At the beginning of the Cold War, the small group of scientists prominent in the debate over weapons of mass destruction – as nuclear, radiological, chemical, and biological weapons were already known by then– included many known to be Communists and some who looked with favor on the Soviet Union, or believed that peace was desirable with the Soviets at almost any price in terms of national sovereignty and self-determination.

In the 1940s, the first major independent report on biological weapons was written by two distinguished scientists who would later be blacklisted for alleged Communist ties. Their product went to a scientific organization strongly influenced by the Communists. That report evolved into Theodor Rosebury’s Peace or Pestilence: Biological Warfare and How to Avoid It. The analysis in Peace or Pestilence was so prescient that, half a century later, the book would appear on al Qaeda’s biological weapons (BW) reading list.
This is the story of Rosebury and his book.

Rosebury Steps Up

Theodor Rosebury’s rich career encompasses highs from two vastly different fields. In the first, dental science, he is so highly regarded that a recent article called him the “grandfather of modern oral microbiology”. The second area brought fame as a writer of popular science books. His 1969 book about microflora on the human body, Life on Man, received a special commendation at the National Book Awards. In his most popular book, Microbes and Morals – the Strange Story of Venereal Disease, he attacked the theory that syphilis was introduced into Europe from the New World. (Rosebury, we now know, was correct on that point. ) His significance to the study of Biodefense rests on his 1940s analyses of the threat of biological warfare.

In the fall of 1941, as World War II ravaged Europe, the U.S. War Department was beginning its examination of the potential uses and dangers of biological weapons. In February 1942, a National Academy of Sciences group known as the WBC Committee reported on BWs, and the report led to the creation that summer of the War Research Service (the U.S. BW program) headed by George Merck. But the government’s activities on BWs were unknown to the general public, including Rosebury.
Rosebury became interested in biological weapons just as Hitler rose to power and the looming threat of his Nazism inspired an occasional newspaper article on the BW threat. By early 1942, Rosebury’s concern heightened as his saw no public indication of U.S. efforts to study BWs. After discussing the issue with fellow members of the American Association of Scientific Workers, Rosebury and biochemist Elvin Kabat, with the aid of medical student Martin H. Boldt, conducted their own study for AASW.

Daniel H. Fine, “Dr. Theodor Rosebury: Grandfather of Modern Oral Microbiology,” Journal of Dental Research, November 2006, p. 990.

Thomas W. Ennis, “Theodor Rosebury Is Dead at 72; Bacteriologist Wrote on Disease,” The New York Times, November 28, 1976, p. 44.

Robert Barr, “Excavations cast doubt on belief that syphilis came from New World,” Associated Press, August 28, 2000.

Theodor Rosebury, Peace or Pestilence: Biological Warfare and How to Avoid It, New York: Whittlesey House/McGraw-Hill Book Company, 1949, p. 6-7.

• BW scientists might seek out previously unknown pathogens, create new ones that combine traits from different microbes, or enable existing pathogens to resist drugs and vaccines. Rosebury wrote: “It is now possible to alter the hereditary constitution of bacteria so as to produce new types by what amounts to a marriage of different kinds, just as new varieties of dogs and wheat can be produced by crossbreeding. So far only varieties of the harmless colon bacillus, which we all have in our intestines, have been dealt with in this way, but who knows what tomorrow may bring?”

Peace or Pestilence was among the books listed in a 1999 memo on chemical and biological warfare from Muhammed Atef, the al Qaeda military chief, to Ayman al-Zawahiri, bin Laden’s lieutenant. Also listed were such works as Tomorrow’s Weapons (1964) and Chemical Warfare (1921).

In a 2004 blog entry, Gene Healy of George Mason University’s History News Network took comfort from the fact that al Qaeda was studying chemical and biological warfare writings from generations ago. “Of all the things to keep us up at night, perhaps AQ's homegrown dog-poisoning arsenal shouldn't be one of them,” he wrote. But Healy missed an important point: In order for terrorists to be effective they don’t need the latest biological weapons information or technology. They don’t even need to keep microbes alive while they’re delivered by ICBMs. Terrorists only need to know the basics, such as how to create a fine-but-not-too-fine powder containing anthrax, and how to distribute it so as to do the most harm. Older books are more likely to provide terrorists what they need: guidance on the technology to which they have access today.

Not every aspect of Rosebury’s analysis stands the test of time. He wrote that that “the bubonic form of plague” is a poor choice for a BW. He declared that “We may be reasonably safe for a while on the atomic side, for we are told that it will be many years before any other nation can hope to catch up with us in making atomic bombs.” (The USSR exploded its bomb the year the book was published.) And when he ventured outside his field of expertise to declare that, in a third world war, “Inflation would have to be held in check with drastic price ceilings, very high taxes, and forced savings,” he displayed a deep ignorance of economics.

In his scientific analysis, Rosebury was rarely wrong. But it appears that, to him, the scientific analysis was a means to an end – that is, a way of making a political point.

Political Analysis

In the 1947 Journal of Immunology article based on their 1942 report, Rosebury and Kabat insisted that the purpose of the report’s release was to promote the cause of peace. “Our report tells the world what to expect if war is not abolished.” The New York Times, in an editorial, explained that, “As socially minded scientists, Drs. Rosebury and Kabat are not so much concerned with teaching the Army how to use infectious diseases as weapons as with arousing the conscience of the world. . . . Because they can conceive no effective control of bacteria and viruses as weapons Drs. Rosebury and Kabat are convinced that if we are to escape mass infection we must abolish war.”

Rosebury continued that theme in a speech at a 1947 meeting of the Association of New York Scientists. “If an understanding of biological warfare demonstrates the futility of an approach through technology alone to the complex political and economic problems of war, perhaps it will point the way to peace. We may find that we cannot buy peace by controlling weapons alone – certainly not by controlling one weapon, however potent. We may find it

Why Destroy The World Over Nothing Important?

Throughout the post-World War II aftermath of atomic bombs to end the war, political activists have argued that universal destruction is fast approaching, and that only this policy or that policy can save us. . A variation of this argument is the main thrust in Peace or Pestilence. Nuclear war can destroy our cities, turn our children or their children into monsters, or worse, put the world into a winter so dark that civilization and perhaps our species could come to an end. These horrors must be prevented – even if it means establishing world government, or surrendering to our adversaries

    “The power of destruction is now so great on
     both sides that, once we let loose in the      inexorable chain reaction of war, the clock of      civilization may be turned back centuries, if not      millennia. Perhaps we will leave the world to the      rats and the cockroaches . . . We can choose to      save the world for ourselves and our children,      with science as our servant . . . Or we can      choose the easier road, the road of hate and      fear that would lead us to destroy our neighbors      because we don’t like the way they live and      because we are sure they are threatening to      destroy us.”

To Rosebury, the Cold War was “two great nations, each slightly swollen with pride, [that] seem to be striving to divide the world between them; and in both men prepare for another and even bloodier war. . . . To many the threat of a new conflict seems to have a fabricated quality, like that of a fight between the local bully and the new boy.”

He wrote, “World War II had submerged all but two contenders for global hegemony; and these two, in militarily muscle-bound pugnacity, were proceeding to divide the earth into two training camps for the greatest championship finish fight of all time. The smaller countries, finding the prospect of getting out of the way uncomfortably gloomy in the newly contracted spherical geography, hastened to plan loyalty to one camp or the other.”

He thought the Soviet Union was a kind of experiment in living. “It never seemed to me necessary to approach the subject of Russia with any great warmth either of affection or of aversion. I have found fascination in what seems to me to be a gigantic experiment in new social and political forms; and whether ultimately the experiment succeeds or fails I feel sure that we can learn important lessons from it if we wish to, just as, beyond doubt, the Russians can learn from us. But having built neither my hopes nor my fears upon the Soviet experiment it has been possible for me to watch its successes and its failures, its accomplishments and its transgressions – and there have of course been both – with neither vindictiveness nor disillusionment. I believe that the Soviet system is going to remain in the world for a while, although doubtless it will be modified as time passes. And today it seems to me that the so-called ‘menace’ of Soviet Communism is vastly overrated.”

Rosebury found “a clear indication of the fundamental dissimilarity of Hitler’s Germany and Stalin’s Russia in the low estate to which science fell in the former country, despite its earlier preeminence, and the flourishing state of science in the Soviet Union.” In fact, the Nazis considered themselves leaders in basing public policy on biology – especially on eugenics, which the scientific community had foolishly embraced – while, during this period, Soviet biological science was dominated by the anti-geneticist Trofim Lysenko.

Rosebury’s attitude toward the Soviet Union led him to write approvingly of the effort by atomic scientists in Chicago to prevent the use of the atomic bomb against Japan. They sought, Rosebury noted, to persuade government officials to “withhold it or explode it publicly and with due warning in an inhabited spot.” He quoted Albert Einstein and the British physicist P.M.S. Blackett to suggest that the real reason for dropping bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki was to stymie the Soviet Union. Einstein,