The courage of Galileo: Joseph Needham and the "germ warfare" allegations in the Korean War.

In 1952, during the Korean War, it was claimed that United States forces were using bacteriological warfare against China and North Korea. The allegation was dismissed by western governments, but a six-strong international scientific commission (ISC) visited China and concluded that bacteriological warfare had taken place. On their return, the scientists, of whom the best known was the British biochemist Joseph Needham, were depicted as dupes or fellow-travellers. Interest in this subject was revived in 1998 with revelations from Moscow archives which seemed to prove that the commission was hoaxed, although a monograph published in the same year was more sympathetic to the ISC’s conclusions. To date, however, Needham’s own papers have not been consulted, and full use has not been made of the foreign office papers. On the basis of these archival sources, this article shows how Needham was drawn reluctantly into the limited and flawed work of the ISC. It also shows how the British government, concerned at the possible impact of the ISC report, sought to mobilize politicians, journalists and academics to refute it. The article concludes that Needham’s personal courage is not in doubt, but that his role in the ISC – and the defence of its conclusions – exacted a high personal cost. In early 1952, during the second year of the Korean War, disconcerting stories began to emanate from North Korea and north-east China about mysterious outbreaks of disease, inappropriate to the region and season. Unusual insects, said to be infected with a variety of bacilli, were being found on patches of snow, and their appearance seemed to coincide with bombing raids by American warplanes. A variety of other allegedly infected organisms and objects, from voles to kitchen utensils, feathers to pancakes, were also being deposited on Chinese and Korean hillsides. On 21 February the New China News agency claimed that United States forces were waging bateriological1 warfare in Korea and 1 The term ‘germ’ warfare was widely used in Britain at the time. Joseph Needham objected on the grounds that this was inaccurate and preferred either the term ‘bacterial’ or ‘bacteriological’ warfare; Imperial War Museum, Joseph Needham Papers, [hereafter IWM, JNP], file 82, Needham to Hector Hawton, 15 Nov. 1952. 504 JOSEPH NEEDHAM AND ‘GERM WARFARE’ © The Historical Association 2001 China, and on 24 February the Chinese foreign minister Chou En-lai branded the US guilty of war crimes. The charge was immediately denied by US Secretary of State Dean Acheson, who called, fruitlessly, on the Chinese to accept an impartial investigation by the International Committee of the Red Cross. The Chinese allegations, endorsed by visitors from the west and apparently substantiated by the ‘confessions’ of captured American airmen, became the focus for a vigorous international communist campaign. An exhibition was staged in Beijing where metal containers, said to be the means by which the infected matter had been dropped, were put on display.2 The allegations received significant further support from an ‘International Scientific Commission for the Investigation of the Facts Concerning Bacterial Warfare in Korea and China’ (ISC), established by the World Peace Council following an appeal by Dr Kuo Mo-Jo, president of the Chinese People’s Committee for World Peace. The commission was composed of six foreign scientists,3 the best known of whom was Joseph Needham, the Cambridge biochemist and sinologist. The ISC’s report (which, with appendices, ran to 665 pages) concluded that US forces had, indeed, engaged in bacteriological warfare against the Korean and Chinese people. However, given Beijing’s refusal to submit to an ‘impartial’ investigation, the charges remained, outside the communist world, unproven. Indeed, to many in the west it seemed absurd that the Chinese should persist in making such bizarre claims once they had been denied by the US government. The allegations lost much of their credibility when many of the American airmen retracted their confessions (under threat of court martial) as soon as they had been repatriated at the end of the Korean War. The subject has since received only intermittent scholarly attention,4 and is frequently dismissed in histories of the Korean War as a mere propaganda ploy (although often seen as a model of its kind).5 2 See Desmond Donnelly, The March Wind: Explorations behind the Iron Curtain (1959), pp. 40–1, for an account by a Labour MP who visited the exhibition. For a detailed presentation of the germ warfare allegations as a communist propaganda campaign, see John C. Clews, Communist Propaganda Techniques (1964), part 4, pp. 179–268. 3 In addition to Needham, the commission was composed of Dr Andrea Andreen (Sweden), Jean Malterre (France), Dr Oliviero Olivo (Italy), Dr Samuel B. Pessoa (Brazil) and Dr N. N. ZhukovVerezhnikov (USSR). It was joined on 6 August by Dr Franco Graziosi (Italy) as observer-consultant. The ISC worked closely with a Chinese committee of reception. 4 See, in particular, two volumes of the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute’s, The Problem of Chemical and Biological Warfare (Stockholm, 1971), iv. 196–223; v. 238–58 (vol. iv was authored by Jozef Goldblat and the Korean War case study in vol. v by Milton Leitenberg). See also Mark A. Ryan, Chinese Attitudes towards Nuclear Weapons: China and the United States during the Korean War (1989) and John Ellis van Courtland Moon, ‘Biological Warfare Allegations: The Korean War Case’, Annals of the New York Academy of Science, vol. 666: The Microbiologist and Biological Defense Research: Ethics, Politics and National Security, ed. Raymond A. Zilinskas (New York, 1992), pp. 53–83. 5 See, for instance, David Rees, Korea: The Limited War (1964) [hereafter Rees, Korea], pp. 347–63, and Michael Hickey, The Korean War: The West Confronts Communism, 1950–1953 (1999), p. 268. The subject is treated with a more open mind in Jon Halliday and Bruce Cumings, Korea: The Unknown War (1988), pp. 182–6, and in Callum A MacDonald, Korea: The War before Vietnam (Basingstoke, 1986), pp. 161–3.