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World-famous
microbiologist Sir Macfarlane Burnet, the Nobel prize winner
revered as Australia's greatest medical research scientist,
secretly urged the government to develop biological weapons for
use against Indonesia and other "overpopulated" countries of
South-East Asia.
The
revelation is contained in top-secret files declassified by the
National Archives of Australia, despite resistance from the Department
of Foreign Affairs and Trade.
Sir
Macfarlane recommended in a secret report in 1947 that biological
and chemical weapons should be developed to target food crops
and spread infectious diseases.
His key
advisory role on biological warfare was uncovered by Canberra
historian Philip Dorling in the National Archives in 1998.
The
department initially blocked release of the material on the
basis it would damage Australia's international relations. Dr Dorling
sought a review and the material was finally released to him late
last year.
The files include a
comprehensive memo Sir Macfarlane wrote for the Defence
Department in 1947 in which he said Australia should develop
biological weapons that would work in tropical Asia without spreading
to Australia's more temperate population centres.
"Specifically
to the Australian situation, the most effective
counter-offensive to threatened invasion by overpopulated Asiatic
countries would be directed towards the destruction by biological
or chemical means of tropical food crops and the dissemination of
infectious disease capable of spreading in tropical but not under
Australian conditions," Sir Macfarlane said.
The
Victorian-born immunologist, who headed the Walter and Eliza
Hall Institute of Medical Research, won the Nobel prize for medicine
in 1960. He died in 1985 but his theories on immunity and "clonal
selection" provided the basis for modern biotechnology and
genetic engineering.
On December 24,
1946, the secretary of the Department of Defence, F.G. Shedden,
wrote to Macfarlane Burnet saying Australia could not ignore the
fact that many countries were conducting intense research on
biological warfare and inviting him to a meeting of top military
officers to discuss the question.
The
minutes of a meeting in January, 1947, reveal that Sir
Macfarlane argued that Australia's temperate climate could give
it a significant military advantage.
"The
main contribution of local research so far as Australia is
concerned might be to study intensively the possibilities of
biological warfare in the tropics against troops and civil populations
at a relatively low level of hygiene and with correspondingly high
resistance to the common infectious diseases," he told the
meeting.
In September, 1947, Sir
Macfarlane was invited to join a chemical and biological warfare
subcommittee of the New Weapons and Equipment Development
Committee.
He prepared a secret report
titled Note on War from a Biological Angle suggesting that
biological warfare could be a powerful weapon to help defend a
thinly populated Australia.
Sir
Macfarlane also urged the government to encourage universities to
research those branches of biological science that had a special
bearing on biological warfare.
A clinically scientific approach is evident in a note he wrote in June, 1948.
He
said a successful attack with a microbiological agent on a large
population would have such a devastating impact that its use was
extremely unlikely while both sides were capable of retaliation.
"The
main strategic use of biological warfare may well be to
administer the coup de grace to a virtually defeated enemy and
compel surrender in the same way that the atomic bomb served in 1945.
"Its
use has the tremendous advantage of not destroying the enemy's
industrial potential which can then be taken over intact.
"Overt biological warfare might be used to enforce surrender by psychological rather than direct destructive measures."
The
minutes of a meeting at Melbourne's Victoria Barracks in 1948
noted that Sir Macfarlane "was of the opinion that if Australia
undertakes work in this field it should be on the tropical offensive
side rather than the defensive. There was very little known about
biological attack on tropical crops."
After
visiting the UK in 1950 and examining the British chemical and
biological warfare research effort, Sir Macfarlane told the
committee that the initiation of epidemics among enemy populations had
usually been discarded as a means of waging war because it was
likely to rebound on the user.
"In
a country of low sanitation the introduction of an exotic
intestinal pathogen, e.g. by water contamination, might initiate
widespread dissemination," he said.
"Introduction
of yellow fever into a country with appropriate mosquito vectors
might build up into a disabling epidemic before control measures
were established."
The subcommittee
recommended that "the possibilities of an attack on the food
supplies of S-E Asia and Indonesia using B.W. agents should be
considered by a small study group".
It
1951 it recommended that "a panel reporting to the chemical and
biological warfare subcommittee should be authorised to report on
the offensive potentiality of biological agents likely to be
effective against the local food supplies of South-East Asia and
Indonesia".
Dr Dorling said that while
Sir Macfarlane was a great Australian he was also a product of
times -when the elites want to defend past racism or violence by a man or a people then they say that these people and acts were a 'product of the times'. This is an attempt to gloss over the event-when many Australians held deep fears about more populous
Asian countries.
He said the Menzies
government was more interested in trying to acquire nuclear
weapons. "Fortunately this also proved impracticable and
Australia never acquired a weapon of mass destruction."
The
secretary of the Federation of Australian Scientific and
Technological Societies, Peter French, said he had not yet seen the
files but the whole notion of biological warfare was something that
Australian scientists would not be comfortable with today.
"Viewed through today's eyes it is clearly an abhorrent
suggestion," Dr French said.http://www.theage.com.au/articles/2002/03/09/1015365752044.html
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