International: Alphabet of Destruction

The U.S. Navy’s Rear Admiral Ellis M. Zacharias, ret. (famous for his wartime broadcasts to Japan), who likes to make people’s flesh creep, last week did it again. He reminded the U.S. that its top military men were anything but complacent over “absolute weapons.”* In the United Nations World, Zacharias wrote of new non-atomic weapons “that could wipe out the last vestige of human, animal and vegetable life.” And then he added: “They are not an American monopoly. Several nations are known to have them, to be making them, and to be improving them. Furthermore, unlike the atom bomb, they are of such a nature that smaller nations with limited industrial facilities are in a position to develop them.”

The U.S., said Zacharias, now has atom bombs 50 times more powerful than those that fell on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. But there are other weapons in the new alphabet of destruction: 1) bacteriological bombs containing either botulinus toxin or psittacosis virus; 2) a U.S. -developed biological spray that “can wipe out all forms of life in a large city”; 3) some sort of military application of cosmic rays which is now, he thought, being developed by Russian scientists.

Zacharias punctuated his article with two sentences framed in Doomsday black: “A single milliliter† of the highly infectious psittacosis [parrot fever] virus could kill 20 million men. This virus can be produced cheaply in bulk by a small laboratory anywhere in the world.”

* Definition: “Capable of exterminating human life entirely.” † About one-fifth of a teaspoonful.