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(Excerpted)

A New Report On North Korea’s Biological Weapons Program

By Alex Berezow — October 10, 2017

In foreign policy, it is difficult to state anything with certainty. Intelligence agencies have sources that journalists do not. As a result, publicly available information is often incomplete. For North Korea, this problem is made exponentially worse by the reclusive nature of the regime. All conclusions should be thought of as tentative.

Given those caveats, a team of researchers at Harvard’s Belfer Center scoured the globe for whatever was publicly available on North Korea’s biological weapons program. Referencing news articles, journal papers, expert interviews, and government reports, the team assembled a comprehensive study of the knowns and unknowns. The main findings are summarized below.

North Korean Biological Weapons: The Knowns

(1) Kim Il-Sung, the first leader (known as the “Great Leader”) of North Korea, established a biological weapons program in the 1960s and produced weapons by the 1980s. Unlike its nuclear program, which is easy to detect and of which the country is immensely proud, North Korea has denied the existence of its biological weapons program.

(2) North Korean soldiers are vaccinated against smallpox.

U.S. soldiers deployed to the Korean Peninsula are required to receive smallpox and anthrax vaccinations. Both of these facts strongly imply that North Korea is in possession of biological weapons — or at least had them at some point in the past.

(3) It has been widely reported that North Korea is in possession of 13 different biological agents — including plague, smallpox, and anthrax — and probably has the capability to weaponize them. Some of their industrial facilities appear to be “dual-use,” meaning they can be converted from civilian to military purposes.