Operation Paperclip: The Secret Intelligence Program that Brought Nazi Scientists to America

by Annie Jacobsen

America’s bioweapons program needed to continue, the Merck Report made clear. America may have won the war with the mighty atomic bomb, but biological weapons were the poor man’s nuclear weapon. Biological weapons could be made by just about any country “without vast expenditures of money or the construction of huge production facilities.” A bioweapon could be hidden “under the guise of legitimate medical or bacteriological research,” the report said. The Merck Report was written by George W. Merck, a forty-eight-year-old chemist and the owner of Merck & Co., a pharmaceutical manufacturer in New Jersey. Merck had served Presidents Roosevelt and Truman as civilian head of the U.S. biological warfare effort during the war. Merck & Co. made and sold vaccines, notably the first commercial U.S. smallpox vaccine, in 1898, and, in 1942, it manufactured penicillin G, among the first general antibiotics. During World War II, U.S. soldiers received smallpox vaccines. The man diagnosing the bioweapons threat, George Merck, was also the man whose company might sell the government the solution to combat the threat. In 1946 this was not looked upon with the same kind of scrutiny as it might have been decades later, because America’s military-industrial complex had yet to be broadly revealed.