Nicholson Baker's book Baseless: My Search for Secrets in the Ruins of the Freedom of Information Act, had a somewhat uncanny quality when I found it in a local bookstore, sometime during the first two years of the pandemic. Here was a then-new release that took an obsessive deep dive into the history of biological and chemical warfare—including the deliberate manipulation of viruses to make them more deadly and transmissible to humans. But it did not say anything about the COVID-19 pandemic—mostly because it hadn't yet reached the United States at the time the book was published.
The timing of the book is therefore downright eerie. It mostly deals with a three-month period in 2019, which Baker records in the form of a personal diary. The final version of the book appears to have gone to press in early March 2020—right on the eve of the COVID lockdowns. So, here is a book that dwells relentlessly on the subject of artificial pandemics and germ research gone wrong. And it appears just days before the start of a global pandemic that would spark an ongoing debate—still raging—over whether it could have been triggered by an accidental spill-over from a lab engaged in gain-of-function research.
Indeed, Baker himself would go on to add personally to this "lab leak" debate. He wrote one of the first article-length treatments of the subject, arguing that yes, the virus may have come from a lab—and indeed, in many ways, this presents the most plausible and parsimonious explanation for—among other things—why an intermediate animal host for the virus was never found; why the virus should first be reported in a major city that has no natural bat reservoir, but does have a large research facility dedicated to the study of bat coronaviruses; and why the virus from the beginning was so strangely well-adapted to transmission in human hosts (unlike the more deadly and therefore more containable first SARS outbreak decades earlier).
But all of that came after Baker wrote this other, unrelated book about misguided bioweapons research, just before the pandemic. Go figure. It's certainly an odd synchronicity. Unless there's actually a causal relationship.
Baker—as he comes across in Baseless—seems primed to see lab leaks behind every disease outbreak of the twentieth century. And I don't know that he's wrong. He presents circumstantial evidence that epidemics as diverse as Korean hemorrhagic fever, hog cholera, wheat rust, and Lyme disease may have had some link to biological warfare research in Japan and the United States. He could be right. But his research into the topic may have also primed him to leap on the "lab leak" hypothesis early, in Covid's case, at a time when other commentators were still dismissing it as a conspiracy theory (and indeed—it has to be said—it still hasn't been proven with any degree of certainty, and may never be).
Baker is the author of many quirky and excellent books on diverse topics—most of which have nothing to do with biological or chemical warfare. As a writer of literary fiction, he produced one of the greatest books of all time—The Mezzanine—about the thoughts of a twenty-something office worker while riding an escalator on a lunch break. His follow-up, Room Temperature—which adopts a similar device of microscopically recording the passing thoughts of a well-educated person as they reflect on the minor details of their experience—is almost as good as its predecessor. (The Mezzanine would be an impossible act to follow.) There's also his Updike book that isn't really about Updike; and so on.
I was therefore predisposed to like Baseless; and I wasn't disappointed. The book—like all of Baker's books that I've read—is compulsively engrossing, even if occasionally irritating. The meat of the book is a diaristic chronicle of Baker's excavation of the U.S. biological and chemical weapons program in the early Cold War. The existence of this program is a matter of public record—it was known at the time and was extensively debated even while it was happening (Edmund Wilson's 1963 book, The Cold War and the Income Tax—which I read just before this—devotes an outstanding section to condemning it.) The controversial question is whether the U.S. actually used some of these weapons in Korea or elsewhere.
Baker doesn't pretend to provide a definitive answer to this question—which has been posed by Seymour Hersh, Errol Morris, and countless other writers and filmmakers of a New Left/anti-Establishment persuasion. I myself have gone back and forth on my own hunches. Like many people, I thought Morris's Wormwood series on Netflix—which treats a similar topic and came out about two years before Baker's book—was convincing at the time. But I then read the various Cold War neo-orthodox articles which cite the Soviet Archives that opened after the collapse of the USSR—revealing unmistakably that USSR and Chinese officials deliberately planted false evidence of U.S. biological weapons use in Korea as a disinformation campaign—and I came away thinking the case was closed.
Baker (eventually) acknowledges the existence of the Soviet archival evidence pointing to a hoax. But he lays out a fairly plausible narrative of how both things might actually be true at once: the U.S. may have tried out a few ineffective and short-lived bioweapons drops in Korea—been quickly caught—and then engaged in more outré maneuvers (like dropping hundreds of dead voles from the sky) that were actually designed more to confuse and panic the enemy, as a form of psychological warfare, than to actually spread disease. When these later airdrops turned out not to contain any virus or plague bacilli—contrary to the claims of Soviet and Chinese propagandists—they may have doctored the evidence to strengthen their case; which therefore became a disinformation campaign, even though it had been based initially on a kernel of truth.
Such is Baker's hypothesis, at any rate. Do we buy it? Who knows—and Baker will tell you that his motive in trying to reopen this case is really just to advocate for an end to government secrecy and the redaction of old files. If the government did not deploy any biological weapons in Korea—he asks—why not declassify the files without any redactions? And if they did—don't we have a right to know about it as citizens? And who could be harmed by the disclosure of this information more than seventy years after the fact?
As in so many speculative books about government malfeasance—though—what's ultimately most interesting and convincing is not what new questions the book raises—but what it reminds us about what we already knew. The most damning parts of Baker's book are the details he fetches from existing secondary sources and government reports—many of which have been known to the public for decades—but which many of us have preferred to forget. Things like the bloody CIA-backed coup in Guatemala; the defoliation campaign in Vietnam; the fire-bombing of Korea; etc.
Ultimately, Baker doesn't really need to prove the U.S. government dropped biological weapons on Korea. Because what we know they did in the same era is quite bad enough. We know they dropped incendiary weapons on Korea—including napalm—that razed half the country to the ground and may have directly caused the deaths of millions of civilians. We know—and this is one of the most powerful reminders in the book—that the U.S. government formulated plans (thankfully, never carried out) to potentially murder as many as ten million Japanese civilians by means of airborne toxic gas, in the final years of the Second World War—as part of a program known as Operation Sphinx.
We may never know if the U.S. dropped plague-infested "feather bombs" in Korea (though Baker convinces us that the U.S. developed such weapons, that bizarre allegations involving "feathers" were lodged by Chinese officials at the time, that one British pilot witnessed a mysterious incident involving feathers and was subsequently immunized for an unknown virus, and that the researchers in Japan's notorious Unit 731—with whom U.S. occupation authorities cut a deal after the war to escape criminal liability in exchange for trading secrets—were working on this outré method of attack—seemingly too bizarre to have been pure invention on the part of Chinese propagandists, as Baker points out)—we may never know that to a certainty, I repeat. But we do know the U.S. dropped chemical weapons like Agent Orange and napalm on Vietnam.
That much we've known for more than half a century. Edmund Wilson was already writing about it in his 1963 book mentioned above: "we are spraying the country [Vietnam] with something which kills vegetation and, it is also said, cattle. [...] Yet this spray kills crops as well as foliage, and so leaves people to starve." Baker compiles evidence that this starvation may have been a deliberate strategy on the government's part—he quotes multiple references from Kennedy officials to the idea of using "food denial" as a tactic to pressure the North Vietnamese. One can't help but think of the situation in Gaza today—where the Israeli government (with U.S. support) has been deliberately withholding humanitarian aid from a starving population for months, in an effort to force Hamas to the bargaining table.
If Baker had confined himself to only these well-documented U.S. atrocities, he would already have more than proved his case. And indeed, he even admits at one point that the U.S. bioweapons story in Korea—even if it could be proven—would still not be the main event of the war. "[T]he war was not about germs, it was about fire," he writes. "Napalm firebombs were the horror weapons of the Korean War, and never before or since [...] has there been such a steady, concerted, relentless effort to destroy an entire country [....] As Bruce Cumings [my old professor] wrote years ago, by the end of the war, after years of napalm, the North Koreans were living in caves. There was very little left to burn."
That's quite ghastly enough. And it really should have been the sum of the book. If Baker's real message is simply that war is evil and the U.S. has no claim to special moral righteousness in the world—given the way it has treated civilians in wartime—then the case is closed. His evidence is overwhelming.
But he insists on putting a lot else into the book. One of his least successful devices is to intersperse his cavernous dives into the abyss of government wrongdoing with glimpses into his quotidian home life. We hear about the U.S. firebombing Korea into embers on one page; the next will tell us about the two rescue dogs that Baker cares for, or something endearing his wife just said over dinner. It's a trope that starts out sweet and quickly becomes cloying. Baker in many of his books has felt a sort of compulsion to parade the happiness of his home life before us. It reaches its apogee in the closing passage of Room Temperature—but there the narrator at least acknowledges that he risks "approaching" self-"complacence". One wishes Baker had listened in later years to that small inward voice of self-restraint.
He does not heed it here. Baker's book is peppered with anecdotes in which his wife will suddenly declare that she could never eat pigs, because they have "souls"; or will gaze down lovingly at a rescue dachshund, and say things like "this one is looking at me with his shiny eyes." The effect of these small interludes from home life—in the context of the book as a literary whole—is to position Baker's family as a symbol of Edenic innocence—a place where no one ever eats an animal; let alone kills a human being—in contrast to to dark and Satanic world outside, where men toil in secret laboratories to plot creative ways to kill one another.
To cast oneself in such a role in one's own book—as the embodiment of innocence and the right way to live—is, to say the least, a bit self-serving. The charge of being "self-righteous" has occasionally hovered over Baker's other writings on the subjects of war and peace. And let's just say this book does nothing to dispel the impression.
In one passage, Baker reflects on the legacy of one of the historical researchers he admires. Baker laments the latter has gone largely unrecognized and unsung, while war criminals take home medals and accolades. Baker is ostensibly talking about another historian in this passage. But in the context of his constant asides in the text about how peaceful and loving he and his wife are to all the innocent creatures that surround them—one gets the sense he is talking about himself: "There are two ways to live," writes Baker. "You can live in a way in which you do your best not to kill people, or you can live in a way in which you attend meetings and perform experiments that are aimed at refining ways to cut lives short."
One comes away from the book with the impression that Baker really does see the world as this simple. He does not show any interest in the problem of complicity—even as it was otherwise dominating the culture at the time Baker was writing this book. He seems to really think that if one does not eat meat or kill people, then one is innocent. He doesn't grapple with the question of whether it is so much better to inherit the spoils of killing committed by others—to reside upon land wrested from its original inhabitants by fraud and violence, say.
This is just one of several ways in which Baker's book reads as strangely out of time. One gets the sense he really has spent the last decade reading old government documents and secondary tomes from decades past—and not so much reading the news. There are one or two references to Trump in the book, whom Baker rightly characterizes as an idiot. But he doesn't display any discomfort over the ways in which the kinds of anti-Establishment speculations and anti-interventionist polemics that Baker deploys in the book have been appropriated in recent years by the far-right—especially Trump's "America First" movement.
Baseless reads like a New Left book of the old school (to state an oxymoron)—on the model of all our old heroes like Seymour Hersh and I.F. Stone—without questioning whether some of their claims now read somewhat differently in an era when anti-Establishment and conspiracist rhetoric has been coopted as the lingua franca of choice for our new far-right anti-Establishment Establishment.
Having lodged these complaints, I still say that Baker's book is outstanding. It passed with highest honors the first and only real test for a book's quality—it held (indeed, gripped) my attention.
And at the end of it, we're mostly willing to go along with all that Baker really wants to convince us of. Even if the U.S. never did deploy biological weapons in Korea, we can all agree that developing them in the first place (which we have long known the U.S. did; they just claimed at the time that they were doing so for purely "defensive" reasons) was a moral stain on the nation.
It is a perversion of medicine and science to use the knowledge that should be deployed for saving human lives to instead find new methods of killing them. As Edmund Wilson wrote in his 1963 work on the Cold War: "The artificial cultivation of yellow fever and cholera epidemics, after the centuries when humanity has suffered from them and when cures and controls have at last been found, must be the most macabre irony of medical history—especially when one considers that efforts are now being made to intensify the virulence of these diseases[...]" (ahem, "gain of function" research, anyone?)
Where Baker's account falls short is in the two-dimensional way in which it frames its story as one of good guys and villains (and—worst of all—he mostly positions himself and his family as the good guys). He acknowledges at times in the book that the Soviets and the Chinese were also lying, concocting evidence, spreading disinformation, and developing bioweapons in the same period. He does not even rule out entirely that the U.S. government's public narrative about its bioweapons program may be entirely truthful: they may have simply researched these things for potential retaliatory purposes, and never deployed them as a first-strike in wartime (not that this would morally excuse developing them in the first place (see above), if it proved to be true). But Baker still seems to see the horrors of the world as the result of the lone actions of a small group of killers, which would all go away if we could all become pacifists and vegetarians like him.
Edmund Wilson's reflections on the moral qualities of the Cold War seem to me much more apt—and ultimately, a more mature and adult way of seeing the world. "The confident reformer of the past always saw himself confronted by an enemy," Wilson writes, "the defeat of whom would represent for him a release of the forces of life, the 'dawn of a new day,' the 'beginning of a better world.'" And indeed, that sounds a lot like Baker's attitude. "But," Wilson continues, "who today is the reformer's adversary? [...] Not 'capitalism,' not 'communism.' Simply human limitations so general as sometimes to seem insurmountable, an impulse to internecine destruction which one comes more and more to feel irrepressible. These elements, plus our runaway technology, have produced our Defense Department."
Wilson condemns the U.S. bioweapons program and its use of chemical defoliants and napalm in Southeast Asia just as vehemently as Baker does. But Wilson—in grappling with this moral darkness—is willing to see that the source of the darkness may be within himself as well. It may be part of human nature (and here I'm channeling Niebuhr, I suddenly realize)—rather than something that could be easily expunged if only the "children of light"—the pacifists and good-hearted people who take care of rescue dogs—would be put in charge. And Wilson's more Niebuhrian attitude seems to me the more just and realistic one than Baker's.
But maybe this is a cop-out. Maybe I'm just trying to make human guilt universal so as to avoid the more direct confrontation with my nation's—my government's—more specific guilt. Maybe—like the protagonist of Camus's The Fall—I am trying to convince you that guilt is innate and a human universal, just so I no longer have to confront my own guilt.
But what guilt is that? Did the United States burn North Korea to the ground and napalm Vietnamese villages? Yes—but not in my lifetime. We don't do that sort of thing anymore, right? When was the last time we dropped chemical weapons on innocent people?
But we already mentioned above that the U.S. is right now supporting a war in Gaza where Israel has already deployed hunger as a weapon—just as defoliants were used as a "food denial" device in Vietnam.
At one point, Nicholson Baker quotes a dissident former employee of the U.S. bioweapons program, who spoke out against what she called the development of "terror weapons" at the U.S. taxpayer's expense—which she lists as including "napalm, white phosphorus, nerve gas," etc.
And, early on in the current Gaza war, credible reports emerged that Israel (with U.S. support for its military actions) had deployed white phosphorus against targets in Gaza.
It seems our nation hasn't quite escaped complicity in chemical weapons yet—no more than we can shake off our lingering guilt for the napalming of Vietnamese civilians or the use of Agent Orange to kill crops and livestock or the WWII-era plans Baker describes for gassing the entire civilian population of Japan with cyanide and mustard gas.
It would seem that things have not that much changed since the U.S. formally suspended development of such unlawful weapons in our own labs. As Thomas Hardy once put it—writing in his usual disillusioned and pessimistic vein:
" Peace upon earth!" was said. We sing it,
And pay a million priests to bring it.
After two thousand years of mass
We've got as far as poison-gas.
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