Shiro Ishii has died and moved on. The US, predictably, did not really shut down its biowarfare efforts after the Korean War – it just changed them, outsourced some of them, transformed them, and took different approaches here and there. I see no way that Agent Orange, the famous cancer-causing dioxin-based defoliant sprayed all over Vietnam, can be seen as anything but biological or chemical warfare. Either way, it’s “Weapons of Mass Destruction” – that thing the US resolutely rains sanctions down upon, when anyone except us tries to use them. And, we re-define ours so they’re not WMD. Thus, we have the irony of the US invading Iraq in an illegal war ostensibly to take away their WMD, then using WMD on the Iraqi population (White phosphorus and area bombardment). Yes, high explosive is a weapon of mass destruction. It’s one of the tragedies of our historical period that we even need to mention that.

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