Questions about germ warfare still plague

This program should be fascinating and terrifying. It's not.

With some notable exceptions, "The Living Weapon," produced, written, and directed by John Rubin, is a flat, linear look at the history of the American biological warfare program that begins during World War II and ends with the renunciation of biological weapons by Richard Nixon in 1969. It closes without addressing questions of obvious interest to all of us now.

To wit: Has the United States really done nothing in this area since then? And: In 2007, what is the global threat of germ warfare -- and from whom?

We anticipate a troubling tale and that's what we get. In the show, airing tonight on WGBH, we see film clips of sheep and monkeys in death throes during experiments. We hear bacteriologists involved in early efforts during World War II recall their world of secrecy. Moral dilemmas were overshadowed by the patriotic conviction that all means must be used to defeat Hitler who, it turned out, had not mounted a serious germ warfare program.

Afraid that Germany would use biological weapons against England, Winston Churchill asked the United States in 1942 to develop a large-scale germ warfare program. The next year, American scientists began that work at Fort Detrick in Maryland. In 1944, as Nazi V-1 rockets rained down on London, Churchill asked for half a million anthrax bomb loads. The war ended before the order was filled.

If the Germans weren't serious about germ warfare, the Japanese were. The infamous Japanese Unit 731, based in China, conducted appalling experiments on local peasants, killing thousands, using an array of ghastly germs.

The horrors there rival ed anything perpetrated by German death camp doctors, but the man who led it, Shiro Ishii, and his henchmen were never tried as war criminals in Tokyo as were their counterparts in Nuremberg. The American government made this dreadful decision to avoid questions about its own biological warfare program.

The foreign pieces of the story are more interesting than anything presented about U S efforts. The recounting of the American biological program, full of grainy footage of testing sites and meetings, is perfectly solid but strangely familiar. Most of us have a fair idea that our government sought these weapons to keep up with the Soviets during the Cold War.

Washington issued warnings to the public about the threat of biological attack, and there's a priceless clip of kids in gas masks watching TV. It would've been enlightening to plumb US paranoia, if that's what it was, at the time.

In the '60s, domestic opposition mounted as American forces used tear gas and the toxic defoliant Agent Orange in Vietnam, and in 1969, Nixon ordered a full review of the American biological warfare program. This finally led to our ratification in 1975 of the 1925 Geneva Protocol, banning the use of biological and chemical weapons in the wake of the mustard gas horrors of World War I.

Better late than never, but what has transpired since then? "The Living Weapon" ends abruptly, long before weapons of mass destruction returned as an existential threat to us.

Sam Allis can be reached at allis@globe.com