By Le Shui
After being discussed and approved at the United Nations General Assembly (UNGA), the Biological Weapons Convention (BWC) was opened for signature on April 10, 1972. The BWC has played an important role in preventing biological security threats and prohibiting the proliferation of biological weapons as designed.
However, the US, as a contracting power, has been unable to fulfill its obligations and even publicly opposed the establishment of a multilateral verification mechanism for the BWC, which seriously weakened the legally binding force of the BWC. At the same time, while accusing other countries of possessing biological weapons, the US has 336 biological labs in more than 30 countries around the world.
Biological weapons as weapons of mass destruction have caused huge disasters to human beings. Biological weapons are hundreds or even thousands of times more potent compared to conventional weapons. A History of Infectious Diseases and the Microbial World by American scholar Lois N. Magner tells that in the 18th century, the deadly epidemic of smallpox came to American Indians as carried in blankets and handkerchiefs through the scheme of British colonists in North America, resulting in the death of a large number of Indians. Similarly, the notorious Unit 731 conducted Japanese biological warfare experiments by deliberately infecting people, primarily Chinese prisoners of war and civilians, with infectious agents during the 1930s-1940s, causing 3,000-4,000 deaths. It also triggered epidemics raging in more than 20 provinces in China by spreading a variety of germs, causing hundreds of thousands of Chinese people to die from infection.
The US itself is a "recidivist" in using biological weapons. During the Korean War (1950-1953), the US dropped a variety of germs, including typhoid bacteria, on the Democratic People's Republic of Korea (DPRK) and northeast China, causing unprecedented outbreaks of plague, cholera and encephalitis, etc. In 1950, the US Navy massively sprayed Serratia marcescens and Bacillus globigii bacteria over the San Francisco Bay Area in California, resulting in 11 hospital admissions and 1 death; in 2018, Georgia’s former Minister of State Security Igor Giorgadze released that the US was carrying out clandestine bio weapons experiments on humans at its domestic Lugar Center, resulting in the deaths of many participants.
The US has carried out numerous clandestine biological experiments. What more chilling are the 30 US military biological laboratories recently discovered by Russia in Ukraine. According to news released by Russia, the US Department of Defense has been directly involved in an array of biological projects in Ukraine with migratory birds, bats and other animals as the research objects, involving pathogens of highly pathogenic avian influenza, plague, anthrax, and coronavirus, etc. On February 24 in 2022, the day when Russia launched the special military operation, the deadly pathogens of plague, anthrax, tularemia, and cholera, were "urgently destroyed" in the Ukrainian bio-labs.
In recent years, with the COVID-19 pandemic raging around the world, it is imperative to strengthen the control of biological weapons. However, the US dared to be against the whole world and cast the only dissenting vote in the voting on the BWC verification mechanism held in May 2021, making the mechanism ultimately aborted on a 182-1 vote. The impediment from the US has put 7.8 billion people in the world at risk of biological weapons, and meanwhile completely exposed its eagerness to seek global hegemony and pursuit of dual standards.
What exactly does the US want to hide by trying so hard to obstruct the establishment of the BWC verification mechanism? What is the US' purpose in carrying out a large number of pathogen experiments in the Ukrainian bio-labs? The US has owed an explanation to the people all across the world, and also an explanation to those who lost their lives innocently under clandestine biological experiments.
(The author is a commentator of China.com.cn)
Editor's note: This article is originally published on china.com.cn, and is translated from Chinese into English and edited by the China Military Online. The information, ideas or opinions appearing in this article do not necessarily reflect the views of eng.chinamil.com.cn.
