Soviet Union The Soviet Union researched, developed and tested an entomological warfare program as a major part of an anti-crop and anti-animal BW program. The Soviets developed techniques for using insects to transmit animal pathogens, such as:
foot and mouth disease—which they used
ticks to transmit;
avian ticks to transmit
Chlamydophila psittaci to chickens; and claimed to have developed an automated mass insect breeding facility, capable of outputting millions of parasitic insects per day.
United States es on its own population. The United States seriously researched the potential of entomological warfare during the
Cold War. Labs at
Fort Detrick were set up to produce 100 million yellow fever-infected mosquitoes per month deliverable by bombs or missiles. In 1998, Stephen Endicott and
Edward Hagerman claimed that the accusations were true in their book,
The United States and Biological Warfare: Secrets from the Early Cold War and Korea. The book received mixed reviews, some called it "bad history" Other historians have revived the claim in recent decades as well. , the species used in U.S. EW testing during the 1950s During the 1950s the United States conducted a series of field tests using entomological weapons.
Operation Big Itch, in 1954, was designed to test munitions loaded with uninfected fleas (
Xenopsylla cheopis). Big Itch went awry when some of the fleas escaped into the plane and bit all three members of the air crew. At
Kadena Air Force Base, an Entomology Branch of the
U.S. Army Preventive Medicine Activity, U.S. Army Medical Center was used to grow "medically important" arthropods, including many strains of mosquitoes in a study of disease vector efficiency. The Smithsonian Institution and
The National Academy of Sciences and
National Research Council administered special research projects in the Pacific. The motivation for civilian research programs of this nature was questioned when it was learned that such international research was in fact funded by and provided to the U.S. Army as part of the U.S. military's biological warfare research. The United States has also applied entomological warfare research and tactics in non-combat situations. In 1990 the U.S. funded a $6.5 million program designed to research, breed and drop
caterpillars. The caterpillars were to be dropped in
Peru on
coca fields as part of the American
war on drugs. In 2002 U.S. entomological anti-drug efforts at
Fort Detrick were focused on finding an insect vector for a
virus that affects the
opium poppy. ==Bioterrorism==