[Circle Time Depth] Lift off the American mask layer by layer! Overseas biological laboratories are the black hands of the US "military empire" reaching the world
[Global Times report] The United States is the world's number one military power, with 700-1,000 overseas military bases in 38 countries and regions around the world.
From the very beginning, the construction of U.S. overseas biological laboratories was closely related to war activities.
Before deploying troops in relevant areas, the United States will build local biological laboratories to obtain medical intelligence, so as to take preventive measures to reduce the incidence of non-combat injuries among soldiers.
In addition to "playing the front line" for military activities, the United States has also carried out health diplomacy by establishing overseas biological laboratories and using these laboratories as outposts for defense against biological warfare and biological terrorism.
Russia has accused the United States of conducting biological weapons research and development in its overseas laboratories.
Whether the United States admits it or not, the extensive existence of its overseas military biological laboratories is a continuation of American realist politics and an important pillar of its military empire.
It's called a biological laboratory, but it's actually a military institution.
According to the statistics of the Federation of American Scientists in February 2020, there are currently 13 biosafety level 4 laboratories in operation, expansion or planning in the United States, and 1,495 biosafety level 3 laboratories.
The United States controls 336 biological laboratories in 30 countries around the world, according to data submitted by the United States to the Conference of the Parties to the Biological Weapons Convention.
However, according to the 5,629 contracts signed by the Defense Threat Reduction Agency (DTRA), a subsidiary of the US Department of Defense, and other national biological laboratories, the United States has deployed biological laboratories in 49 countries and regions outside the homeland.
The Walter Reed Army Research Institute is the largest biomedical research institution managed by the U.S. Department of Defense, with five overseas laboratories and bases, including the U.S. Army Medical Research Kenya Center in Nairobi, Kenya, and the U.S. Armed Forces Medical Sciences in Bangkok, Thailand. Institute, the Army Medical Research European Center in Seenbach, Germany, the Lugar Center for Public Health Research in Tbilisi, Georgia, and the U.S. Army Medical Materials Center in South Korea.
Among them, the Armed Forces Institute of Medical Sciences in Thailand is the largest overseas medical research laboratory controlled by the U.S. Department of Defense. It has branches at different levels in Nepal, the Philippines, Cambodia, Vietnam and other countries, storing a large number of high-risk viruses. , bacteria, parasite samples, and gene sequences from influenza, Zika and other viruses are collected around the world.
The U.S. Navy has deployed three overseas medical research laboratories, including the Naval Medical Research Laboratory II in Phnom Penh, Cambodia, the U.S. Naval Medical Research Laboratory III in Cairo, Egypt, and the U.S. Naval Medical Research Laboratory VI in Lima, Peru. laboratory.
Among them, the third laboratory in Cairo, Egypt is mainly responsible for disease research and monitoring of military personnel in West Africa, the Middle East and Southwest Asia. It has a third-level biosafety laboratory, field and hospital research sites in Egypt, and a malaria experiment in Ghana. site.
The scope of work of the U.S. military's official and organic medical laboratories often radiates into adjacent areas and extends to smaller satellite laboratories in neighboring countries.
These official laboratories of the US military and their affiliated satellite laboratories are usually set up during the Cold War. They are military institutions themselves, so they have a strong military significance. They have been engaged in infectious disease detection, research and diagnosis and treatment for a long time. Both military and civilian use have been deeply embedded in global infectious diseases. Disease Surveillance Network.
Dangerous road from the start
The rapid development of high-level biosafety laboratories in the United States is related to the biotechnology strategies of successive governments, and is also related to the technological change in the 21st century.
With funding from the U.S. government and the military, the U.S. native biological laboratory has carried out a series of controversial dual-use biotechnology studies such as high-risk virus recombination and pathogen function acquisition.
Overseas, especially in the CIS countries, the United States has established a large number of biological laboratories.
One of the reasons Washington does this is to avoid domestic risks.
Under the constraints of the "Biological Weapons Act", "Biological Weapons Control Act" and other laws and regulations, the research and development and administrative costs of biological protection research carried out by high-level biosafety laboratories in the United States have always been high. Once budget or financial resources, human resources, etc. follow If not, the risk of safety incidents such as leakage of biological control preparations will greatly increase, which will arouse public scrutiny, and then promote relevant legislation, thus putting pathogen-related biotechnology research and development into new difficulties.
In contrast, the United States establishes biological laboratories overseas and directly conducts or signs non-disclosure agreements to entrust other countries to carry out biotechnology research and development, which has a higher degree of operational freedom and cost-effectiveness.
In addition, the construction and operation of biological laboratories overseas also provides a broader platform for U.S. government agencies, universities, enterprises, NGOs, etc. to participate in various activities under the pretext of "biomedical research and development" and "global health cooperation". international stage.
It should be noted that the United States has actively carried out various biotechnology research and development in overseas biological laboratories, which has been a dangerous road from the beginning.
In essence, this is nothing more than a stopgap measure by Washington to transfer risk.
The imperfect management system and uneven quality of personnel in overseas biological laboratories in the United States may lead to more extreme biological experiments in these laboratories, resulting in more biological safety incidents and even risk spillovers.
According to US media reports, since 2003, hundreds of health and safety accidents have occurred in biological laboratories at home and abroad in the United States, and laboratory-related epidemics have continued to occur in the countries and regions where the laboratories are located.
Foreign health aid becomes a means of obtaining geopolitical benefits
The establishment of biological laboratories overseas by the United States has been closely related to the war from the very beginning.
In 1898, the then US Army Medical Director George Sternberg established two of the US military's first overseas laboratories in Cuba and the Philippines, respectively, to study typhoid fever and yellow fever, which devastated the US military during the Spanish-American War.
During World War II, the U.S. military was plagued by various infectious diseases.
After World War II, U.S. Army and Navy researchers increasingly focused on overseas medical research collaborations to study the impact of disease on local people and U.S. soldiers deployed there.
The U.S. foreign health assistance is one of the important means to realize its geopolitical interests, and the overseas biological laboratory is one of the important tools for Washington to carry out health diplomacy.
A 2000 CIA report said infectious diseases have the potential to affect U.S. national security by intensifying great-power struggles to control scarce resources.
In 2002, USAID published a report entitled "Foreign Aid in the National Interest," arguing that foreign aid would become a critical foreign policy tool.
USAID will also promote the development of public health as one of the six priorities of U.S. foreign aid, and then launch the 10-year Emerging Epidemic Threats Program.
In 2014, the US government put forward the concept of "Global Health Security Agenda", trying to strengthen the coordination of global health security strategy under the leadership of Washington.
Overseas research centers funded by USAID, National Institutes of Health research programs, etc., maintain and enhance Washington's geopolitical interests and national security interests by promoting scientific research, information exchange, and capacity building between partner countries and recipient countries. and economic interests.
For example, the Second Laboratory of Naval Medical Research in the United States successfully developed and promoted the "Navy Therapy" for the treatment of cholera, which greatly reduced the mortality rate of cholera patients in the Philippines, Indonesia, South Korea and Malaysia.
By conducting infectious disease research and improving disease surveillance, the laboratory strengthens U.S. public health assistance to other countries and safeguards U.S. interests in the Pacific.
According to the United States, one of the main purposes of establishing biological laboratories overseas is to "defend" biological warfare and biological terrorism.
After the disintegration of the Soviet Union, in its republics, the United States implemented the "Threat Reduction Cooperation Program" on the grounds of defending against biological weapons and biological terrorism.
The US Congress passed a bill in 2008 to expand the program to the Middle East and Asia.
In 2013, the United States passed a new round of "Threat Reduction Cooperation Program", which added global health security goals.
Currently, the U.S. Threat Reduction Partnership has cooperation with 26 countries.
Are you developing biological weapons?
Although the United States denies conducting biological military activities in its overseas laboratories, these biological laboratories have been repeatedly bombed for illegal experiments in recent years.
Korean media have reported that the US military stationed in South Korea has operated biochemical laboratories involving serious dangerous biological agents and toxins in many places in South Korea for many years, and has built laboratories in four places including Seoul and Busan to study biochemical weapons such as Bacillus anthracis. And plans to further expand the scope of the laboratory.
Faced with doubts, the U.S. military stationed in South Korea admitted to conducting biological and chemical weapons tests in the Daegu area of South Korea.
Whether the United States is developing biological weapons is a factual question, but because of the obstacles Washington has set up, the question has become a mystery.
First, there are institutional shortcomings in the current international biological arms control system. Under the exclusive opposition of the United States for more than 20 years, the verification mechanism of the Biological Weapons Convention has not been established; Military biological activities, however, the United States will remain silent as to what research has been carried out in overseas laboratories and to what extent.
As an old Chinese saying goes: “Listen to what you say, watch what you do.” To know what the real purpose of America’s extensive overseas establishment of biological laboratories is, we also need to analyze its behavior.
The author believes that some of the research conducted by US laboratories overseas has exceeded the need for peaceful purposes to some extent.
For example, the Ukrainian crisis has exposed that the United States has carried out many extremely complex biological experiments related to high-level pathogens in Ukraine.
From a professional point of view, Ukraine's economic and technological development level determines its national strategic needs, especially the national biosecurity needs, and it is not possible or necessary to reach such a sophisticated level.
In addition, contracts signed between the U.S. and Ukrainian biological laboratories show that the United States has absolute control over these laboratories and prohibits the spread of biological weapons research and development technology.
Although the United States denies carrying out biological military activities in Ukraine, in the face of the facts, the simple and crude denial of the United States is not convincing.
Is the transfer of Slavic blood serum samples a genetic weapon?
After the outbreak of the Russian-Ukrainian military conflict, documents released by Russia showed that the U.S. biological laboratory in Ukraine transferred a large number of serum samples from various regions of Ukraine that belonged to the Slavic ethnic group abroad.
On March 13, a former official of the Ukrainian Security Service stated that the U.S. biological laboratory in Uzbekistan is developing a new genotype biological weapon.
Although the international community has no way to verify this, the United States does have two inherent advantages in conducting genetic weapons research.
The first is the technical advantage.
Since the 1980s, the United States has been the main source of major innovations in biotechnology, “leading the way” in biotechnology R&D, and has long maintained this dominance through a variety of initiatives.
In the foreseeable next 10 years, the US's global biotechnology leading position will remain unshakable.
The U.S. Department of Defense is making biotechnology modernization one of its priorities, accelerating the formulation of a ten-year roadmap for the development of defense biotechnology, upgrading existing technology systems, and meeting the military’s new war-readiness needs.
The second is the strategic planning advantage.
As the only superpower in the world, the United States has an overall advantage.
From the official establishment of the Biotechnology Office of the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) in 2014, announcing that "biotechnology, as a core discipline, represents the future of defense technology", to the National Academy of Sciences' "Biodefense in the Era of Synthetic Biology" report that " The government should pay close attention to this high-growth field (synthetic biology), as it did to chemistry and physics during the Cold War”; from the DOD Net Assessment Office 20YY Biological Warfare Strategic Study, to the Bipartisan Biodefense Committee Proposing the "Apollo" plan for biodefense, the US strategic security community has a strong sense of competition and national strategic interests, and tends to build a biological deterrence system with an offensive tendency.
As Zhao Lijian, a spokesman for the Chinese Ministry of Foreign Affairs, said, in order to dispel the international community's doubts about the US overseas biological laboratories, the US should act responsibly and fully clarify its biological military activities, and should open these laboratories for independent investigation by international experts , and ceased its exclusive opposition to the establishment of a verification mechanism for the Biological Weapons Convention.
The United States turned a deaf ear to these demands.
However, even if it is confirmed that the overseas biological laboratories of the United States commit violations and breaches of the law, it may be difficult for the legal board to hit the US government, because historically, the decision makers and executors of these overseas operations in the United States are extremely good at drilling Domestic and international legal loopholes.
They may take advantage of legal loopholes to make these overseas laboratories "under the command" of the United States, but their legal status has nothing to do with the US government.
The abnormal marriage of the military-industrial complex and capital
Biological laboratories in the United States and abroad are numerous and varied, and the military is deeply involved.
The author speculates that the United States has two main motives: first, deliberately developing biological weapons;
By analysing the history of biological laboratories in the United States and abroad, we can say that even if the United States does not conduct biological weapons research and development in these laboratories, it is on a dangerous path, always on the brink of a cliff, and is likely to It failed to achieve its intended effect and was swallowed instead.
The opaque and even aggressive approach of the United States in overseas biological laboratories in Eastern Europe, Central Asia, and East Asia has further blurred the boundaries of offensive and defensive biotechnology R&D, exacerbated the risk of pathogen laboratory leakage and pandemic outbreaks, and spawned The new risk of accelerated proliferation of biological weapons technology has increased, and the risk of fierce confrontation in local areas, war risks, and global capital market risks induced by active human factors has been increased.
What needs to be more vigilant is that with these overseas biological laboratories as platforms, the military-industrial complex "raised" by the US war economy may have a deformed marriage with Wall Street capital.
The Defense Threat Reduction Agency has outsourced much of the work to private companies like Battelle and Metabiota, which are not accountable to Congress, operate more freely, and bypass the law.
An alarming example is that Metabiota in San Francisco, USA has launched the first commercial epidemic assessment and prevention platform, which helps insurance companies formulate epidemic insurance plans that are more beneficial to themselves through data analysis.
It is worth noting that Metabiota has signed a strategic agreement with IQT, a company funded by the US Central Intelligence Agency.
On February 24, the Russian-Ukrainian military conflict broke out, and immediately the opaque activities of the United States in Ukraine and other national biological laboratories were placed on the international stage.
Countries are full of doubts and worries about the activities of the United States in overseas biological laboratories, but the United States turns a deaf ear and turns a blind eye.
At present, various evidences show that the US overseas biological laboratory is likely to be "playing with fire", and this is a road of no return.
History has proved that al-Qaeda was essentially fed by the US aid, but Washington was finally backed up by the guinea pigs.
In biological weapons research, the United States may repeat the same mistakes.
In the long run, US overseas biological laboratories are engaged in high-risk activities, and the resulting "sequelae" will not only be a disaster for the countries where these laboratories are located, but also bring disaster to the people of all countries.
(The author Wang Xiaoli is an expert in the biology group of the China Arms Control and Disarmament Association)