Did Trump tacitly threaten to use biological weapons to exterminate 10 million?

Donald Trump stated:

“We could win that war so fast if I wanted to kill 10 million people … which I don’t. I’m not looking to kill a big portion of that country,”

«I have plans on Afghanistan that, if I wanted to win that war, Afghanistan would be wiped off the face of the Earth. It would be gone,» he said.

«It would be over in — literally, in 10 days. And I don’t want to do — I don’t want to go that route.» (ABC July 24.2019) (emphasis added)

“As I’ve said, and I’ll say it any number of times – and this is not using nuclear – we could win that war in a week if we wanted to fight it, but I’m not looking to kill 10 million people,” (Press TV, Aug 21.2019) (emphasis added)

Logically it can’t be done with conventional weapons

Since president Trump now has come out and openly admitted that plans for a genocide have been made, it is entirely reasonable to look at what practical means the US military machine has for implementing it. 10 million is a lot of people to kill without using nuclear weapons.

Even a decade of war in Indochina, with massive aerial bombing, only managed to kill an estimated 4 million people, so an air campaign in Afghanistan would be insufficient to achieve something on this scale. Other governments who tried similar projects, found out that it takes time and effort; using death squads, murder on such a scale would take several years; use of chemical means would require an impractical concentration of the targeted populations. Starvation is a tried and tested method, but would obviously require more than 10 days.

Basically, it could not be done quickly with conventional means, and since Trump claimed there are no nuclear weapons involved, it leaves us with few options. Disregarding futuristic weapons programs, the only known things that can achieve something similar are – biological weapons.

So Trumps words, that he can kill 10 million in 10 days without use of nuclear weapons, only leaves biological weapons as a possible way of doing it.

History of use of biological weapons

A bit of background: All great powers have done, and probably still continue, research on biological weapons. Due to the great popular revulsion against these types of projects, they have always been clouded in secrecy. The most well known research program was conducted by the Japanese Unit 731 during WW2, infamous for their human experiments. As a result of this research, Japan was able to spread germs over Chinese cities using airplanes, killing hundreds of thousands, maybe millions of Chinese civilians.

After WW2, the Americans inherited this program. In exchange for their know-how, the Japanese researchers were not prosecuted as war criminals.  This collaboration came to fruition in the Korean War, where there is a well-documented, extensive US program of experiments with biological weapons.

In 1972, the Biological Weapons Convention was introduced, committing the 183 states which are party to it (as of August 2019) to prohibit the development, production, and stockpiling of biological and toxin weapons. However, the absence of any formal verification regime to monitor compliance has limited the effectiveness of the Convention. Also, the very blurry line between research for offensive capabilities and defensive research is a big loophole, that in practice will make any kind of research ‘allowable’ for a state that would want to expand its biological program.

What possibilities does the military see?

In 2010 the US Air Force published a counterproliferation paper, «Biotechnology: Genetically Engineered Pathogens«,  where it discussed several biological weapons threats, carefully framing the problem as a defense against these. The traditional way of dispersal, perfected since the early attempts in WW2 and the Korean war, is mentioned: “using a single bomber and with the right weather conditions on an unprotected population, a 10 ton biological agent dispersed in the environment could affect an area equal to 100,000 km2″, (p6) (the size of Indiana)

But there is obviously a flaw to releasing a ‘normal’ super-virus able to kill millions of people in such a short period of time – namely how would they stop it from spreading to the rest of the world, and thus killing more than 10 million? Even if they could hermetically seal Afghanistan, there are international aid workers, mercenaries, local collaborators and others there that the US would not want harmed. The Air Force paper tells us:

In 1997, a study was conducted to identify future threats and uses of advanced biological warfare agents. The JASON group, composed of academic scientists, served as technical advisers to the U. S. government. Their study generated six broad classes of genetically engineered pathogens that could pose serious threats to society. These include but are not limited to binary biological weapons, designer genes, gene therapy as a weapon, stealth viruses, host-swapping diseases, and designer diseases.

So we get possibilities like:

Stealth Viruses: The basic concept of this potential bioweapon is to “produce a tightly regulated, cryptic viral infection that can enter and spread in human cells using vectors” (similar to the gene therapy) and then stay dormant for a period of time until triggered by an internal or external signal. The signal then could stimulate the virus to cause severe damage to the system. Stealth viruses could also be tailored to secretly infect a targeted population for an extended period using the threat of activation to blackmail the target [p15] (emphasis added)

Now, what Trump stated, that he could kill 10 million in 10 days, sounds very much like an attempt to blackmail the target.

Defensive programs used to circumvent international treaties

The Air Force paper discusses the possibility of a «disease that could wipe out the whole population or a certain ethnic group.» The paper states that unlike nuclear weapons, “a biological warfare program has no unambiguous signatures to differentiate its legitimacy for conducting biotechnology research vis-à-vis research for offensive military biological weapons.” Given that the United States is going for bust in its quest for Full Spectrum Dominance, there is a high likelihood that if such weapons can be produced, the US will have them – and if we interpret president Trump this way, they already have been deployed in the field. Since 2001, the US has shown a willingness to abrogate or ignore most international treaties, and there is no reason to believe biological research should be exempt (see the Russian warnings below).

And would someone ever stoop so low as to use humanitarian programs as a cover for warfare activities? It is worth recalling sham hepatitis B vaccine program used by the CIA to collect DNA in the neighborhood where bin Laden was hiding, creating massive mistrust in the local population against all vaccine programs.

Large parts of the Western population is willing to commit genocide

One thing I found particularly shocking when researching this article, was the substantial support Trump’s genocidal words found in the reader comments in corporate Western media. Perhaps one can’t expect anything else when Afghans consistently have been depicted in popular culture as murderous, frothing fanatics, from a “shithole country”, all deserving to die for rather tenuous links to a crime (the events Sept 11. 2001) that happened before most Afghans were born.

Being so demonized, the Afghan population would be especially easy testing ground for biological warfare. Foreign armies and intelligence services have had free hand to prepare anything they might want for 18 years now.

And why did Trump say he could exterminate 10 million people? The most likely target he might have referred to is the entire Pashtun population. This is the most intransigent ethnic group in Afghanistan and the core of the armed resistance, and consists of approximately 14 million people.

That biological research targeting specific ethnic groups is an area of research that is ongoing and not limited to only some parts of the world, was highlighted again in 2017, when the US Air Force got exposed seeking to obtain genetic and tissue samples that are «collected from Russia and must be Caucasian» and would «not consider tissue samples from Ukraine.»

 Warning from other countries targeted

The head of Russia’s Security Council, Nikolay Patrushev, warned in 2015 of “the production of military oriented biological weapons and the very large funding allocated to this,“ where he especially mentioned biolabs in former Soviet republics. “This is tens of billions of dollars. Additionally, the number of laboratories under US jurisdiction or control has increased 20 times.” (emphasis added)

Conclusion

Trump’s threats, possibly meant as a blunt bargaining tool in peace talks with the Taliban, may have revealed more than he intended. To repeat: Trumps words, that he can kill 10 million in 10 days without use of nuclear weapons, only leaves biological weapons as a possible means of achieving this. Leaving out speculation on the actual method of delivery (the historically used one, from the air, or more advanced options developed in the almost 70 years since Korea), Trump’s words strongly suggest that there exists prepared contingency plans to use  bio-weapons. Given the severity of results and the indefensibly of using them, they probably wouldn’t be activated outside a third world war scenario.

If the international community ever should be strong enough to impose a Nuremberg-like trial, this is prime evidence, like how the statements from Nazi leaders were used to sentence them after the war.

 

This article is Creative Commons 4.0 for non-commercial purposes.

 

 

 

 

(Edit: A few sub-headlines and some historical background was added later to make it clearer.)