By Neil
Harris
THE KOREAN War was at its
fiercest in 1951, following the “third phase offensive”, which began on New
Year’s Eve 1950. The Korean People’s Army, aided by Chinese volunteers, had
driven the Americans back across the 38th parallel, although the war
was not to reach stalemate for another two years. The Americans were panicking
and as General Macarthur admitted in his memoirs, planned to use nuclear
weapons in the hope that the radioactive fallout would hinder the North Korean
war effort. A recent find in FBI archives has escaped the shredder and made it
to the internet, shedding a new and sinister light on this episode.
The happy
accident of FBI involvement saved the document (100-HQ-93216, serial 461),
which would probably have disappeared if the lead agencies; the US Army and the
Atomic Energy Commission (AEC) had the
decision over whether to declassify.
The FBI had
come to have a role in all this after it was given the job of vetting state
employees in nuclear weapons development. J Edgar Hoover, building up his
anti-communist FBI empire, developed this into a liaison role between agencies
and soon the FBI had an office in every atomic facility and an element of control
over the development process.
McCarthyism
was in full swing; state employees were feeling the pressure from politicians
and anti-communist witch-hunters, and all the time the FBI was watching and
listening. The United States Government
office memorandum is dated 20th
April 1951 and reflects this. Both are as forgotten now as the
cause of the memo: a V P Keay wrote to a Mr A H Belmont, about Representative
Albert Gore (Democrat) and a rabble-rousing speech he had made in the US
Congress. This demanded the creation of “a belt containing radioactive material
being laid down across Korea
which would dehumanise the area” and which seems to echo Macarthur’s plan to
use atomic bombs to form dead zones and prevent supplies and reinforcements
getting to the front.
Representative
Gore was pushing this in the press and may have been doing so on behalf of the
military. In the memo, it looks as though he had confronted a Dr Paul McDaniel
of the AEC and when he wasn’t happy with the
answer he got, brought it up with an “Agent Bates” from the FBI’s “liaison
section”.
McDaniel said
that a commission set up in 1948 to “examine the possibilities of using
radiological warfare in such a way”, had submitted its final report on the 11th April 1951 and indicated that while “it was possible for an area to be
completely ‘dehumanised’ by using radiological agents, ‘it was not practicable’.”
A list of
reasons were given: the AEC didn’t have
“sufficient waste materials” and currently didn’t “have provision for producing
such agents”, nor did it have the ability to ship them and anyway the AEC
had no intention of “greatly curtailing the present production of plutonium” in
order to create them. In any case “research would have to be done to develop a
radiological agent of sufficient strength to last long enough”. In short, they
were quite busy enough building hydrogen bombs and the FBI took the hint.
McDaniel was,
in any event sceptical: “He pointed out that as a practical matter any zone
that could be ‘dehumanised’ would be of no use to our forces for advancing and
could be flown over or gone around by the enemy”. The writers of the report
were more hopeful, indicating: “Such a possibility as the use of radiological
agents should not be completely abandoned but should be kept in mind for future
discussions,” which of course it was, because in the era of Ronald Reagan, the
Americans developed the neutron bomb, which was a refinement on these rather
crude ideas, in that it was designed to kill people but leave property
unscathed.
And so from
April through to May, the document passed from office to office, each time
acquiring a new stamp, date and initials. Every so often a bureaucrat would add
an underlining here or a scribbled emphasis there. Nowhere did anyone record
any objection or see anything wrong in what was proposed. One even added the
helpful suggestion, written in by hand – “Biological warfare” – and presumably
the FBI took this up with other agencies, who were to be more careful with 60-year-old
documents.
The half-life
of plutonium is about 24,000 years, which means it would have been over 100,000
years before there would be any appreciable reduction in the amount of
radio-activity, although there would still be a soup of various decaying
radio-active elements long into the future. In any event plutonium is a highly
poisonous chemical in its own right. The Americans, of course, would have just
left the Koreans to sort it all out as they did in Vietnam
with Agent Orange.
