PARTRIDGE WAS AN AIR FORCE GENERAL; most of what he did was overt. Donald Nichols was also in the Air Force, but most of what he did was covert. Project Baseless, the overt Air Force program of biowar research, development, and training—the effort on the part of Jimmy Doolittle and William Burden and Nathan Twining and James Totten (and do not forget Robert Lovett, secretary of defense) to achieve a large-scale, Air Force–wide “practical capability” in biological weapons at the earliest possible date, to be used against Russia and China in a total war—is, in a way, a blind, a smoke screen, a foil, for the looser and smaller-scale experiments in unconventional weaponry, including feathers and insects and modified leaflet bombs, that the Communists were (I believe legitimately) complaining about—and sometimes exaggerating.

Nicholson Baker, Baseless- My Search for Sec…, loc. 556