"Better" than the Bomb
During a routine House debate...Representative Harry Sheppard, chairman of the Naval Appropriations subcommittee...said, "This nation is in possession of scientific factors which place it in an enviable position. The scientific factors at hand would result in devastation equal to, if not greater than, the atomic bomb. Remember, there are different kinds of devastation."
(Continuing)...Navy had a weapon which could wipe out "all forms of life" in a large city. "It is a germ proposition and is sprayed from airplanes that can fly high enough to be reasonably safe from ground fire. It is quick and certain death."
While germs are usually specialists, attacking only a limited number of species, some form of biological warfare might be only too practicable. Chances are that pestilence-spreaders would not use old, familiar diseases, but would create new ones by modifying standard bacteria or viruses. With modern knowledge of genetics and biochemistry, this should not be impossible. Human beings would have little natural resistance against such synthetic diseases, which might conceivably spread, in a biological chain reaction, through the world's entire population. Perhaps suitable diseases have already been created in several countries, their organisms kept alive in secret, guarded incubators.
The only defense would be mass immunization in advance. A nation planning aggression would protect its own soldiers and citizens before loosing its high-bred germs upon enemies and innocent bystanders. If all went well, its territory would be left an island of health in a world of poisonous corpses.
So far, no nation's agents had publicly reported such a suspicious "health campaign."
As I said last year at this time: "...poisoned bodies, poisoned minds, poisoned souls." |
