transcripts and summaries run to over 200 pages.

Chinese scientists and medical doctors emphasized the need for careful research and laid out three reasons they suspected the United States and United Nations militaries of using germ warfare:
 
  1. Diseases that broke out were new to area and time of year;
  2. Unusual insects and materials served as vectors;
  3. Outbreaks happened after US airplanes flew by.

These scientists also pointed to the context of the US biological weapons program and borrowed the term “bacteriology upside down” from Theodor Rosebury, one of the founders of the US biological weapons program, who later published a warning about them. Finally, these reports argue that patriotic hygiene mass movement was a good way to counter effects of biological warfare. All of these themes were picked up by the Việt Minh in their own investigations. This report is contained in the Ministry of Health file 5402 held in the National Archives of Vietnam Center 3 (NAV3).

For more on Chinese and North Korean charges of US biological warfare, see the work of Ruth Rogaski.

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