The novel coronavirus is not an ideal biological warfare agent, experts say, because its impact on the United States and adversaries alike cannot be controlled. But China refuses to help the world answer questions about its origin.
“Coronavirus would be a bad candidate to be a bioweapon,” said Thomas Spoehr, head of the Center for National Defense at the Heritage Foundation, who was the U.S. Army’s senior-most officer for chemical and biological weapons during his 36-year military career.
“I love conspiracy theories,” Spoehr admitted to the Washington Examiner, but he said doctors he has spoken to called the coronavirus “a wimp, you know, if you just hit it with a little bit of Purell, it’s gonna die.”
The former lieutenant general said biological weapons must have high-lethality to be effective.
“A good bioweapon would be something like anthrax, where you would get 80% of those exposed to it would die,” he said.
Spoehr said during the first Gulf War, the Army took Iraq’s biological warfare threat very seriously, developing detectors that would discover biological agents in the air and fielding vaccines to keep troops safe.
After 9/11, he said, the entire perimeter of the Pentagon was outfitted with bio detectors looking for anthrax and other harmful agents.
Another reason why he said coronavirus would not be an effective weapon is that it cannot be controlled.
“It’s always nice if your side has the antidote or the vaccine,” he said. “The coronavirus as a bioweapon doesn’t make great sense to me, nor that any country that didn’t have an effective treatment would allow it to get out of confinement.”
In a March 24 press briefing, Defense Secretary Mark Esper downplayed the idea that adversaries could be taking advantage of the coronavirus to harm U.S. national interests.
“How does this change the international security environment? Clearly, what we see are countries are turning inward right now,” he said. “They’re looking very closely at their own internal affairs, how they treat and deal with the coronavirus, its spread.”
Army Gen. Robert Abrams, commander of United States Forces Korea, told reporters during a March 13 briefing that he did not believe North Korea was using the virus as a biological weapon.
“There are no indications of any, sort of, attempts by North Korea to inject some sort of biological weapons or anything like that,” he said. “It is a closed-off nation, so we can’t say emphatically that they have cases, but we’re fairly certain they do.”
Bill Gertz, a national security expert who authored Deceiving the Sky: Inside Communist China’s Drive for Global Supremacy, told the Washington Examiner that the biological warfare theory is fiction, but China does have some important questions to answer.
“No one knows the origin of the coronavirus,” he said, but he noted that China was studying bat and insect viruses and working on their vaccines.
Gertz said following the SARS coronavirus outbreak in 2003, China invested heavily in research on viruses, including isolating 2,000 new viruses and studying bat coronaviruses.
“China, on top of that, has not made public what kind of research that it has done with [those] coronaviruses,” he said. “They’ve studied bat viruses. Okay. Do we know whether they’ve studied this bat virus? We don’t know that.”
Gertz said China’s Wuhan Institute of Virology initially offered to send samples of the new coronavirus to the U.S. for study.
“But yet they never followed through on that,” he said. “So, that’s another data point for their failure to provide data and information about the virus.”
Gertz said conspiracy theories that make a case for the coronavirus as a biological weapon fail to take into account the nature of the communist system in China.
“The communist system, its priority is first and foremost, not to protect the Chinese people but to protect the Communist Party of China,” he said. “Anything that reflects poorly on the Communist Party of China is driving whatever reaction, response, cover-up, dissembling, disinformation on the part of the Chinese government.”
Gertz said his discussions with former Army doctors involved in biological weapons research at Fort Detrick reinforce the idea that coronaviruses are not appropriate for warfare because they are difficult to control.
The use of coronavirus does, however, fit the case for “unrestricted warfare” that Gertz writes about in his book.
“China has adopted what two People’s Liberation Army colonels referred to as unrestricted warfare, which mentions using all forms of warfare, whether it’s biological warfare, economic warfare, financial warfare,” he said.
But the economic repercussions on the global economy, including China, make that case far-fetched.
“I don’t think they want to destroy the economy to the point where it would impact their modernization program,” he said.
“Whether the Chinese would favor that, of course, they wouldn’t say publicly, but they’ve tried to use other means to limit our ability,” he said. “We don’t really know what the impact has been in China.”
