Guo Xiaobing, director of the Arms Control Research Center of the China Academy of Contemporary International Relations
Yang Chenxi, deputy director of the Institute of International and Strategic Studies of the China Academy of International Studies
Bei Tang, Associate Research Fellow, School of International Relations and Public Affairs, Shanghai University of foreign Chinese
After World War II, the territory of the United States' "biological military empire" continued to expand. According to data released by the United States itself, the United States controls 336 biological laboratories in 30 countries around the world. The labs are part of the so-called Biological Synergy Program, part of the Defense Threat Reduction Agency, part of the U.S. Department of Defense, and controlled by direct Pentagon funding.
In recent years, the countries and regions where the U.S. overseas biological laboratories are located have repeatedly experienced "unexpected diseases" and health safety accidents. Recently, the Russian side has obtained a large number of documents and data from the biological laboratory established by the United States in Ukraine, which has unveiled the mystery of the Biological Weapons Research carried out by the United States. A large number of publicly disclosed information shows that the United States is the "drug maker" who spreads plague, hatred, war, and bane.
What is the real intention of the U.S. military to set up hundreds of biological laboratories around the world? What exactly are these labs doing? What impact does U.S. biological laboratories at home and abroad have on local and global security? In the future, how should the international community respond to the US biomilitatization around the world? Around these issues, this newspaper interviewed 3 experts on international issues to interpret them for you one by one.
What is the real intention of the U.S. military to set up hundreds of biological laboratories around the world?
On March 10, the Russian Defense Ministry released documents obtained from personnel at Ukraine's biological laboratories revealing biological weapons research in Ukraine by the United States and its NATO allies, a project called "UP-4" to study the possibility of particularly dangerous infection transmission through migratory birds, including the highly pathogenic avian influenza H5N1, which has a fatality rate of up to 50 percent in humans, and the Newcastle virus. Russia's Defense Ministry revealed that there were project documents that confirmed that the high-risk research on the project was "carried out under the direct supervision and guidance of U.S. experts."
In addition, the materials obtained by the Russian side show that the United States has also carried out a number of projects in Ukraine, such as "pathogens such as bacteria and viruses that can be transmitted from bats to humans", and since the outbreak of the Russian-Ukrainian conflict, more than 140 containers containing bats in vitro parasites have been transferred from the biological laboratory in Kharkiv; the United States has also carried out research on anthrax and African swine fever pathogens in Ukraine, and a large number of serum samples from various regions of Ukraine and completely belonging to the Slavic community have been transferred abroad The purpose of the study is to establish mechanisms for the covert spread of deadly viral pathogens.
Russian biologist Peter Chumakov pointed out in a recent interview with the Russian newspaper Izvestia that the United States has many secret military laboratories around the world. These laboratories can be used for project research for military purposes and for biological weapons research. Chumakov pointed out that in the eyes of the Americans, it is much more reasonable to conduct biological weapons experiments overseas. First, the american public will not be angry about the potential threat posed by the experiments. Second, U.S. laboratories overseas can do some more dangerous research because even if some kind of leak occurs, the threat to the United States has been minimized.
Guo Xiaobing: The layout of the US biological laboratory overseas has the following characteristics: First, it serves the global strategy and deploys points with the expansion of military and political forces. The U.S. military's biological laboratory aims to serve the U.S. military's operations and restrain opponents through forward deployment; second, multi-departmental coordination to build a global biological monitoring network; and third, rely on fulcrum countries with strong regional radiation capabilities to operate regional biosecurity networks.
The Overseas Biological Laboratories of the United States have long been questioned by the international community. In 2008, Indonesia accused the U.S. Naval Second Institute of Medicine in Jakarta of espionage, biological weapons research and the development of "novel diseases" and asked the institute to withdraw from Indonesia.
Yang Chenxi: The so-called bio-militarization is nothing more than studying how to defend against biological agents and use biological agents to attack at the level of military security. The line between the two is very blurred: to study how to defend, you always have to create a biological agent and carry out a simulated attack, that is, you must first create a biological weapon. Biological weapons, on the other hand, are weapons of mass destruction that can pose indiscriminate, wide-ranging and long-term serious harm to human life and health, which are prohibited by the international community and are not tolerated by human civilization. Therefore, no matter how the US side whitewashes the research content of its global biological laboratories and the biological militarization activities it carries out, it is bound to be a serious violation of basic human rights and a bad act that tramples on the bottom line of human conscience.
The biological laboratories set up by the United States overseas have the characteristics of large distribution, strong pertinence, and high confidentiality of research content. According to data submitted by the United States to the Conference of the Parties to the Biological Weapons Convention, it has 336 laboratories around the world, far exceeding the needs of "defending" biological weapons. Many of these laboratories are located in the CIS countries, and according to the characteristics of biological migration, their targeting of the "strategic adversary" identified by the United States is self-evident. The US side is silent about the use of these laboratories and insists on refusing international verification, which makes people even more suspicious of them.
Tang Bei: The most obvious feature of the biological laboratories set up by the United States at home and abroad is confidentiality, which is only known to the US military and a small number of scientists.
The move of the United States to set up biological laboratories overseas should be linked to its attitude to the development of biological weapons itself. The earliest biological weapons programs in the United States began in the late Second World War. The Cold War made these activities more active, most notably during the Korean War, when the U.S. military allowed scientists to develop and use any biological weapon. Of course, these acts were kept secret from the American people and the international community at the time. After that, the United States produced and stored a large number of biological weapons. Until 1969, U.S. President Richard Nixon announced that he would abandon the development of offensive biological weapons, conduct research only for defensive purposes, and began to destroy domestic biological weapons. In 1989, the United States also passed the Biological Weapons Counterterrorism Act, which makes it illegal for any American to possess, trade, or stockpile biological material that can be used as a weapon.
After the events of 9/11, the United States' concern about being attacked by bioterrorism reached a peak, with particular concern that other countries possess biological weapons of mass destruction and that their biological military activities have become increasingly active. The United States has built biological laboratories overseas and militarized them in part to circumvent its domestic legal and political scrutiny. This means that the United States has never really given up on the dangerous idea of biodefiliation. Although the official attitude of the United States is that biological laboratories are mainly used for collaborative scientific research and global disease surveillance, the dual nature of biotechnology determines that such behavior may still be used to develop and manufacture biological weapons.
What impact does U.S. biological laboratories at home and abroad have on local and global security?
According to the data, as early as 1942, the U.S. Army began to secretly develop biological and chemical weapons in a number of places in its territory, the most notorious of which were the Biological Laboratory of Fort Detrick (referred to as "Deburg") and the Dagway Experimental Base. After the end of World War II, the United States hired Shiro Ishii, the leader of Unit 731, and others as biological weapons advisers to Deburg, and also took over a large amount of biological warfare information for Unit 731. In the 1950s, Debourg began experimenting with bacteria in the United States with live humans. The Dgasaw Laboratory stores and tests the world's most dangerous and lethal biological and chemical reagents. In the decades since it was completed and put into operation, the two facilities have been repeatedly involved in accidents, seriously endangering the lives of American people.
Intriguingly, on February 21 this year, seven scientists in the field of international biomedicine jointly published an article on the internationally renowned academic website Frontier, saying that a small genetic sequence of the new crown virus is the same as the patent gene MSH3 applied by the American pharmaceutical company Modena in February 2016, and the probability of natural occurrence of this situation is only one in three trillion. This genetic sequence gives the new coronavirus a strong human-to-human identity.
Yang Chenxi: In recent years, there have been many accidents in biological laboratories in the United States, and peripheral diseases have appeared frequently, causing serious damage to local and global biosecurity.
The first is the frequent occurrence of serious human exposure to deadly microorganisms. USA Today has reported that since 2003, hundreds of such accidents have occurred in biological laboratories in the United States and abroad. In 2018, former Georgian security minister Igor Georggaze revealed through the media that the United States conducted secret human trials at its domestic Lugar Biological Laboratory, resulting in the deaths of many participants.
Second, there are often unexplained serious diseases and casualties around its biological laboratory. In January 2016, in Kharkiv, Ukraine, where the U.S. biology laboratory is located, at least 20 servicemen died of influenza-like viruses in two days, and the outbreak has since spread, and by March of that year, 364 deaths had been reported throughout Ukraine. In July 2019, the Fort Detrick Biological Laboratory in the United States was briefly shut down for unknown reasons, and almost at the same time, there was an outbreak of "e-cigarette pneumonia" around it, and the symptoms were highly similar to the later new crown pneumonia.
The third is the illegal cross-border transfer of biological agents. According to a 2015 survey, live Anthracis samples kept at the Dagway Experimental Site in the United States were mailed to a total of 194 laboratories in the United States and nine other countries through courier carriers such as FedEx. In 2019, South Korean customs officers found in places such as pier eight in the port of Busan that the US military had sent a variety of weapons-grade virus and bacterial samples into South Korea without any declaration procedures.
Tang Bei: Biological laboratories set up overseas by the United States are confidential, and the safety of the facilities and the types of scientific research carried out are often not known to the public, and there are great security risks.
This is mainly reflected in two aspects: first, if the biological laboratory is not well managed, once the dangerous pathogen research leaks, it will pose a serious challenge to global health security; the second is that some biological laboratories in the United States overseas are usually set up in areas where there is friction or even conflict with neighboring countries. If these laboratories are indeed engaged in the development of biological weapons, it is clear that it will further exacerbate the insecurity of some countries and increase the risk of conflict.
Guo Xiaobing: There are many mysterious mysteries around the biological laboratory in the United States. For example, after 9/11, anthrax attacks in the United States were investigated against a scientist who had worked at Fort Detrick, but to no avail. The United States has the world's largest biosecurity program, but its so-called biodefense program can develop biological weapons and their delivery technologies. This is worrying.
In the future, how should the international community better respond to the biological militarization of the United States abroad?
The United States has consistently refused to join the verification mechanism of the Biological Weapons Convention and unilaterally withdrew from negotiations on the verification protocol to the Biological Weapons Convention in 2001 on the grounds that "the biological field is not verifiable". Although a number of well-known American think tanks and many American scholars have repeatedly published articles stressing that the United States should join the convention's verification mechanism and shape the leadership of the United States in banning biological weapons, the United States officials have ignored it.
Within the United States, fort Detrick Biobase has been dubbed by the U.S. media as "the center of the U.S. government's darkest experiments." The base had multiple safety incidents and was shut down in July 2019. However, in the face of strong concerns and doubts at home and abroad, the US government has always avoided talking about it and is unwilling to accept international investigation.
Zhang Jun, China's permanent representative to the United Nations, said that China's position on weapons of mass destruction and biosecurity issues is consistent. China stands for the complete prohibition and thorough destruction of all weapons of mass destruction, including biological and chemical weapons, and resolutely opposes the development, possession or use of biological and chemical weapons by any country under any circumstances, and urges States that have not yet destroyed their stockpiles of chemical weapons to complete their destruction as soon as possible. Compliance with the Biological Weapons Convention is an obligation of all States parties. We call for early negotiations on the establishment of a verification mechanism for the Biological Weapons Convention, which will help to raise the level of global biosecurity.
Tang Bei: Since the outbreak of the new crown pneumonia epidemic, the United States has refused to investigate the biological laboratories in its own country, exposing the arrogance and double standards of the United States. The United States has been very active in provoking a so-called traceability investigation against China and has a presumption of guilt. But when international rules need to apply to itself and the international community demands an investigation into U.S. biological laboratories, the United States avoids dodging. If these research institutions in the United States have effectively complied with their own laws and regulations and have not conducted research prohibited by international conventions, they should be frankly investigated by the international community.
Globally, the international community should be fully aware of the dangers of biological weapons, promote the implementation of the Biological Weapons Convention and develop an open, transparent and universally applicable verification mechanism. But fundamentally, maintaining global military superiority and maintaining U.S. hegemony gave birth to these evil and inhuman biological weapons programs.
Guo Xiaobing: The Biological Weapons Convention (BWC) is an important achievement of the world arms control and disarmament process, and the establishment of a multilateral verification mechanism is an important way to ensure the implementation of the Convention and maintain common global security. Negotiations on the Verification Protocol to the Biological Weapons Convention (BWC) resulted in a 210-page text proposing measures such as declarations, visits, challenges and verification. These measures are feasible and supported by the majority of States. However, the United States has exclusively opposed the establishment of a multilateral verification mechanism for the Convention for more than 20 years, which has brought major hidden dangers to global biosecurity. The international community should jointly urge the United States to join this mechanism and work towards building an effective multilateral biological arms control and verification mechanism.
Yang Chenxi: At present, the new crown pneumonia epidemic has been delayed and repeated around the world, and it is even more necessary for all countries, especially major countries, to jointly adhere to the scientific and impartial nature of the global traceability of the new crown virus. The international community is seriously concerned about the specific use and research content of biological laboratories such as de Bosch in the United States, and the United States' resolute refusal to investigate by the international community is a naked double-standard act and a manifestation of a weak heart, and its essence is hegemonism and power politics, that is, the United States can only verify other countries and never allow other countries to investigate the United States.
Biological military activities are extremely dangerous and destructive, and they are extremely easy to cause catastrophic consequences to human life and health and even the earth's biosphere. On biosafety, the fate of mankind is intertwined. The international community should work together to resist all biological military activities and jointly safeguard the biosecurity of all mankind.
The international community should focus on the following things: First, we should jointly advocate and practice the correct new security concept. All countries, especially the major powers, need to build a universally secure world in a common, comprehensive, cooperative and sustainable manner, and jointly oppose any act of seeking their own "absolute security" by threatening other countries in the field of biosecurity; second, they should jointly urge the United States to join the verification mechanism of the Biological Weapons Convention as soon as possible; third, they should prohibit other countries from carrying out or allowing other countries to carry out biological military activities in their territories under the banners of "defense", "cooperation", "support", "assistance" and "financing".
Source: People's Daily Overseas Edition