Science at war. Pt. 2, The enemy of all mankind.

In the 1930s Japan developed a biological warfare programme to strengthen its hold on China which it invaded in 1937. The water supplies of small Chinese towns were infected with laboratory-grown bacteria as an experiment and samples were taken from victims who were then murdered. Chinese men were also rounded up for use in germ warfare experiments, which included anthrax spores, bubonic plague and glanders. The Japanese also set up germ warfare centres in Manchuria, Thailand and Singapore. Throughout the 1940s they field-tested bombs containing anthrax spores and even collected plague-infected fleas which were packed into bombs and dropped over China. Britain experimented with anthrax in 1942 on the island of Gruinard. There is film of these experiments, in which sheep were used to test the spread and toxicity of the anthrax organism. However, germ 'bombs' were never put into mass production in Britain. Japanese efforts to produce a war-winning weapon were finally defeated by the US atom bomb; and after World War II germ warfare research became a serious business in the US. That country gave an undertaking that it would be for defence purposes only, but elsewhere in the world biological weapons research was directed towards aggressive as well as defensive ends, with Iraq causing current concern over its holdings and their potential use.