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Title: The Biology of Doom : America's Secret Germ Warfare Project by Ed Regis ISBN: 0-8050-5765-X Publisher: Owl Books Pub. Date: 01 October, 2000 Format: Paperback Volumes: 1 List Price(USD): $15.00 |
Average Customer Rating: 4.33 (15 reviews)
Rating: 3
Summary: Well researched, but ends with a unwarranted confidence
Comment: This is a good book for facts. Unfortunately, it is way out of date. Considering how fast technology is moving, what would lead someone to look back 20 years in the past and use that, as-is, for projecting forward?
Reality is going to bite us, hard.
Rating: 5
Summary: SCARY!
Comment: The book was an awesome overview of the American, Russian and British programs of biological weapons. While the Americans and the British stuck to a treaty signed in the 1970's to stop the production of biological weapons, the Russian's only increased their production. And what a production they had! Almost unrealistic in its scope.
This book is important in its insight into the biological weapons programs of "the big three" and into the possible capabilities of what these programs could do. Information on the early projects at Ft. Dietrick, Maryland were very illuminating and lit a fire for me to read some more on this subject.
Overall, an exceptional book, important to read not only because of what was done, but what could be done with the remnants of what is left. Where did all the former Soviet scientists go? To the Middle East? Read this book - open your eyes!
Rating: 3
Summary: The elephant laboured mightily and brought forth... a vole
Comment: The editorial review in the amazon.com entry for Ed Regis's "Biology of Doom" refers to a Herculean effort on the author's part to mine thousands of pages of previously-classified material on biological warfare research in Germany and Japan from the massive archives on the subject maintained in the United States and elsewhere as though merely the exertion were sure of yielding new insights on the subject... wish it were so, but it isn't.
"Biology of Doom" is another book on biological warfare, on a bookshelf already groaning with them. The "teaser" - the premise: that there is something especially sinister about the involvement of the governments of the world to develop diseases to be sued as weapons in order to accomplish national goals beyond the grasp of conventional armed force and threats-and-blandishments diplomacy, remains a true tease... because there still isn't anything worse about biological warfare than what we already know.
And what we already know, that Japan's infamous military germ warfare research Unit 731 and other Axis war criminal doctors were spared hanging for war crimes and murder by an American germ warfare agency greedy for the masses of data compiled by Japanese researchers, is undoubtedly terrible. It's also not news.
As far back as the early 1980s writers such as Sterling Seagrave ("Yellow Rain") have been alluding to this work, and for quite a long time since then an unsophisticated reader could have gotten the impression that the ONLY work done on biological and chemical warfare was being done at Fort Detrick, Porton Down and the Dugway Proving Ground - in other words, by America, Great Britain and their NATO allies - when the sorry fact was that the defensive work done at those installations was dwarfed by the sheer magnitude of the treaty-breaking biological warfare industry run by the Soviets while they slandered us lustily.
Regis does do respectable work in allowing us to visualize the monsters of Unit 731 coldly testing every killer germ and fungus imaginable to them on innocent men, women, and children... unfortunately, while Regis may have succeeded in drawing some previously undrawn dots in on the whole nasty chiaroscuro of military BW, he gives us no new or startling images that other writers had not already revealed to us.
In justice, Dr. Regis does draw more attention in his book to the Whitecoats, the brave conscientious objectors who during World War II volunteered to be exposed to biological warfare agents so that their effects might be closely monitored in the human model, and this is certainly a worthwhile addition to the popular literature on the history of biological warfare. Other parts of his book dealing with the history of Fort Detrick, such as the story of the "8-ball" enclosure, are fascinating but again have been covered by other writers in the popular literature (even in one or two popular-audience science-fiction novels written during the 1970s).
Certainly I share Regis' outrage about the callousness with which innocent blood was shed by the bioweaponeers of several countries, and at how so much indisputable evidence of so many murders comitted by the defeated countries of World War II in the name of better, deadlier weapons of war was kicked under the rug by the victors of that same war in their lust to learn all they could about that same obscene research... what Regis and too many of the other chroniclers of biological warfare research have failed to do is to capture the imagination of the world and vividly demonstrate the vast human tragedy of this research so that the public might be motivated to prevent the wrongs they describe from recurring.
And unfortunately, better research just doesn't make a better book, not by itself, without some effective means of making the reader care about what was uncovered. I wish I could reward all of Dr. Regis's hard work with better than an average rating, but he didn't give us better than an average book. The weakness of amazon.com's rating system is that I can't give half-points, because the book probably is above average, but I cannot honestly award a "4" to this book.
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