WMD Threat !

So far, the world has kept the lid on weapons of mass destruction being used to decimate civilian populations during wars.  Poison gas was used on the battlefields of the first world war and there was fear it would be dropped on cities in later wars, but thankfully that did not happen.

The ultimate WMD is of course the use of nuclear weapons.  During the years of the cold war both the Soviet Union and the western powers had enough atom bombs to wipe out their respective populations many times over.   The doctrine of MAD - standing for "Mutually Assured Destruction " was the nightmare that kept fingers off the firing button.

That threat of a sudden and unprovoked attack by one country on another still exists and the ability to incapacitate the entire civilian population to prevent a response must be tempting.  Few realise how close that came to reality in the second world war because the details have been closely hidden away by military censors for fear of alarming the public.

The Japanese army setup a medical  weapons development unit in occupied Chinese territory during the early days of the second world war and used local people and prisoners of war as guinea pigs.  They were deliberately infected with various diseases and the aim was to develop a means of spreading death quickly on great numbers of people.   The target the Japanese had in mind was the United States civilian population.

The disease that gained the major hope of success was Bubonic Plague.   In the fourteenth century it had ravaged Europe and killed a third of the population.  Military planners were looking for a way of introducing it into the United States cities with the hope of forcing America out of the war.  It was known that this disease was spread by fleas and that rats were the vehicle to disperse these fleas across a civilian population.

The method of delivery posed a problem.  The Japanese developed a special bomb that could safely distribute infected fleas but they doubted that their aircraft carriers could approach to launch a bombing raid without suffering major losses.  Naval architects were ordered to design submersible aircraft carriers.

This seemed an impossible task, but a clever design entailed joining two existing submarines side by side to enable a cylindrical aircraft hanger to be posited between the hulls.  This would contain three single engine seaplanes, each capable of taking a single bomb on a mission to an American city.  An order was placed for nineteen of such vessels, and six were constructed and declared operational before the war ended with a Japanese surrender.

This "Flea Bomb "attack never materialized.   The Japanese thought that provoking the Americans at that later stage of the war unwise and when the Americans discovered these "submersible aircraft carriers " they were intent on keeping the idea from the Russians and clamped a security hold on all forms of information.

You can be certain that somewhere in the military of most countries there exists today a laboratory examining the use of disease as a war weapon, and trying to devise a means of safeguarding their own population from such an attack by an enemy.    You can also be assured that the potential of poison gas has not been fully discarded.

Perhaps that it is well that all this is not general knowledge.   It would be enough to give most people a bad case of insomnia !