Biological warfare in North Korea?

C

chimpkin

C'mon, get happy!
Registered Senior Member
:bugeye::confused:

It sounds awfully dotty...

On the morning of January 28, 1952, an enemy aircraft flew over territory in the district of Ichon two or three times and then made off in a southerly direction. On that morning, the weather was calm and misty. Towards noon, the mist dispersed and on the snow at various points on the territory flown over by the enemy aircraft, the Chinese People's Volunteers found insects—flies, fleas, ticks and spiders.

...the flies tested positive for cholera, which, apart from an outbreak in South Korea in 1946, had been unknown in Korea for sixty years. An entomological investigation found four groups of flies....all having great resistance to low temperatures, and the first three not known in Korea.
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According to North Korean and Chinese medical records, there was a systematic dropping of infection-bearing insects over North Korea and adjoining parts of China.

This is really weird and the first I've ever heard of this.

But apparently the communists mounted a huge inoculation and cleanup campaign in response.
All this is well-documented on their part.

http://www.nytimes.com/books/first/e/endicott-biological.html
 
Edited: Message I was responding to deleted.

To clarify my position: I'm not advocating for or against this article per se. What I'm wondering-is this something my government actually tried, or a bunch of whackadoodle made up by the CCP and North Koreans? Then bought by a credulous reporter?
Please support your arguments? Pretty Please?

Anyway:

Flies land on food sold by food vendors. Walk on it. Food is eaten. Person gets cholera?

I don't actually know if cholera is spread this way. I've always heard water contamination myself.

I *do* know that it is possible to get hepatitis from food vendors from airborne dried human fecal dust in third world countries-why a tourist shouldn't eat from roadside food stands.
 
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Although there are quite a number of "Number 1 rule is...", one of the most important ones is this:

Rule Number 1: Never, ever trust ANY information put out by North Korea!
 
Both current Chinese and Russian scholarship dismiss any claims of biological warfare on the part of the Americans. North Korea, of course, still says it happened. I'm doing research right now on Chinese media representations of North Korea before, during and after the war, and one interesting thing is that the claims of biological warfare only come out way after the Chinese retroactively say it came out. Basically, it's an obvious fraud. Imagine if the U.S. government suddenly today said "oh yeah, and Saddam used biological warfare on our boys six years ago...and we told you six years ago, you just forget..."
 
Both current Chinese and Russian scholarship dismiss any claims of biological warfare on the part of the Americans.
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Ah, then it likely didn't happen.

North Korea seems to be run by a lunatic, so, generally, what they say isn't credible.

If the current academic establishment in China says it didn't happen...when it seems it would be to the advantage of the CCP to at least keep up the pretense that it did...

Then it is almost certainly a fabrication.

Alright. Thanks Tyler.

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/39456324

like this. oops, sorry i infected you with std's.
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The US government and the medical establishment in the US were experimenting on mental patients and prisoners in Guatemala.

They did nonconsensual medical experiments on psychiatric patients, the institutionalized mentally retarded, and consensual chemical exposure experiments on prisoners in the US too during the same time period.

SO
As far as dropping plague fleas on the Koreans...I could see my government doing that, yeah.

But apparently there's not good documentation that they did.
 
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Read-Only said:
Although there are quite a number of "Number 1 rule is...", one of the most important ones is this:

Rule Number 1: Never, ever trust ANY information put out by North Korea!
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No, that's at best rule number two.

Rule number one is, don't get caught.
 
The REAL #1 is don't DO anything that you could be caught for.
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The US government has not been observed to be very good at that part.

I'm...yes, drifting off topic here...but I guess what we did do in that war was bad enough.
We committed war crimes ourselves and allowed the South Koreans to do so-well, we certainly didn't stop them, our officers were present at mass slaughters of "communists" and took pictures:

(from a repost from the Korea Times)

In the latest revelation about Korea’s turbulent history following its liberation from Japanese colonial rule at the end of World War II, the research group said they found evidence of 700 to 800 cases of mass civilian killings between 1945 and 1953.

The group said the incidents led to the death of about 200,000 to 250,000 people.
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http://www.korea-is-one.org/spip.php?article2161
Also, this article from NBC:
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/24695113/ with one of the photos taken.

Apparently, we also gunned down civilian refugees:

"All Koreans moving south to be treated as enemy" says one military communiqué generated in the early days of the war. Another from April 1951, incredibly, expresses concern that the policy of shooting southward bound civilians has gone on so long that troops are growing "hesitant" to carry it out. All of that information was left out of the Pentagon’s 2001 report.
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http://www.korea-is-one.org/spip.php?article2522

And I'd never heard of Cheju:

http://www1.korea-np.co.jp/pk/036th_issue/98040102.htm
 
Weaponized bugs, insects and animals all exist. They carry plague, typhus, and any number of nasty things like anthrax. Disease has been used as a weapon of war for millenia. Diseased men and cattle were catapulted over castle walls as a matter of routine. It's nothing new. Even the ebola virus (heammorhagic fever) has been weaponised, and that's just the ones i'm allowed to talk about. Obviously when I was in the Army we had to train to counter specific threats.
They are an efficient and cheap way to wipe out masses of people.
 
ULTRA said:
Weaponized bugs, insects and animals all exist. They carry plague, typhus, and any number of nasty things like anthrax. Disease has been used as a weapon of war for millenia. Diseased men and cattle were catapulted over castle walls as a matter of routine. It's nothing new. Even the ebola virus (heammorhagic fever) has been weaponised, and that's just the ones i'm allowed to talk about. Obviously when I was in the Army we had to train to counter specific threats.
They are an efficient and cheap way to wipe out masses of people.
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Oh, absolutely.
I have read that the bubonic plague entered Europe via the dead bodies of troops catapulted over walls...

What I'm just trying to find out...is did my government try this in this instance?

I mean, there were at least two incidents of smallpox-infected blankets being given or left out for First Nations people...precedent.

But in our country, the Korean war's much less talked over than the Vietnam war...it's almost a historical afterthought. Which is petty alarming. I'd heard about *some* shootings of civilians that compared to the rather more famous My Lai Massacre in Vietnam. But not that all civilians moving south were mowed down indiscriminately as a matter of policy.

Basically, the most exposure I had to the Korean war in mass media is M.A.S.H.http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/M*A*S*H_%28TV_series%29 Which was a good show, not supportive of war...but left one with the erroneous impression that our presence in Korea was less...horrific than it was in truth?

So.
 
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chimpkin said:
Edited: Message I was responding to deleted.

To clarify my position: I'm not advocating for or against this article per se. What I'm wondering-is this something my government actually tried, or a bunch of whackadoodle made up by the CCP and North Koreans? Then bought by a credulous reporter?
Please support your arguments? Pretty Please?

Anyway:

Flies land on food sold by food vendors. Walk on it. Food is eaten. Person gets cholera?

I don't actually know if cholera is spread this way. I've always heard water contamination myself.

I *do* know that it is possible to get hepatitis from food vendors from airborne dried human fecal dust in third world countries-why a tourist shouldn't eat from roadside food stands.
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I forgot to get back to this mess earlier.

Wiki is only a click away. Insects are NOT cholera vectors,
those midgie thingies being the only possible exception that
modern medicine has some up with the entire, vast insect world.

Furthermore, even if insects did spread cholera the tactic
of dropping them from aircraft is blantantly absurd, regardless
of the source of the claim.

Finally your anti-US bigotry is offensive. You place as much
value in a claim by North Korea, and more value in Chinese
and Russian claims, and fall for some garbage about mass
innoculation as though epidemics were not a serious threat
in war-ravaged territory, and as though there might have
been a substantial uninnoculated segment of the population
at risk.
 
ULTRA said:
Weaponized bugs, insects and animals all exist. They carry plague, typhus, and any number of nasty things like anthrax. Disease has been used as a weapon of war for millenia. Diseased men and cattle were catapulted over castle walls as a matter of routine. It's nothing new. Even the ebola virus (heammorhagic fever) has been weaponised, and that's just the ones i'm allowed to talk about. Obviously when I was in the Army we had to train to counter specific threats.
They are an efficient and cheap way to wipe out masses of people.
Click to expand...
They exist but have rarely been used.

The only two cases I have heard of, and they may be apocryphal,
were by the Mongols catapulting a dead plague victim into a Genoese
fort in the Crimea ca. 1250, and by English colonists against the
Indians in the notorious smallpox blanket episode in the early 1600s.

Modern militaries regrettably have had arsenals of this awful stuff.
These arsenals have almost certainly never been used, and let us
hope they never are. It is people like Mr. Kim of NK who most likely
to be the first offenders, and I hope that had been drilled into the
threadstarter by now.
 
Dywyddyr said:
And visible only to you, apparently.
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Take another look at exactly, precisely what I said:
NCDane said:
You place as much value (emphasis added) in a claim by North Korea
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Got it?

Now, is that or is it not a 100% fair interpretation of this:

"What I'm wondering-
(1) is this something my government actually tried, or
(2) a bunch of whackadoodle made up by the CCP and North Koreans?"
(numbering added)

Got it?

Take it slowly, and maybe you will get everything right on the next try.
 
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I get the secondhand impression NCDane's still acting like a douchecanoe?

He seems to have forgotten I put him on ignore for so doing already.

Short recall that, he might want to have that checked...:D
 
chimpkin said:
I get the secondhand impression NCDane's still acting like a douchecanoe?

He seems to have forgotten I put him on ignore for so doing already.

Short recall that, he might want to have that checked...:D
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You think I care if you use the pussified ignore option on me?

Your contributions are not so brilliant that I want to see them all,
that's for damn sure.

And you seem to have many gallant partisans such as that guy
with the 125k vocabulary and the unfathomable username who
jumped in a short while ago to mount a (completely ineffective)
defense. They can fulfill the role of adversary since you don't have
the spine or the balls to defend yourself.
 
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