Five days after the Korean War started, a committee charged with studying unconventional weapons issued a set of emphatic recommendations, known as the Stevenson Report....
...The United States “must not arbitrarily deny itself” the use of biological weapons or use them only in retaliation, the report stated. It should prepare “to wage biological warfare offensively.” This view was championed by General Jimmy Doolittle, famed for having bombed Tokyo in 1942. “In my estimation, we have just one moral obligation,” he told his fellow officers at an interservice symposium. “And that moral obligation is for us to develop at the earliest possible moment that agent which will kill enemy personnel most quickly and most cheaply.”
Not everyone agreed with him, but the Pentagon nevertheless backed a crash program, spending nearly $350 million on biological warfare development during the Korean War. Scientists were put to work weaponizing diseases, from familiar scourges like plague to epidemiological deep cuts like coccidioidomycosis, a fungal infection of the lungs. At no point while fighting in Korea did the military acquire the ability to wage all-out germ war with dedicated units of trained biological weapons handlers and mass-produced stockpiles of tested weapons. It could make small, experimental attacks, though.
