Cold War history: how to fabricate chemical weapons

[innonimatu]

Suppose you run a big world power which suffered a bad defeat and bad PR from having a lot of "collateral damage" reported by your own free press. You can't erase that bad impression quickly. But you can at least even the balance, claim that your rivals are just as bad. Or even worse. Wonderful!

Thus a now mostly forgotten episode of the Cold War: the "Yellow Rain". Better than to explain here what it was, read the official documents prepared for media use back in 1982. Of course the media then were worse than now, they had more of those irritating employees who distrusted governments and wanted to check facts.

"Over the past five years, and perhaps longer, weapons outlawed by mankind, weapons successfully banned from the battlefields of the industrialized world for five decades, have been used against unsophisticated and defenselesspeople..."
....These words of an American official, in testimony before the U.S. Congress, are not based on conjecture, guesswork or the allegations of unidentified sources. They are the culmination of years of painstaking investigation, by individuals and organizations of many countries, in an effort to identify the sources, agents and extent of chemical warfare in Southeast Asia and Afghanistan
[...]
As this document is printed, the weapons of chemical war are being used against Asians and Afghans precisely for the reasons that nations have sought to outlaw them: because they are weapons of mass terror, suffering and death.
The evidence of systematic Yellow Rain attacks and their connection to the Soviet Union can no longer be ignored or dismissed by the international community.

The evidence was overwhelming. Numerous reports from the victims of such attacks, an US investigation, an UN investigation, a history of (alleged) use of such weapons by the USSR, scary pictures and a description of the agents used....

The problem was that it turned out the "yellow rain" was a natural phenomenon of rain with polen. And the effects the result of natural diseases.

Misperceptions in preparing for biological attack: an historical survey

Allegations of ‘yellow rain’
In 1981, the USA alleged that Soviet client regimes in Laos and Vietnam had used biotoxin weapons against the Hmong minority people and Kampuchean insurgents, and that the USSR itself had used similar weapons against mujahidin rebels in Afghanistan. Although a wide variety of attacks and resulting symptoms were reported, the most characteristic attack was described in the allegations as ‘yellow rain’. These occurrences collectively came to be known as ‘yellow rain attacks’ (69).

The releases occurred in military actions sponsored or made directly by the USSR. The reports of illnesses
associated with military attacks were clearly suspicious.
As early as 1978, the USA made initial investigations into yellow rain, collecting both physical evidence and
extensive testimony from survivors. The initial laboratory findings identified no classical chemical or biological
agents, but a university laboratory reported trace amounts of trichothecene mycotoxins in some specimens. In
1982, the US Government issued allegations in which the symptoms were described as typical of trichothecene
mycotoxin poisoning and mycotoxins were reported as being identified in multiple specimens from the attack
sites.
However, the persuasiveness of the initial data suffered in 1983 and 1984, when ‘follow-up’ investigators from a US Army/State Department team re-interviewed many of the original ‘victims’ and they admitted they had fabricated their stories or passed on hearsay as personal experience to gain political asylum. The symptom complex reported by victims corresponded to mycotoxin toxicity in only five of the 217 alleged victims interviewed. The first laboratory analysis of trichothecene mycotoxins in the original specimens could not be confirmed by more specific assay in the chemical warfare laboratory of the US Army. Nor could mycotoxins be identified by French, Swedish or Canadian government BW laboratories in the original or subsequent specimens of yellow rain. The credibility of the allegations was dealt a severe blow when it was
demonstrated that samples of the ‘yellow rain’ material recovered from leaves were in fact honey bee faeces, and the yellow rain phenomenon was due to collective defecation of honey bee swarms (75).

Despite the apparent discrediting of the ‘yellow rain’ claims and the negative scientific data from its own laboratories, the USA has never retracted the allegations.

The Yellow Rain Affair
Lessons from a Discredited Allegation

The U.S. accusations appear to have been based on no credible evidence: without confirmation of a single alleged witness report, without confirmation of an association between trichothecenes and any alleged attacks, without any sample of the agent itself, without any recovered rocket or other munition, without any otherwise inexplicable claimed symptoms, and without any credible defector or prisoner testimony in all these years, counterfactual analysis leads to the conclusion that, except for riot-control agent, CBW weapons were not used in Laos or Cambodia.
The lessons to be learned from the Yellow Rain episode are straightforward: reliable procedures must be used to acquire and evaluate interview evidence, including the use of corroborative cross-checks and double-checks and careful avoidance of leading questions. Chemical identification of trace components must adhere to appropriate standards for forensic analysis, and results must be corroborated by an independent laboratory. Hypotheses must be subjected to wide consultation and objective criticism. Failure to apply these lessons, whether through incompetence or because of political exigencies and pressures, imperils the credibility of subsequent investigations of situations in which CBW weapons may actually have been used.

We learn from history that we learn nothing from history?

 

[Hygro]

Come on inno don't you want a war so the Republicans can hold power longer?