Book Alert / Six-Legged Soldiers

Six-Legged Soldiers -- Using Insects as Weapons of War by Jeffrey A. Lockwood, Oxford UP '08, $27.95, 377 pages, ISBN #0195333055. Index, source notes, suggested readings, b&w images sprinkled through text.

How fascinating to contemplate the ways the insect world can be harnessed to wreak havoc in wartime against our enemies. How horrifying to realize that the harnessers lack basic controls over the harnessed that would prevent us from becoming the ultimate victims.

This is the basic scope of a new book by Jeffrey Lockwood, author and professor of natural sciences and humanities at the University of Wyoming, a book made more interesting by the fact that its author is not only an entomologist but a philosopher as well.

Lockwood reveals such weapons of war throughout history include: insects as weapons of divine wrath in Egypt's Biblical plagues, Colorado potato beetles used by the French and Germans as weapons of crop destruction in World War II, plague-infected fleas and cholera-coated flies used by Japanese against Chinese in World War II, and yellow fever-infected mosquitoes as an American weapon against the Soviet Union during the Cold War.