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1964 NORTHROP NORTRONICS AntiCrop SUPERSONIC Chemical Dispenser COLD WAR Poison

Sale price $349.99 Regular price $500.00

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Description

  Wow! A 1964 Cold War era military strategy technical proposal. It's for poisoning the enemies crops and food supplies with specially equipped and modified Supersonic Fighters and Bombers carrying 50 gallon modular type delivery tank dispensers!

9 x 11.5 inches, about 100 pages. Illustrated with 26 diagrams, schematics, drawings, & large fold-outs. Red pen mark on the inside back cover, I saw a couple of small red ink math type corrections in the math section. A couple of written in corrections on illustrations. The covers shows some wear & marks, the inside looks great, no other writing, no tears, no missing or loose pages.


In the 1960s, the U.S. changed its main approach from biological agents aimed to kill to those that would incapacitate. In 1964, research programs studied Enterotoxin type B, which can cause food poisoning. New research initiatives also included prophylaxis, the preventative treatment of diseases. Pathogens studied included the biological agents causing a myriad of diseases such as anthrax, glanders, brucellosis, melioidosis, Venezuelan equine encephalitis, Q fever, coccidioidomycosis, and other plant and animal pathogens.

The Vietnam War brought public awareness to the U.S. biological weapons program. The use of chemicals, riot-control agents, and herbicides like Agent Orange drew international criticism, and negatively affected the U.S. public opinion on the development of biological weapons. Highly controversial human research programs and open air experiments were discovered. Jeanne Guillemin, wife of biologist Matthew Meselson, summarized the controversy:

The entire experimental legacy is dismaying, from the hundreds of dead monkeys at Fort Detrick to the spectacle of Seventh Day Adventist soldiers, the vaccinated volunteers in Project Whitecoat, strapped to chairs amid cages of animals in the Utah sunlight as Q fever aerosols are blown over them. Most chilling are the mock scenarios played out in urban areas: light bulbs filled with simulated BW agents being dropped in New York subways, men in Washington National Airport spraying pseudo-BW from briefcases, and similar tests in California and Texas and over the Florida Keys.

The Nixon administration felt an urgent need to respond to the growing negative perception of biological weapons. The realization that biological weapons may become the poor man's atom bomb also contributed to the end of the U.S. biological weapons program. Subsequently, President Nixon announced that the U.S. was unilaterally renouncing its biological warfare program, ultimately signing the Biological and Toxin Weapons Convention in 1972.




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