Is North Korea Testing Biological Weapons on Children?
Many defectors tell startlingly similar stories about the regime using human guinea pigs to test poison gas.
Is North Korea testing chemical and biological weapons on humans? The answer almost certainly is yes. Is it experimenting on children and the mentally handicapped? Probably so.
After decades of development, Pyongyang has stockpiled 2,500 to 5,000 tons of chemical weapons — mainly mustard gas, sarin, phosgene, and hydrogen cyanide — and is capable of rapid production in time of war. The arsenal, one of the world’s largest, can be fired into South Korea either by artillery shell or with missiles.
When he was director of National Intelligence, John Negroponte cited the North’s chemical weapons as among the “greatest threats” to the United States. The North is believed to operate 12 facilities producing chemicals for war use.
North Korea has also weaponized anthrax, smallpox, pneumonic plague, cholera, and botulism and may have as many as 5,000 tons of biological agents. Kim Jong Il’s militant state is thought to have at least 20 plants involved in developing and producing these weapons. The North’s program started in the 1960s, and it has a high call on the nation’s meager resources.
So far, there has been no documented use of North Korea’s chemical or biological agents on foreigners, but that does not mean there have been no victims. Some, such as national security analyst John Loftus, think the high toll — perhaps 3,000 killed or injured — resulting from the train blast in Ryongchon, a town close to the China border, in April 2004 was the result of the release of chemical or biological agents being transported to Syria. That charge has never been proven..
More certain, however, are the accusations that North Korea has tested chemical and biological agents on its own people. “An officer ordered me to select 50 healthy female prisoners. One of the guards handed me a basket full of soaked cabbage, told me not to eat it but to give it to the fifty women,” said Sun Ok Lee, a former prisoner, in the middle of this decade. “All who ate the cabbage leaves started violently vomiting blood and screaming with pain. It was hell. In less than 20 minutes they were quite dead.”
None of the allegations, including Lee’s, can be substantiated. All of them come from refugees and defectors, who have a general motive to make their stories appear of great value to South Korean and Western intelligence agencies. As a result of the incentive to fabricate, some of what we hear from those fleeing Kim’s state is almost certainly untrue.
For example, Pyongyang — and some of its harshest critics — allege that the BBC 2004 program Access to Evil, which reported that chemical weapons were used on political prisoners, relied on faked North Korean documents. The documents — orders to transfer prisoners for the purpose of experimentation — could be forgeries because they carry seals that do not look genuine.
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Gordon G. Chang is the author of Nuclear Showdown: North Korea Takes On the World and The Coming Collapse of China.
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23 Comments
1. sodacrackers:God help us all. In reading the last paragraph, I could not help seeing similarities in Obamacare, that would withhold treatment from elderly, handicapped, and those who could not be “productive (tax paying)” citizens.
Jul 28, 2009 - 4:55 am 2. steeple:Former US vice-president Al Gore has told a Melbourne breakfast that climate change is both the most dangerous threat … that civilisation has faced
Jul 28, 2009 - 5:38 am 3. JCinOBX:As to using these weapons, why wouldn’t Kim Jong Ill (spelled properly to correct the missing “L”) use them?
If DPRK is liberated, Ill and his cronies know what will happen to them. The US won’t have a chance to even catch this guy, because he’ll be slaughtered like a pig by his own people.
Jul 28, 2009 - 5:59 am 4. JSebast:Things like this happen when a war is left unfinished.
We’ve had to deal with serious threats, some of them still around, because we let the right moment to act pass away.
Need more examples? the Soviet Union and the cold war after WWII, Fidel Castro with the Bay of Pigs, Saddam Hussein with the 1st Gulf War.
Jul 28, 2009 - 6:27 am 5. bill:Some one contact Nancy Pelosi. Here is the key to the savings needed to pass her health-care monstrosity. No one sucks up needed health funds like the infirm. Of course, if we invested just a little in universal amniocentesis, we could ice the little leeches before they ever claimed a cent.
Jul 28, 2009 - 6:52 am 6. ding:Of course they are testing biological weapons on children. Bio is the way to go if you want to mass-kill on the cheap. They are part of the Axis of Evil after all. Bush got it right, God bless him. And God help us because the end product has been designed for our consumption. Nukes are the least of our worries with these clowns.
When the North falls, and it will, we’ll see the brutal results of unchecked socialism up close.
Jul 28, 2009 - 10:18 am 7. frank grimes:of course.
Jul 28, 2009 - 12:16 pm 8. Anonymous:steeple, even if one accepts Gore’s science, one could make the argument that nuclear proliferation is more dangerous. It’s not easy comparing the two threats of course, but in any event North Korea, perhaps the most immediate proliferation threat, would have to score high in anyone’s rankings on threats.
Jul 29, 2009 - 10:09 am 9. Anonymous:JCinOBX, in your short comment you have given us the main reason why Kim would use these horrible weapons: He has nothing to lose when his time comes.
Jul 29, 2009 - 10:11 am 10. Gordon Chang:steeple, even if one accepts Gore’s science, nuclear proliferation ranks up there as one of the world’s greatest threats. Kim, of course, is a master proliferator, so he scores high as a global threat no matter what one thinks of climate change.
Jul 29, 2009 - 10:14 am 11. Gordon Chang:JCinOBX, yes, Kim could use these horrible weapons if he feels he has nothing to lose. As his father said, if you’re going to go, it’s good to take everyone else with you. Kim Jr. put it this way: “If we lose, I will destroy the world.”
Jul 29, 2009 - 10:16 am 12. Gordon Chang:JSebast, exactly. We did not have the will to win the Korean War, and we have yet to pay the final price for this instance of American failure.
Jul 29, 2009 - 10:18 am 13. Gordon Chang:bill, as you point out, one of the defining features of America is its protection of the weak.
Jul 29, 2009 - 10:20 am 14. Gordon Chang:sodacrackers, we have to provide for all Americans, even the weak. That’s something Obama doesn’t talk about when he refers to “excessive costs.”
Jul 29, 2009 - 10:22 am 15. Gordon Chang:ding, it’s hard to figure out which of Kim’s weapons are the worst. That’s why, one way or another, we have to get make sure this regime does not threaten us, our allies, or the international community.
Jul 29, 2009 - 10:25 am 16. abi:We watched a documentary of North Korea, children were of particular interest. They were pitiful. Most roaming the streets are orphans, so no one cares if they “disappear”..into some experimental world of chemicals.
This man needs to be stopped, not through warfare, but taken out some how.
Jul 29, 2009 - 2:55 pm 17. Gordon Chang:abi, how about an airtight embargo on everything except food and medical aid that is strictly monitored by in-country inspectors?
Jul 30, 2009 - 4:09 am 18. ldd:Gordon, I’d like to agree however who will do this ‘air tight’ embargo? Besides it only hurts the poorest of the people not the regime and it’s cronies. But nonetheless, that leaves the UN to do this no matter that it’s a corrupt organization. They’d love the chance to personally gain personal wealth like with Iraq…mind you, maybe they’d leave the ‘lets guilt and tax the productive people to death’ program alone for another decade or so…keep ‘em busy stealing from the most marginalized of the world and covering up their useless but very expensive existence, and not focused on trying to steal the personal wealth and freedom of working class people all over the globe any way they can. Same-o, same-o.
Jul 30, 2009 - 6:48 am 19. Gordon Chang:Idd, who would enforce the embargo? The United States, Japan, and South Korea. And the three of them would say to China that it cannot remain a part of the international community if it does not join with them.
Many will say this won’t happen, and my reply is that sometimes what is necessary is not considered practical. Those times are usually followed by uncertainty, turbulence, and death in great numbers.
Thanks for asking.
Jul 30, 2009 - 6:31 pm 20. Kabud:There is no independent state of North Korea
it is a joint venture of Kremlin and Beijing
all weapon technologies and science is done by russians mostly,
the idea is to use bio weapons on USA, and make stupid TV viewers believe that it is North Korea or non-existing Al Quada
Jul 30, 2009 - 11:22 pm 21. Gordon Chang:Kabud, I certainly agree that North Korea has been a Moscow-Beijing joint venture since 1948. Now, however, the place is taking on an independent streak as the military regime in Pyongyang is starting to go its own way as Kim’s health fades. China is beginning to realize that its client state is becoming a real danger to all in the region, maybe even the Chinese themselves.
Jul 31, 2009 - 3:21 pm 22. Kabud:To 21. Gordon
well, I have to say that when kremlin in the past considered to give out nuclear weapon, first to Beijing and later to Korea-
they calculated consequences with extreme precision
affair like that means you don’t just control the `gift receiver`
NO!!! You own them. Totally own them.
How? Well from what i know : contingency plan to immediately destroy the receiver government and if needed -most of their population
I know that this is exactly the way kremlin `owns` both N Korea and China
By `destroy` i mean a set of attack measures:
including immediate elimination of rulers of the object country.
This should work well because under the communist regime all you
(and i hope USA does it one day) have to do is :
arrive in a `stealth` manner right where they are in Beijing or Pyongyang
and attack them in their underground or other bunkers with tactical nukes
If, say, they attack you first- then the plan is to destroy 80% or some other big part of their population with biological and 4th generation nuclear weapons
it is EXACTLY planned like that, details may differ but the idea is to OWN those whom you give nukes/wmd by genocidal attack with WMD.
Jul 31, 2009 - 10:02 pm 23. Gordon Chang:Kabud, thanks, but once a nation gets nuclear weapons, it in a sense becomes independent of the provider of the technology. That’s one of the reasons why North Korea has been so successful in defying the international community recently. Its deterrent is working.
Aug 1, 2009 - 4:22 am