War in Korea and Indochina } 83
ambassador K. M. Panikkar (India was a channel for transmission of some of
the Eisenhower administration’s nuclear threats) in 1953:
The Americans can bomb us, they can destroy our industries, but they
cannot defeat us on land. We have calculated all that ... They may even
drop atomic bombs on us. What then? ... After all, China lives on the
farms.^52
The American belief in the effectiveness of atomic coercion against Beijing
probably influenced subsequent resort to the same tactic by the United States
during the Indochina crisis of 1953–1954 and again during both the 1954 and
1958 Taiwan Strait crises. The American use of nuclear coercion also helped
convince China’s leaders that China could not be without nuclear weapons of
its own. In the words of a spokesperson for a Chinese scientific association,
“only when we ourselves have the atomic weapon, and are fully prepared, is
it possible for the frenzied warmongers to listen to our just and reasonable
proposals.”^53
Germ Warfare Campaign as Negotiating Leverage
Beijing responded to US use of the POW repatriation issue to claim a pos-
ition of moral superiority in the Korean War negotiations by launching a
global campaign charging the United States with use of biological weapons
(BW) against civilian populations of China and North Korea. Hundreds of
US aircraft were reported to have dropped disease-infected insects, rodents,
or other material across wide areas of northeast China and North Korea. The
list of diseases allegedly spread was long: cholera, smallpox, bubonic plague,
meningitis, encephalitis, hemorrhagic fever, typhoid, scarlet fever, measles,
and typhus. This has long been a contentious issue, with China insisting that
its charges were true, and the United States government denying it with equal
vehemence. Some scholars have argued that the changes are essentially accu-
rate.^54 Post–Cold War evidence from the Russian presidential archives, how-
ever, indicates that the Soviet government understood the charges were false,
and that Soviet operatives cooperated with Chinese and North Koreans to
fabricate evidence substantiating these assertions as a way of of undermining
the moral position of the United States.
Initial reports of US germ warfare activities came from CPV head-
quarters. Mao and Zhou apparently initially credited those reports, but at
some point came to understand they were bogus. They nonetheless allowed
the charges to continue as part of a political strategy to undermine the
US moral position in the Korean armistice talks, and indeed made them
the center of a global anti-US campaign. On January 28, 1952, CPV head-
quarters reported that enemy aircraft had dropped material spreading