Expensive military hardware
Could weaponisation of insects, be the next chapter in modern conflicts, asks MANEKA GANDHI
If you enjoyed reading this article, you can help support our journalism by adding OHeraldo as a preferred source.
India has given yet another order for military equipment to France, England and Russia. The cost of these weapons, which will probably never be used, could have given us a road in every village and solar energy lighting in six lakh villages. It could give us food security, by raising the prices for farmers, and it could take care of the reasons that cause floods. But that is not as much fun as boys’ toys.
Are planes, guns, bombs and tanks the most effective weapons that humans have to wage war against each other? Apparently not. A non-fiction study called Six Legged Soldiers: Using Insects as Weapons of War by Jeffrey Lockwood shows how effective, armies made of insects can be, in times of war. Lockwood is an award-winning author and University of Wyoming professor. The book explores the history entomological warfare and bioterrorism.
Man has been weaponising creatures for centuries. When we learned how to pacify bees with smoke, we used hives as projectiles. We turned the potent toxins of some insects into deadly agents. Now, having mastered genetics gives us the power to transform insects into entirely new carriers of diseases. I’ve often thought that if a genocidal genius thought of a way to transmit HIV through mosquitoes, we would all be dead in ten years. For thousands of years clever generals have made insects their foot soldiers. There are three ways to wage entomological warfare.
* Using poisonous insects, such as bees, to directly attack the enemy.
* Infecting insects with a pathogen and dispersing them over the target areas. Any person or animal bitten by the insect gets infected.
* A direct insect attack against crops using pests like locusts, borers, beetles to destroy agriculture and the economy.
Troops in the Middle Ages catapulted beehives and wasp nests into enemy strongholds. Roman historian Pliny the Elder records that, in the second century AD, inhabitants of the Middle Eastern fortress city of Hatra forced the Roman legions surrounding them to flee by dropping scorpions on them. In the 12th century, King Henry I of England ordered his men to launch ‘nest bombs’ into the middle of the Duke of Lorraine’s army in Normandy. By the 14th century, some European armies had created a vast windmill-like device that propelled hives. Then came the machine that threw rotting human corpses of victims of insect-born diseases.
In the 14th century, 75 million people died of flea-borne bubonic plague. The Black Death arrived in Europe after the invading Mongols under Emperor Janiberg catapulted flea-ridden corpses into the port of Kaffa on the Black Sea. People fled, carrying bacteria, rats and fleas throughout the Mediterranean. As recently, as World War II Japan’s Unit 731 used plague-infected fleas and cholera-coated flies to kill nearly half-a-million Chinese. This was the greatest military success in the modern annals of biological warfare.
Yunnan Province had become a nuisance to the Japanese. This region fed China with the supplies and arms they needed to resist the Japanese. This route was an essential one for the Japanese leading from Burma into southern China. On 4 May 1942, Japanese bombers descended on the city of Baoshan and dropped a number of ceramic-shelled bombs.
The Yagi bombs thrown by the Japanese did not explode. The casing simply burst open. Inside was a yellow waxy substance with live houseflies with a slimy coating of cholera bacteria which promptly dispersed into the city. Three more bombings happened on May 5th, 6th, and 8th. By June, cholera had spread into the Yunnan province and the Chinese army fled. The Japanese were free to divert thousands of soldiers to other fronts. Cholera killed 410,000 people, more than Hiroshima and Nagasaki. At the end of World War II, the General who organised this did not get prosecuted as a war criminal, and before leaving China, he released plague-carrying rats into the countryside.
He was pardoned and invited as a teacher to the US military. The US Government conducted research at their biological warfare laboratories at Fort Detrick, in Maryland. During the cold war, the US military planned a facility to produce yellow-fever-infected mosquitoes and produced an “entomological warfare target analysis” of vulnerable sites in the Soviet Union. In February 1952, during the Korean War, both China and North Korea accused the US of bombarding their populations with plague-infected insects. In turn, the Vietcong wired boxes of scorpions to trip wires in tunnels, during the Vietnam war at the end of the 1960s.
During the war, both Germany and France reared millions of Colorado potato beetles, for use on their enemies. During the 1940s, the British government, using the laboratory at Porton Down near Salisbury, began to look into the possible uses of salmonella food poisoning, carried by flies.
In 1989 the terrorists discovered the potential of insect warfare. A group calling itself ‘Breeders’ sent a letter to the mayor of Los Angeles claiming to have released the Mediterranean fruit fly, in Los Angeles and Orange counties, and threatened to expand their attack to the San Joaquin valley, an important centre of Californian agriculture. They demanded that the state government issue a ban on pesticides, failing which they would insure that California lost its fruit. The infestation was real – but it had the opposite effect, California doubled its pesticide spraying.
If terrorists wanted to kill people in the US, they could employ the West Nile virus or its cousin, Rift Valley fever. Discovered in 1931, this viral disease is spread by mosquitoes. In 1997, 200,000 Egyptians fell ill, of whom 2,000 lost their sight and 598 died of encephalitis. An outbreak of West Nile virus which began in New York city in 1999 spread to 47 states in North America, killing 654 people and leaving 7,000 ill.
If they wanted to destroy forests, the Asian long horned beetle, and the emerald ash borer can destroy all of them. If enough orchards were destroyed, entire economies would sink. According to Lockwood, “For a terrorist group with patience, a slow-motion disaster in ecological time, would be a perfect tactic against an enemy, that thinks in terms of days or months, but would suffer across the generations. Anyone, with a course in medical entomology, could build a simple trap and conscript a bloodthirsty army releasing yellow fever laden mosquitoes in the swampier parts of the USA like the Gulf coast. Consider that a person with $100 worth of supplies, a set of simple instructions, and a plane ticket from an afflicted African nation could introduce the disease to the United States, with virtually no chance of being caught.
One malaria, Chikungunya, Japanese encephalitis or bubonic plague could bring India to her knees. Think about all the pandemics that have come out of nowhere: AIDs, H1N1, SARS, Dengue…
Could the weaponisation of insects be the next chapter in modern conflicts? Insects are the most destructive weapons available. They are cheap, simple, easy to sneak across borders, reproduce quickly and can spread disease and destroy crops with devastating speed. It takes one cola can of infected fleas to kill a few hundred people with bubonic plague and cause a country to panic. One envelope of infected mosquito eggs dropped into the water of another country. Is any country prepared for an entomological attack? No.
++++
When I got lost
By Marc de Souza
Getting lost is a lot like learning humility. After the initial shock, it can become not only virtuous, but a cheerful experience. I managed it once, many, many, years ago, in London. I found myself in a small square, lit by street lamps of many colours. People were sitting in little stalls, selling everything from perfume to crumpets. A woman wanted to sell me a pair of lace gloves, “For your young lady”, she said. I replied I had no young lady. But then, she smiled so sadly, I bought the gloves anyway.
Buying them, giving myself a commitment to love and be loved, was crazy and nice. But it was when I went down into the subway, to ask directions to my hotel, that I really started to enjoy being lost. The things I saw, things I would have never seen otherwise, were wonderful. As a hero who has exhibited grace under pressure, I traversed to the newsagent who sold me the Times. Then, at a hole-in-the-wall restaurant, I drank cappuccino and ate a croissant that had character, body and soul!
“The man who is weary of London, is weary of life”, said Dr Samuel Johnson. For this to be true, a man first has to find a place where he can get close to the heart of the city that gave Johnson, a reason for living. I have been listening for the heartbeat of London, since the first summer I came to those shores from Soho, around the corner from Foyle’s, I could hear it beating. The sound is like music, making me happier than I have been, in all my previous visits.
I saw an old flower woman sitting on a bench, her flower basket empty, but for one yellow rose. She had taken off her shoes and was rubbing her feet, on her face a beatific smile, to be done with the day’s hassles. From her, I bought the yellow beard rose. I saw a news vendor who had a coal-black beard that was all snowy white under his chin. From him I bought the evening edition.
Back to South Kensington, in the park outside our apartment, the grass was a colour of emeralds. And the leaves on the great shade trees were many splendoured things, challenging, really showing unexpected shades of green, depending on whether they were wind tossed or wet with rain or still – like listeners, when the birds sing their morning hymn, or indistinct in the twilight, when the falling shadows make them seem patch worked with darkness.
London can be a bitter disappointment, when you come here wanting to love the place as the great poets have described it, only to find yourself living in neighbourhoods too graceless to be lovable, crowded with storefronts and mattress factories made of red-brick.
In Soho, I was surrounded by people, as much at peace with the city, as Wordsworth was, on the early morning he saw London, still asleep, from Westminster Bridge. Earth, he felt, has nothing more fair to show than this city, which, in its active hours, was hidden from him under the smoke, grime and noise of the industrial revolution.
Coming out of the subway, finally in the right direction, I was greeted by a sky where only one star remained to be seen. God had not shut out all the lights in his house. He had left one to guide souls homeward, so none need get lost.
My treasures that night weren’t many. A pair of gloves, a rose, a newspaper, and memory of a smile, and a star’s light. But what is life made of, but such things?
