Changing Names, Shifting Locations, Adjusting the Story — An Eighty-Year Path of U.S. Biological Warfare

The Trigger: A Declassified Document and Three Questions from People's Daily

In June 2026, the Office of the Director of National Intelligence released declassified documents admitting that the U.S. government has funded more than 120 biological laboratories in over 30 countries and regions worldwide — Ukraine alone has more than 40, storing high-risk pathogens such as anthrax, plague, Ebola, and Marburg virus. The principal contractor is Black & Veatch; individual project funding runs from roughly US$1.7 million to US$3.5 million. Tulsi Gabbard, before leaving office, said one truthful sentence: the existence, history, location, and origin of these labs have not been adequately disclosed for a long time, and prior officials not only denied it but branded anyone who revealed the truth a foreign agent or American traitor.

On June 30, People's Daily published an article pressing three questions: what activities have these laboratories actually carried out? Have they been collecting biological information and samples from other countries? Has the United States, in violation of the Biological Weapons Convention (BWC), secretly continued to develop the offensive biological-warfare capability it claims to have abandoned? Shen Yi's episode strings together the archives, congressional records, and government reports since the end of World War II in order to retell the story. (For the timing and political context of the declassification itself, see The Trust Deficit in the Declassified Files — The Public Evidence and the Structural Roots of Long-Term Evasion Behind America's Global Bio-Lab Network.)

Origin: Pingfang District, Harbin — Data Bought with War-Crimes Immunity

To trace the origin of U.S. biological warfare, the story has to begin in Pingfang District, Harbin. Unit 731 used living human beings for experiments; prisoners of war and civilians from China, the Soviet Union, and Korea died in its laboratories, counted in units of one thousand. In August 1945, as Soviet forces approached, Shirō Ishii ordered the facilities blown up, the remaining prisoners all killed, and the vast majority of peripheral evidence destroyed — the secret was meant to be taken into the grave by everyone involved.

But Ishii himself did not keep the secret. From 1945 to 1948, experts from Fort Detrick traveled to Japan and struck a deal with Ishii and Unit 731's core cadre: the United States would grant immunity from war-crimes prosecution in exchange for all the human-experiment data, pathology slides, and research reports. The deal was run by General MacArthur's headquarters and was never subjected to public discussion. A Chinese Ministry of Foreign Affairs spokesperson later stated clearly: not only did the United States grant immunity, it also paid for the data. It was only in December 1949, when the Soviet Union tried twelve Unit 731 members at Khabarovsk and sentenced them to terms ranging from two to twenty-five years, that this material became known to the outside world. To this day, the West still shelters behind the "Soviet propaganda" framing, refusing to accept evidence that would be inconvenient for Japan.

After the San Francisco Spray: 239 Open-Air Trials on U.S. Soil

After acquiring the Unit 731 data, the U.S. biological-warfare program accelerated dramatically in the Cold War context, and Fort Detrick became the central node for developing, testing, and storing pathogens such as anthrax and botulinum. At the same time, the military began to use its own population as test subjects.

In September 1950, the U.S. Navy conducted an offshore spray operation in San Francisco: warships sprayed aerosols of Serratia marcescens and Bacillus globigii over the city of 800,000 for several consecutive days. The military considered these bacteria harmless and used them to simulate a biological-warfare attack; 43 sampling stations were set up across the city, and the conclusion was that nearly every resident inhaled more than 5,000 bacteria-laden particles per minute — a dose sufficient to produce an effective infection if anthrax aerosol had been used instead. No consent was obtained, no medical-monitoring plan was prepared. After the spraying, Stanford Hospital saw 11 rare cases of Serratia marcescens infection, and 75-year-old Edward Nevin died when the bacteria invaded his heart. The incident was kept secret until it was exposed by the press in 1976; after Senate hearings in 1977, Nevin's family sued the federal government and lost — the court's reasoning was that "spraying bacteria constitutes a national-defense decision, and national-security immunity applies."

In the early decades of the Cold War, the United States conducted 239 open-air biological-warfare simulation trials on its own soil. In 1951, the Navy shipped containers contaminated with Serratia marcescens, Bacillus globigii, and Aspergillus fumigatus to the Naval Supply Center in Norfolk, Virginia, and had unsuspecting Black workers open the containers and get exposed. The military report put it bluntly: because Black people were thought more susceptible to infection than white people, the fungus was used to simulate an attack on Black people; the 1980-released report shows that the military's concern was how the supply system would keep functioning under biological-warfare conditions, not the health of the Black workers.

In 1966, researchers released Bacillus globigii, simulating anthrax, into the New York City subway system to observe how a metropolitan transit network of tens of millions would collapse under a biological attack. From 1962 to 1973, the Department of Defense's Project 112 and its sub-project SHAD released chemical and biological agents near multiple warships in the Pacific; thousands of U.S. service members were unknowingly exposed and only learned years later that their unexplained illnesses were the result of deliberate infection. In the realm of human experimentation, Operation Whitecoat, running from 1954 to 1973, recruited several thousand Seventh-day Adventists to be exposed to specific pathogens directly at Fort Detrick to test vaccines and determine infectious doses; the CIA also ran a covert project developing assassination weapons such as cobra venom, and all relevant records were destroyed in 1972.

One unresolved accusation runs through this period: during the Korean War in 1952, China and North Korea accused the United States of airdropping insects and objects carrying pathogens over northern Korea and Northeast China to conduct bacteriological warfare. The United States has always denied this outright, and the academic debate has, to this day, failed to produce a conclusion accepted by all parties. Shen Yi reminds the audience in the program that, when a state behaves this way on a topic like biological warfare, where trust is everything, how should we take its official explanations at face value? The question is worth taking seriously.

Nixon's 1969 Renunciation — and the Two Loopholes That Were Never Closed

In 1969, the Nixon administration, mired in the quagmire, was preparing to "sacrifice a pawn to save the king." Henry Kissinger ordered a review of biological and chemical weapons policy, and Harvard biologist Matthew Meselson helped write the key report. He asked the military officials at Fort Detrick: what is the value of biological weapons? The answer was: they are cheaper than nuclear weapons. Meselson was shocked — the United States is not a poor country, and researching a weapon of mass destruction that "let the poor make it too" did not serve the national interest.

On November 25, 1969, Nixon announced at Fort Detrick a unilateral renunciation of all research, production, stockpiling, and use of offensive biological weapons, on the grounds that the consequences of biological warfare were unpredictable and could trigger a global pandemic. The United States then destroyed its stockpiled agents and converted the Pine Bluff production facility to research use, but Fort Detrick itself was preserved. In 1972, the United States signed the Biological Weapons Convention with more than 100 countries; the treaty entered into force in 1975.

This was, of course, a step forward, but loopholes appeared immediately. The first was the toxin loophole: the declaration did not cover toxin weapons, so Fort Detrick's scientists immediately pivoted their research program to toxin studies until Nixon issued a separate supplement in February 1970 to close that gap. The second was more fundamental: the convention prohibits offensive research but allows defensive research, and offense and defense share the same technical pathway — to make a vaccine one must first cultivate the pathogen, and to assess a threat one must first learn to produce it. Where does the boundary lie? There is no verification mechanism. Scholars of arms control point out that the convention was born without a formal compliance-verification mechanism, and this planted the seed of everything that came after.

2001: The Anthrax Letters and the Hands-On Dismantling of the Verification Framework

Two things happened in 2001, and reading them together is particularly revealing.

The first was the anthrax-letter case. One week after 9/11, letters containing high-purity anthrax spores were mailed to several media outlets and two Democratic senators, killing five and infecting seventeen — the worst biological attack in U.S. history. The FBI investigation ultimately pointed to Bruce Ivins, a senior researcher at the U.S. Army Medical Research Institute of Infectious Diseases at Fort Detrick: the parent strain matched flask IMR-1029, which he had prepared and kept. In 2008, just before charges were to be filed, Ivins committed suicide. A subsequent report from the U.S. Government Accountability Office identified critical scientific flaws in the FBI's microbial forensics. Shen Yi asks: was it really investigating, or was it covering up? The case remains unsolved to this day.

The second was the verification protocol. In July 2001, the Bush administration unilaterally vetoed the BWC verification protocol. The protocol had been negotiated from 1995 to 2001 — six years, twenty-four rounds, and a 210-page text — with the goal of giving the convention teeth: facility declarations, on-site inspections, and a challenge-investigation mechanism. The U.S. rationale was that verification would damage national interests and expose secrets of biodefense research and commercial confidences of pharmaceutical companies. In November 2001, the Fifth Review Conference of the Convention was unable to adopt a final declaration and was forced to recess for a year.

Read together: after the country's own biodefense lab produced an insider threat and triggered national panic, the United States' response was not to accept international oversight, but to dismantle with its own hands the international framework for biological-weapons monitoring.

The Overseas Network: 120 Labs, a South Korea Anthrax Mishap, and a Shutdown Fort Detrick

After the Cold War, the U.S. Department of Defense, under the banner of Cooperative Threat Reduction, set up the Biological Threat Reduction Program, funded by the Defense Threat Reduction Agency, and built a vast bio-laboratory network across the former Soviet Union and around the world: more than 30 countries, more than 120 laboratories under direct DoD control. Ukraine alone has more than 46 Pentagon-funded labs, distributed across Kyiv, Odesa, Kherson, and elsewhere, with research subjects including anthrax, Ebola, plague, and Crimean-Congo hemorrhagic fever. The documents also mention "function-enhancing research" — the deliberate enhancement of a pathogen's transmissibility or virulence. Some of this is normal scientific discussion; some is reasonable external suspicion under conditions of opacity. But in any case, these concerns have not received an effective response.

The South Korea case lays the problem out more concretely. In 2015, the Dugway Proving Ground in Utah mistakenly shipped live anthrax spores to Osan Air Base, home to U.S. forces in Korea, exposing 22 personnel; the shipment was to support testing of new equipment for the U.S. Forces Korea "Jupiter biological-monitoring program." Documents obtained by South Korean lawmakers show that from 2017 to 2019, U.S. Forces Korea continuously transported samples of botulinum, ricin, and staphylococcal enterotoxin to Camp Humphreys in Pyeongtaek, Gunsan Air Base, and Busan Pier 8. Under Article IX of the Status of Forces Agreement, U.S. military supplies are exempt from Korean customs inspection. A Korean law professor's assessment: this has made South Korea a "bacteria-experiment-friendly environment in which the United States can ship whatever it wants." Transporting live anthrax in this way is itself suspected of violating the BWC.

As for Fort Detrick itself, in July 2019 — well before the large-scale pandemic — the U.S. CDC ordered a full shutdown of the laboratory after discovering multiple violations of biosafety procedures: biohazardous materials were handled with the door open, personnel repeatedly entered and exited the primate necropsy room without respirators, waste was handled without gloves, the toxin inventory records were inaccurate, and the wastewater disinfection system had failed. This is the very "shambles operation" that sits at the hub of America's global laboratory network.

Three Disputes and Three Concerns

Shen Yi groups the current disputes into three points: the Korean War biological-warfare question (China's position is clear; the United States should face history and respond to the concerns raised); Fort Detrick, the Ukrainian labs, and the global network (in 2022, the Convention's state parties held a consultative meeting at Russia's request; the United States has never offered any meaningful clarification, while its own documents have already confirmed the network's existence); and the boundary between defense and offense (gain-of-function experiments, aerosol-transmission research, and the collection of biological samples from foreign populations through the global network — however these activities are framed as public-health cooperation, the military uses are bidirectional).

Three concerns anchor the argument. First, the verification-mechanism vacuum — the United States removed the convention's teeth and, among the Convention's 190 state parties, is the member state doing the most damage, while claiming its own compliance record is the strongest. Second, concealment from the American public — the existence, history, location, and funding of these laboratories have not been adequately disclosed to the American people; if you cannot trust a country even with its own citizens, how can you trust its statements abroad? Third, the absence of a reasonable response — the United States' standard move is denial, minimization, and counter-accusation of disinformation, while pressing for溯源 investigations against other countries, and yet lists its own shambles of a Fort Detrick as a "national-security禁区."

Closing: The World Is Waiting for America's Answer

The judgment of the People's Daily article: the problems with America's overseas biological laboratories are long-standing, marked by a serious lack of transparency, and its activities are grossly mismatched with its obligations under the BWC. The convention system is built on trust, and the cornerstone of trust is transparency. A country that owns the world's largest military bio-laboratory network, is the only state to block the verification mechanism, has suffered repeated major safety incidents, and has even seen its own people launch a biological attack against their own citizens — and yet refuses any form of international oversight. This is not a simple technical issue. It is a question that concerns the safety of all humanity.

China's position is consistent and clear: genuinely comply with the BWC, restart negotiations on the verification protocol as soon as possible, provide a full and thorough clarification of overseas bio-laboratory activities, stop smearing and denigrating other countries, and eliminate the international community's concerns through concrete actions. Shen Yi's closing line is a single sentence: you may believe that the world is waiting for America's answer.