American Experience

Weapons Pioneer Ira Baldwin

Justifications for biological weaponry

When asked if he had any misgivings about the work he did, Baldwin explained “I grew up first in medical bacteriology, and you spend your time trying to kill microorganisms to prevent them from causing disease. Now, to turn around and think of it as I had to was horrifying to some extent. Yes, no question about it.” Still he claimed it took him only 24 hours to make that shift. In the context of a war in which the outcome was uncertain, he felt that everyone was obligated to contribute his part.

Ira Baldwin: After all, the immorality of war is war itself. You start out with the idea in war of killing people, and that to me is the immoral part of it. And I tried to put myself in the position of being killed, badly maimed, or something else, in war. Would I rather have a dagger stuck into me, or be hit by a high explosive, or be hit with fire and badly burned, or would I rather have any disease that I could think of. To me it was very simple. I’d rather have any disease that anybody could name than to have any of these other things happen to me.

I think you may recognize this if you take the next step which I took. I, in imagination, went into a hospital. You go into an accident ward and everybody is moaning and suffering. They’re in pain. You walk through a contagious disease ward — you can’t do that anymore, though; we don’t have many contagious disease wards — nobody is suffering. They’re weak, they’re desperately ill, but they aren’t really suffering. Diseases, by and large, don’t bring on suffering. Injuries bring on very real suffering. So if it’s a question of how much you suffer, it’s clear that biological warfare is a more humane weapon than any we commonly use.

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Ira Baldwin:This was really a question of whether you might win the war or lose it. I have talked about this with my children and grandchildren. They have no conception of the fact that the people of the United States were fearful that they might lose that war. That just doesn’t make any impression on them; they simply can’t believe it.

Interviewer: Well, because we didn’t [lose], it’s hard to reproduce the climate in which one was fearful.

Ira Baldwin: Well, that’s true, but I think to understand the biological warfare program you do need to understand the climate in which we existed. So my problem was a terrifically big one, but it never occurred to me to say, 'I don’t want to do this.’ Everybody was doing whatever he was asked to do.

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Ira Baldwin: On the physical end we also developed some more or less group shelter kinds of programs which could have been used. For example, there was a great deal of worry about shelters against nuclear bombs. And while the bomb had not been used, knowledge of the fact that it might be used was available to us, and we began to worry about how you could protect against it. Then, if you’re going to have bomb shelters against nuclear bombs, could you also make them safe against colonies of microorganisms? So, by and large, our’s was a defensive kind of program, although in the late stages of the program there was a decision reached at high levels that we should be able to retaliate in kind, if necessary. In other words, it was very clear policy that the United States would never use it first, but if somebody else used it, and if we found it advisable, we ought to be able to retaliate against it.