Word: hersh
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Watson's role on the secret panel is still officially classified information. But Seymour M. Hersh, author of the recently published Chemical and Biological Warfare, said yesterday Watson had admitted in an open letter to him that he had spent a great deal of time on the panel searching for a "satisfactory incapacitating agent...
...Pentagon had always found it very hard to get first-rate scientists," Hersh said, "but with Kennedy's glamor and the new policy of seeking alternative military responses to nuclear weapons, the government found it easier to get first-rate scientists like Watson...He could take a particular problem, suggest lines for more fruitful investigation, and save the military researchers months of work as well as a great deal of money...
...book, Hersh quotes one former high-level Defense Department official as saying, "There's a revolution in biological sciences, just as there was in the physical sciences in the 1920's. It [genetics] is analagous to quantum theory. A huge area of science is in ferment--and it may have military implications and advantages...
...recent book, Chemical and Biological Warfare: America's Hidden Arsenal (Bobbs-Merrill; $7.50), Seymour M. Hersh, a former A.P. Washington correspondent, reckons that the U.S. Defense Department allocates some $300 million a year for the development and production of CBW weapons -three times the figure the Pentagon usually makes public. Whatever the amount, it is known that the U.S. operates six major CBW research, testing and manufacturing centers and regularly farms out experimental projects to scores of private and university labs. For Pentagon planners are convinced that the U.S. must have a considerable CBW capability, if only...
...were a closely held secret until the end of World War II, when the Allies captured Nazi stores. Releasing a flood of the body chemical acetylcholine, which sets off muscle contractions, nerve gases cause uncontrollable convulsions in their victims. By one scientist's account, according to Hersh, "The pupils, bladder and alimentary canal constrict, the penis erects, the tear and saliva glands secrete and the heart slows." The victim is generally asphyxiated...