One possible reason for tick biowarfare research might be to see if ticks (and fleas, etc) could become a natural reservoir after a bioweapon attack. Not as part of a weapon program, but assessing the risk and possible mitigation after an attack on US targets. That’s the sort of research that I’m fine with being done.
Sort of like the study of HIV and mosquitoes (among many possible vectors) done in the 80s. Again, not as a bioweapon, but to assess the risk. It doesn’t take much imagination to think of what the effect on public health and policy would have been if the results had been different.
"Allegations that the United States military used biological weapons in the Korean War (1950–53) were raised by the governments of People’s Republic of China, the Soviet Union and North Korea. The claims were first raised in 1951.
The story was covered by the worldwide press and led to a highly publicized international investigation in 1952.
US Secretary of State Dean Acheson and other US and allied government officials denounced the allegations as a hoax.
Subsequent scholars are split about the truth of the claims.
Since this is turning into the conspiracy bedtime story hangout, maybe you kids want to hear a real scary story? If so check out “operation shocker”, from the wiki:
Operation Shocker was a 23-year counterintelligence operation run by the US Federal Bureau of Investigation against the Soviet Union. The operation involved the fake defection in place of a US Army sergeant based in Washington, D.C. who, in return for hundreds of thousands of dollars over two decades, provided information to the GRU as agreed by the Joint Chiefs of Staff. This included over 4,000 documents on a new nerve gas the US believed unweaponizable, with the US intending to waste Soviet resources.
Novichok agents may have been an unintended result of the misleading information.
“Bat bombs were an experimental World War II weapon developed by the United States. The bomb consisted of a bomb-shaped casing with over a thousand compartments, each containing a hibernating Mexican free-tailed bat with a small, timed incendiary bomb attached. Dropped from a bomber at dawn, the casings would deploy a parachute in mid-flight and open to release the bats, which would then disperse and roost in eaves and attics in a 20–40-mile radius (32–64 km). The incendiaries, which were set on timers, would then ignite and start fires in inaccessible places in the largely wood and paper constructions of the Japanese cities that were the weapon’s intended target.”
“Errant bats from the experimental Bat Bomb set the Army Air Base in Carlsbad, New Mexico on fire, 1942.”
There was a persistent rumor that the US did the same thing, falsifying work on chlorine trifluoride and dioxygen difluoride as rocket oxidizers - in order to get Russian rocketeers to blow themselves up and decapitate the Eastern Bloc program.
Personally, I’ve never believed that the US intelligence people would ever be sufficiently competent to pull off such a thing.
“Biohazard” is the book I think you are thinking of. Yes, the Soviet biological weapons program continued longer than the US one (which pretty much ended in the 1960s, when it was clear it wasn’t a very practical strategy). It’s an interesting book and certainly the Soviets grew up things like anthrax at a massive scale – and even the Russians now admit that the 1979 outbreak in Sverdlovsk was a leak from a biowarfare plant. That being said, Alibek clearly was trying to make the Soviet program (and by extension himself, as he was second in command of it before defecting to the US) more important than it was by making claims that the Soviets had created a chimeric virus combining smallpox and ebola. Which doesn’t seem very biologically plausible.
