1

archived as http://www.stealthskater.com/Documents/Germ_01.pdf

read more at http://www.stealthskater.com/Science.htm

note: because important websites are frequently "here today but gone tomorrow", the following was

archived from http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/amex/weapon/ on February 9, 2007 . This is NOT an

attempt to divert readers from the aforementioned web-site. Indeed, the reader should only

read this back-up copy if it cannot be found at the original author's site.

The Living Weapon PBS / "The American Experience"

In early 1942, shortly after the United States entered World War II, President Franklin Roosevelt

received an alarming intelligence report: Germany and Japan were developing biological weapons for

potential offensive use. In response, the U.S. and its allies rushed to develop their own germ warfare

program, enlisting some of America's most promising scientists in the effort.

This "American Experience" production examines the international race to develop biological

weapons in the 1940s and 1950s, revealing the scientific and technical challenges scientists faced, and

the moral dilemmas posed by their eventual success.

As America's germ warfare program expanded during the Cold War, scientists began to conduct

their own covert tests on human volunteers. The United States continued the development and

stockpiling of biological weapons until President Nixon terminated the program in 1969. "Biological

weapons have massive, unpredictable, and potentially uncontrollable consequences," he told the Nation.

"Mankind already carries in its hands too many of the seeds of its own destruction."

Film Description

A synopsis of the film, plus film credits.

Primary Sources

Air Force charts showing scenarios for using bioweapons.

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Further Reading

A list of books, articles, and Web sites relating to the program topic.

Acknowledgements

Program interviewees and consultants.

[Narrator]: In November 1969, President Richard Nixon made a startling declaration.

[President Nixon (archival)]: The United States of America will renounce the use of any form of deadly

biological weapons that either kill or incapacitate.

[Narrator]: Nixon's announcement was widely acclaimed. Yet few Americans knew that for more than

25 years, the United States had been operating an extensive research program to harness germs

as weapons of mass destruction. Born during a terrible World War, America's bioweapons

program was fueled by fear and insulated with secrecy.

[Matthew Meselson, Biologist]: Biological weapons are designed to kill vast numbers of civilians.

[Jeanne Guillemin, Sociologist]: You couldn't have these programs out in the open because the public

should not know.

[Narrator]: American researchers would enter uncharted territory as they ran an escalating series of

experiments -- ultimately using human subjects.

[Norm Covert, Camp Detrick Historian]: I've read the day-to-day notebooks of the laboratory scientists.

They never reached an end point. They just kept pushing that point farther and farther every day.

[Martin Furmanski, Pathologist]: There is an appeal to these weapons to certain members of the

scientific community, almost being seduced by the dark side.

[Brian Balmer, Author]: It's essentially invisible. You can't see it. You can't hear it. You can't smell it.

[Richard Preston, Author]: A "biological weapon" is alive. What it wants to do is survive and

reproduce itself -- inside a host, the human body.

[Narrator]: On December 9, 1942, the U.S. Government convened a secret meeting at the National

Academy of Sciences in Washington, D.C.

Army officers had urgent questions for an elite group of scientists. America and its allies

were fighting a horrific World War. Intelligence suggested that Germany might soon target

Britain with a terrifying new weapon -- a bomb packed with biological agents.

The meeting was called to respond to a critical British request. Could the Americans create a large-scale

biological warfare program to help their allies? And do it virtually "overnight"?

[Jeanne Guillemin, Sociologist]: If you brought all that we knew about microbiology and infectious

diseases into a military context, you could develop a weapon that would be amazingly effective.

It would be dangerous. It could change the course of the war.

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[Narrator]: Only a few months before, the president of the United States had grappled with the issue of

biological weapons.

"I have been loath to believe that any nation --" Franklin Roosevelt said, "even our present

enemies -- would be willing to loose upon mankind such terrible and inhumane weapons."

Secretary-of-War Henry Stimson thought differently. "Biological warfare is ... dirty

business," he wrote to Roosevelt. "But ... I think we must be prepared."

The President approved the launch of America's biological warfare program. For the first

time, U.S. researchers would be trying to make weapons from the deadliest germs known to

Science.

[Jeanne Guillemin, Sociologist]: Once you're looking at a science not strictly for the benefits that it can

bring but for the damage it can inflict on an enemy, you're in a whole new world.

[Narrator]: Now, at the request of a desperate ally, America was entering a realm lacking clear ethical

limits where Science and secrecy would go hand-in-hand.

As the meeting broke up, the researchers were now warned that anyone who leaked details of

the discussion would face 40 years in prison and a $10,000 fine.

By the time of the Washington meeting, German bombs had been raining down on Britain for

2 years. The English feared that the next bomb might carry a biological payload.

[Jeanne Guillemin, Sociologist]: You can look at the British in 1940. When the Blitz is going on, that's

when they decide that they're going to start a biological weapons program. They are absolutely

at the edge. They're really desperate, and they want to seek any kind of defense that they can.

[Narrator]: In July 1942, Britain began secret trials of unconventional weapons on a small Scottish

island called Gruinard.

[Brian Balmer, Author]: It was picked because of its remoteness. Partly because of reasons of secrecy,

but also partly because there were very few populated areas around the island.

[Narrator]: The British believed they had a weapon that would disperse infectious germs into the air. In

their labs, they had evaluated a handful of lethal agents. Now in the field, they would test the

most promising -- the bacterium that causes the dreaded disease anthrax.

Led by bacteriologist Paul Fildes, the team first considered how far beyond the island wind

might spread the germs. Then they positioned their subjects -- a score of sheep purchased from

local crofters. A scaffolding held a bomb packed with hardy anthrax spores.

[Jeanne Guillemin, Sociologist]: They really have to turn to an agent like anthrax because the anthrax

spore is able to withstand the pressure of an explosion.

[Brian Balmer, Author]: This was an anti-personnel bomb. But, obviously, doing experiments with

humans with anthrax was out of the question.

[Narrator]: Over the next minutes, the cloud of germs passed over the animals.

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For several days, nothing. Then the sheep began to tremble and stagger. Blood oozed from

their bodies shortly before death.

[Brian Balmer, Author]: What Fildes' experience on Gruinard Island had shown was that an anti-

personnel biological bomb could be produced. What it did convince the allies of was that they

had a really potent weapon.

[Narrator]: A potent weapon … but one exceedingly hard to contain.

[Brian Balmer, Author]: The dead sheep were put at the bottom of the cliff with some explosives. The

explosives were let off to bury the sheep. One-or-two of the sheep were blown into the water

and floated away.

[Narrator]: Soon, animals began to die on the mainland. If word of the lethal experiment got out, Fildes

feared that the public would panic.

British security services concocted a story -- Greek sailors had tossed infected carcasses

overboard. The British reimbursed farmers "on behalf of the Greek government."

Fildes had a successful field trial but scant resources. To move into production, the British

would need American help.

[Brian Balmer, Author]: One of the advantages of bringing the U.S. into the research on biological

warfare as far as Britain was concerned was that they didn't have the facilities, the resources, the

money.

[Narrator]: A British politician of the day described the United States as a "gigantic boiler. Once the

fire is lighted under it, there is no limit to the power it can generate."

Fildes had lit the "boiler".

In Spring 1943, American scientists and staff began arriving at a sleepy airstrip in rural

Maryland. Operating under the Army's Chemical Warfare Service, Camp Detrick would

become the Top-Secret enclave for enthusiastic American biowarfare researchers.

[Norm Covert, Camp Detrick Historian]: They were passionate about their science. They were the best in

the Country. If someone said to you, "Here is an unlimited budget, here's all the equipment you

need, tell me which kind of building you want to work in and we'll build it", you would jump at

that opportunity. And that's exactly what they did. But the imperative was that "we need results

very quickly!"

[Narrator]: The American bioweapons program would embody the same security precautions that the

British had adopted.

[Norm Covert, Camp Detrick Historian]: It was the highest level of secrecy. In some cases, there were

only 4-or-5 people who actually knew the extent of what was going on at Camp Detrick.

[Mike Foster, Captain/Chemical Warfare Service]: I remember one time we had a party and somebody said,

"Hey! Lot of bacteriologists here, aren't there?" That was quickly shushed up. We were taught

at Detrick: "Don't talk about Detrick."

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[Matthew Meselson, Biologist]: If an activity is conducted in secret, people who can see the mistakes in

it or the danger in it or the false assumptions in it may not know about it -- even people within

the Government. And therefore, you might embark upon a course which is disastrous.

[Narrator]: Detrick's scientific director was Ira Baldwin, the 47 year old chairman of the Bacteriology

Department at the University of Wisconsin.

In one sense, Baldwin was an unlikely choice to lead the project.

[Norm Covert, Camp Detrick Historian]: He had Quaker roots, a very strict way of living. And their

morality was that war was not the way you do things. You would think that Doctor Baldwin

would have rejected the value of using biological warfare and the ethics of using biological

warfare.

[Narrator]: Like other Detrick scientists, Baldwin struggled over his decision. But then he quickly got

down to work. It was wartime.

[Norm Covert, Camp Detrick Historian]: Not many people today can understand the mindset of 1941

when we were attacked by Japanese. The entire Nation was at war! So we had a real mission to

protect our Nation.

[Mike Foster, Captain/Chemical Warfare Service]: Do I find anything morally wrong with biological

warfare as compared with other warfare? No. I don't see where there's any difference. The

purpose is the same in every case: Kill 'em!

[Jeanne Guillemin, Sociologist]: The people who worked in the biological weapons programs were able

to convince themselves that there was a patriotic reason for doing this work. That the nation-

state would be in danger of not surviving if they did not do this work. They lived in a closed,

moral order.

[Narrator]: The British had made 2 requests. One was for anthrax. Another was for a toxin produced

by bacteria -- botulinum -- the most lethal substance ever discovered.

[Richard Preston, Author]: A person who is poisoned with botulinum toxin develops paralysis.

Doctors can watch it creep through the body. And when the paralysis reaches the center of the

chest, you have a breathing arrest and a heart attack. And you can't be resuscitated.

[Narrator]: The British provided Detrick with the botulinum recipe. Scaling it up was Ira Baldwin's

job. He built a temporary tarpaper shack. Protected by guards armed with machine-guns, it ran

24 hours-a-day, 7 days-a-week.

Researchers tested the deadly toxin on mice. But no one could say exactly what would

happen in human beings.

[Mike Foster, Captain/Chemical Warfare Service]: One milliliter will kill a million mice. Now, how much

would it take to kill a person? I can't answer that. But it's very, very toxic; very potent.

[Narrator]: A special plan provided for staff who might be accidentally killed on the job. They were to

be buried on Detrick's grounds in airtight metal caskets without any report on the cause of death.

6

For decades, nations had debated the use of unconventional weapons. In World War I, many

saw Germany's use of chlorine gas -- a chemical weapon -- as an outrageous violation of the

norms of War and a corruption of Science.

[Jeanne Guillemin, Sociologist]: Wonderful things came out of modern chemistry that improved people's

lives. But unfortunately in World War I, you find that a great science can be exploited for

military purposes.

[Narrator]: In 1925 in Geneva, over 30 nations signed a protocol banning first use of unconventional

weapons -- germs and chemicals alike.

[Richard Preston, Author]: A chemical weapon is a poison. And it kills usually very rapidly. A

biological weapon is a microorganism. A biological weapon is alive. And like all other life

forms, what it wants to do is survive and reproduce itself.

[Narrator]: The U.S. signed but didn't ratify the Geneva Protocol -- an agreement which still permitted

research and production of germ weapons.

By the late 1930s as tensions rose in Europe, the door was open to the scientific creation of

new weapons of mass destruction.

[Jeanne Guillemin, Sociologist]: This war coming in 1939, 1940 was envisioned as a war of scientists

against scientists. Whoever had the best scientists was going to win this war.

[Narrator]: In 1944, V-1 rockets launched from Germany pounded London, raising British fears of a

Nazi biological attack.

The fears would prove unfounded. But not before British Prime Minister Winston Churchill

had placed an urgent order with the U.S. for half-a-million anthrax bomblets. "Pray let me know

when they will be available," he wrote. "We should regard it as a first installment."

The British request far exceeded Detrick's capacity. To fill it, Ira Baldwin began converting

an old munitions factory in Vigo, Indiana. The new plant was designed as a gigantic industrial

assembly line that could produce anthrax bacteria by the ton!

Still, critics at the highest levels of American government voiced concerns about the germ

program. Admiral William Leahy -- President Roosevelt's chief of staff -- said that using germ

weapons, "would violate every Christian ethic I have ever heard of and all of the known laws of

War."

But in a time of national crisis, Leahy's objections were not enough to slow the momentum of

the U.S. program.

In December 1944, reports came of a potential germ attack on the United States launched by

Japan. Balloons began to fall from the western skies of North America. Amid worries that the

balloons might contain a biological agent, Detrick dispatched a scientist to one of the crash sites.

The balloons contained only explosives. Still, the incident fueled the fears that kept

America's biological program moving forward.

7

By August 1945, the American biological program had spent 60 million dollars. Thousands

of workers at Detrick and satellite facilities had sacrificed over half-a-million experimental

animals while investigating a dozen devastating illnesses. And soon the new Vigo plant would

be ready for its first anthrax run.

But then came surprising news from Japan. As citizens, the biowarfare researchers

celebrated the American victory. But as government scientists, they knew they had a problem.

Another unconventional weapon had proved itself in war.

[Jeanne Guillemin, Sociologist]: After Hiroshima and Nagasaki, biological weapons were put in a kind

of a shadow. They didn't look as powerful or promising as they had before the revelations about

what a nuclear weapon could do.

[Narrator]: Nuclear weapons were now in ascendance. After 3 frantic years, the U.S. biological warfare

program seemed headed for extinction.

Then an unexpected reprieve. Not long after the War's end, the U.S. received unconfirmed

intelligence of biological weapons research conducted by America's wartime ally -- the Soviet

Union.

The looming Cold War would drive the American program for decades to come.

The U.S. germ program was launched in World War II because of reports of German and

Japanese bioweapons research. Now with the war over, America dispatched investigators to

uncover the real extent of its defeated enemies' germ technology.

In Germany, the U.S. had expected to find a large biological program. But no one calculated

that Hitler -- himself wounded in a chemical attack in World War I -- would constrain the

development of a German program.

[Brian Balmer, Author]: As it turned out, the German program was very scattered, and Hitler himself

had given an order very early in the war that there was to be no offensive biological weapons

research.

[Narrator]: But in Japan, Americans were surprised by the ways that germ research surpassed what

wartime intelligence had suggested.

The name of one officer and physician kept coming up. One informant called him "the germ

man." Another said his entire career "starts with germs and ends with germs." He was Shiro

Ishii -- the driving force behind Japan's secret biological weapons program.

Ishii was interrogated by Detrick investigators in May 1947. And what came out exceeded

anything the British or Americans had imagined. Detrick researchers could now piece together

the story of Japan's no-holds-barred germ warfare program.

Its headquarters was a facility called "Unit 731" in a Japanese-controlled region of China.

The site housed 3,000 Japanese personnel and included labs, a Shinto temple, a cinema, and a

brothel.

Like his Allied counterparts, Ishii understood the need for the utmost secrecy. He operated

under a cover as "Chief of the Water Purification and Epidemic Corps."

8

[Jeanne Guillemin, Sociologist]: He had tremendous access to human subjects -- mostly peasant Han

Chinese. He would just pick people up out of their homes or off the street and bring them in and

keep them captive. Then he also would perform on them really atrocious experiments equal to

anything that was ever conducted in the Nazi death camps.

[Martin Furmanski, Pathologist]: The human experiments always ended in death. Even those who

recovered from the disease were killed so that their autopsies could be completed and added to

the files. They sought the scientific information so avidly, they often did the autopsy before the

patient died so that the tissues would be perfectly fresh.

If you look at the number of people who were murdered in the facility in experiments, there

were at least 3,000 -- and more likely closer to 10,000 people.

[Narrator]: Ishii and his team infected people with germs causing plague, cholera, dysentery and

typhoid. But they had a preferred lethal agent.

[Jeanne Guillemin, Sociologist]: They conducted human subjects experiments with anthrax -- something

that the United States and the United Kingdom scientists may have theorized but they had never

brought themselves to that actuality.

[Richard Preston, Author]: If you inhale anthrax spores into your lungs, you can come down with

pulmonary anthrax. It's a very bad disease that is very hard to survive.

Your lungs fill up with fluid. Your skin turns blue. The lymph nodes inside the chest can

swell up to the size of tennis balls and can rupture. It's a very painful, grizzly death.

[Narrator]: The Japanese experiments were not just confined to the laboratory. They also took place in

Chinese cities.

[Martin Furmanski, Pathologist]: One of the weapons that Ishii developed were fleas that had been

infected with the plague bacterium. These were released from airplanes and dropped over

Chinese cities.

[Narrator]: Outside Ishii's compounds, thousands of Chinese were infected with Black Death and other

diseases spread by Japan's forces. The extent of Ishii's experiments amazed the American

investigators.

[Jeanne Guillemin, Sociologist]: The more they learned about the Japanese program, the more they

wanted to know about the Japanese program. The work that the Japanese did was beyond the

experience of those American scientists.

[Narrator]: The Japanese had crossed an ethical line.

[Martin Furmanski, Pathologist]: All of the work in America had been done on animals. The Japanese

data was a proof test. It showed that such a weapon could kill people.

[Narrator]: Ishii had kept what appeared to be meticulous records including autopsy diagrams and

microscope slides of human tissue.

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In exchange for his human data, Ishii wanted immunity from war crimes prosecution for

himself and his colleagues. His case came to the top allied commander in post-war Japan --

General Douglas MacArthur.

He took the matter to the Joint Chiefs of Staff. They gave MacArthur a free hand but

stressed the importance of hiding biowarfare information from the Soviets. By early 1948, the

U.S. understood that it was fighting a Cold War with its former ally. Americans saw the Soviet

Union -- already in control of Eastern Europe -- as a ruthless nation in pursuit of unconventional

weapons.

That March, MacArthur formally approved a highly secret deal with Ishii.

In Nuremberg, Germany, Nazi doctors had been convicted and hanged. The Tokyo War

Crimes trial would play out differently.

Not a single biowarfare case was prosecuted.

[Martin Furmanski, Pathologist]: The immunity deal was a disgrace. The Japanese workers deserved to

be tried for their war crimes. If that had happened, there would have been a precedent against

such things.

[Narrator]: Detrick researchers considered the deal helpful for the American germ program. It put

unique human data in their hands. It suppressed testimony that might have encouraged Soviet

scientists. And it offered something else just as important.

[Jeanne Guillemin, Sociologist]: The United States got secrecy around its own program. Think of it: if

the Japanese scientists had been prosecuted in Tokyo, the World would have reacted with such

horror that it would have been very difficult for Americans to move forward with an offensive

biological weapons program.

[Narrator]: But thanks to the deal, the program was advancing once again. And faster than ever!

In the early years of the Cold War, many Americans -- and Detrick workers in particular --

feared the worst from the Soviets.

[Bill Patrick, Microbiologist]: We felt very strongly that the Soviet Union had a very strong program in

biological warfare and that we were putting our lives at risk to work with all these nasty

organisms.

[Narrator]: The U.S. military concluded it had to make plans despite not knowing if the Soviets really

had germ weapons.

[Matthew Meselson, Biologist]: If they do, do you need them yourself? If you had no nuclear weapons, I

think the decision would have been that "we'd better have a biological capability". And we

would be in bad shape if we found out that they did and had nothing of that sort ourselves.

[Narrator]: Because the U.S. still had few nuclear bombs, germ weapons got a boost.

[Martin Furmanski, Pathologist]: The biological weapons program was able to step up and at least claim

that it could provide a weapon of mass destruction that would augment the atomic arsenal.

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[Narrator]: With the American biological warfare program ramping up, Detrick researchers had high

hopes for the human data from Japan.

But they were deeply disappointed.

[Martin Furmanski, Pathologist]: It turned out that Shiro Ishii was not the kind of scientist they wanted.

What they wanted was a scientist who would tell them how many airborne bacteria would infect

people a half-a-mile downwind. But there was nothing like this in the Japanese documents.

[Narrator]: The U.S. had let war criminals go free in exchange for junk science!

American bioweapons researchers now came to a sobering realization. If they wanted

reliable human data, they would have to get it themselves.

On a sticky August day in 1949, technicians from Detrick visited the Pentagon on a secret

mission. Disguised as maintenance workers, they used "simulants" -- non-infectious bacteria --

to assess the vulnerability of people inside large buildings to attack. Only a few of the

Pentagon's employees were aware of the test. A technical success, the undercover Pentagon trial

on unsuspecting personnel revealed the threat -- and promise -- of germs for sabotage.

But the American biological program had ambitions beyond workers in buildings.

[Matthew Meselson, Biologist]: The characteristic of biological weapons is the ability to cover very

large areas with windborne disease organisms. Automatically that tells you that if there is any

utility to biological weapons, it lies in the attack of civilians.

[Jeanne Guillemin, Sociologist]: This is a great change in notions of conducting war, waging war in the

20th

Century. You have to start thinking of the enemy civilian as aiding and abetting the enemy -

- as part and parcel of the aggression that you're trying to overcome. So your victory may

depend greatly on the killing of civilians.

[Martin Furmanski, Pathologist]: A series of tests were done on American cities. There was still some

doubt that biological weapons could be effective against a target the size of a city.

[Narrator]: An early trial took place in San Francisco in September 1950. Outside the Golden Gate

Bridge, a Navy ship sailed a carefully charted course. It released a plume of simulant bacteria

that dispersed like anthrax germs.

If the test had been real, most of San Francisco's 800,000 residents would have been exposed

to anthrax and a large number would have been infected.

3 years later as the Cold War raged on, American planners took their secret exercises into the

American heartland. In St. Louis and Minneapolis -- 2 cities thought to resemble potential

Soviet targets -- sprayers hidden in cars dispersed invisible clouds of simulants.

U.S. citizens knew almost nothing about the American germ program. Nor did most of their

representatives in Washington. Every year, the House Appropriations Committee approved

biowarfare spending within the defense budget. However, only a few selected congressmen

were briefed on the details in closed meetings.

What the American public was told was how to respond to a biological attack.

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[Actor 1, "What You Should Know About Biological Warfare (archival)"]:

Biological warfare? What do they expect me to do about it? It's not my

headache.

[Narrator, "What You Should Know About Biological Warfare (archival)"]:

You're wrong. You had better find out the facts about biological warfare or BW!

[Actor 2, "What You Should Know About Biological Warfare (archival)"]:

There's a new poison. One ounce can kill all the people in the United States!

[Actress, "What You Should Know About Biological Warfare (archival)"]:

Germ warfare can wipe out an entire city!

[Narrator]: In a period of escalating Cold War tensions, Americans were encouraged by their

government to prepare for a germ assault by a ruthless Soviet enemy thousands-of-miles away.

Few were aware of what the U.S. had already done within its own borders. Fewer still knew

what was coming next.

In 1954, a group of American servicemen -- all volunteers -- began participating in a series of

experiments at Detrick. They stepped up to a new testing facility. The "8-ball" was a million-

liter sphere, --the largest known aerosol testing chamber in the World. Inside, a sprayer or bomb

set up a cloud of microbes.

The human subjects were Seventh Day Adventists. As "conscientious objectors", they

refused to carry arms. But 2,200 of them -- called the "Whitecoats" -- agreed to serve in

experiments including inhaling germs they knew might make them sick.

All human studies were approved by the Secretary of Defense.

[Martin Furmanski, Pathologist]: The Seventh Day Adventists presented an ideal population for testing

biological weapons. Their religious beliefs prevented them from smoking, drinking, and in

general, their religion taught them to live a healthy lifestyle. Even among healthy Army recruits,

they were perhaps the healthiest.

[Narrator]: Some Whitecoat trials evaluated new vaccines developed at Detrick. But curing disease

was not the primary goal of the studies.

[Martin Furmanski, Pathologist]: The Adventists were told that they were undergoing these experiments

in order to save lives. But in fact, they were undergoing the experiments in order to calibrate a

weapon to take lives.

[Narrator]: Bill Patrick helped prepare the germs inhaled by the Whitecoats.

[Bill Patrick, Microbiologist]: You stick your nose into a hood that's attached to a tank. You don't smell

it and you don't see it. The psychological impact of this, I think, would be very, very difficult to

take.

[Narrator]: In the Whitecoat era, Detrick scientists worked with a wider variety of germs.

12

[Richard Preston, Author]: The American biowarfare program seemed to emphasize research into non-

lethal biological weapons -- weapons that wouldn't necessarily make an enemy soldier dead but

would make that person pig-sick for a long time.

A sick soldier is more damaging to an Army than a dead soldier. If a soldier is killed, all

you need to do is just leave the soldier and continue with the campaign. But an ill soldier is

going to require several people to take care of that person.

[Narrator]: Hundreds of Whitecoats would eventually inhale germs including those causing tularemia

and sandfly fever. At least half of the exposed men became sick. But all eventually recuperated.

Researchers knew that it's one thing to test disease agents in the lab but quite another to make

them work on the battlefield. So in 1955, Detrick scientists prepared for America's first outdoor

test of infectious germs on human subjects.

They arranged for a group of Whitecoats to be flown to Utah.

[Lloyd Long, Whitecoat Volunteer]: I know that they were not intentionally going to harm us in any way,

that they had our best interests at heart.

You have to remember we're 18-, 19-year-old kids. It was all kind of a big adventure.

[Narrator]: The site chosen for the experiment was the Dugway Proving Ground located on a remote

stretch of desert.

At the end of a July day, scientists prepared to release an aerosol of germs that cause Q fever

-- a debilitating infection.

Downwind, Whitecoats waited. A half-mile line of platforms held 30 men, 300 hundred

guinea pigs, and 75 monkeys.

[Lloyd Long, Whitecoat Volunteer]: The monkey's faces were blue. It was cold. The wind was coming

right at us. I took my blanket and I put it over the monkeys.

We knew that when the siren blew, this was the signal to get up, sit on the stool, face the

wind, and just breathe naturally.

[Narrator:] It took 4 minutes for the infectious cloud to reach the test stands. After the trials, men,

monkeys, and guinea pigs sat in the silence of the desert.

45 minutes later, the Whitecoats were picked up. Their contaminated clothes were

incinerated and the men boarded a flight to return to Maryland that night.

Back at Detrick, the Whitecoats passed the time as the researchers waited to see if they'd

come down with Q fever.

[Lloyd Long, Whitecoat Volunteer]: They had all kinds of activities for us to do. We could eat. We

played games. We had ping-pong. We shot pool.

[Narrator:] After about 2 weeks, most of the exposed men began to fall ill.

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[Lloyd Long, Whitecoat Volunteer]: I woke up feeling I was coming down with the worst case of flu that I

ever had. My eyes were very, very sensitive to light. I wanted the room dark. I ached

everywhere. I was just incredibly sick -- just very, very sick!

[Narrator:] The ill men took antibiotics. Though one was hospitalized for months, all of the Whitecoats

recovered.

With the cooperation of Seventh Day Adventists, researchers had proved that windborne

germs could infect a small group of people under field conditions. Now with the help of

monkeys, they would try to determine if a biological weapon could match the impact of a

hydrogen bomb.

The tests began early in 1965 as barges took position near a Pacific atoll called Johnston.

[Richard Preston, Author]: Inside the barges were cages filled with monkeys. The monkeys were both

on the deck of the barge and inside the hold of the barge. There were also human beings wearing

space suits and probably quite nervous.

[Narrator]: A low-flying military plane sprayed a 32-mile line of germs that cause a lethal disease --

tularemia or rabbit fever. Drifting over a vast swath of ocean, the microbes remained infectious

for 60 miles.

[Richard Preston, Author]: The barges were towed back to the island. And in the next days, the

monkeys became ill. Ultimately, about half of the monkeys became sick and -- of those -- most

of them died.

[Bill Patrick, Microbiologist]: These large-scale field tests demonstrated -- beyond any shadow of a doubt

-- the feasibility of biological warfare. And that is why we know that one particular agent --

when properly stabilized and properly disseminated -- is a terrific, very effective weapon system.

[Richard Preston, Author]: In theory, a single jet could knock out a city. It could perhaps infect as

many as half the people in Los Angeles with tularemia.

[Narrator]: Though skeptics said the results were oversold, Detrick researchers were jubilant. After 20

years of hard work, they believed they had made the case that biological weapons deserved a

place in the U.S. arsenal.

In fact, they may have succeeded too well.

[Richard Preston, Author]: I think it frightened the U.S. Government. It was relatively easy to make

biological weapons, relatively easy to disperse them. It wasn't as difficult by any means as

building a hydrogen bomb. There was a thinking here that we don't really want to publicize how

powerful these weapons are. Because all we're really doing is proving to the rest of the World

that biological weapons work.

[Narrator]: Even as the trials were being conducted in the Pacific, other events were casting all

unconventional weapons in a negative light.

14

News stories broke about the American use of tear gas in Vietnam -- the first combat use of a

chemical weapon by the U.S. since World War I. America was also spraying a chemical

defoliant tested at Detrick -- Agent Orange.

Public protest erupted.

[Reporter (archival)]: Do you think germ warfare would be justified in Vietnam if it

shortened the war and saved the lives of U.S. servicemen?

[Protestor (archival)]: I feel that the best way to save lives of U.S. servicemen is to pull

them out of Vietnam immediately.

[Narrator:] Adding to the controversy, a news story in February 1969 disclosed an accident at the

Army's Dugway Proving Ground. At a nearby Utah ranch, an errant cloud of nerve gas was

claimed to have killed 6,000 sheep.

[Civilian (archival)]: The Army finally admitted that they had conducted experiments in the

area with nerve gas agents.

[Military officer (archival)]: There are too many confusing aspects. We have been working

in this area for 25 years in this particular part of this country. And we have never

done anything to damage the surrounding area. If we are the cause of this, we have

a problem.

[Narrator]: For critics, the incident strengthened the argument that unconventional weapons of all types

could not be controlled. For biowarfare researchers, it reinforced the need for secrecy

established long ago at Gruinard Island. Germ weapons programs could not survive the

sunlight of public scrutiny.

In Washington, President Richard Nixon was feeling the mounting political pressure. His

National Security Advisor Henry Kissinger ordered a full review of American chemical and

biological weapons policy in May 1969.

Among the invited contributors was Harvard biologist Matthew Meselson. Meselson had

been pushing for a re-assessment of America's unconventional weapons strategy. Working for

the U.S. Arms Control and Disarmament Agency, he had visited Fort Detrick.

[Matthew Meselson, Biologist]: I asked my hosts what value they saw in these weapons. And the main

answer I got back was that it would save money, that it was cheaper than nuclear weapons. I was

amazed at this answer. It took a little thought -- but not much -- to realize that to pioneer a cheap

weapon of mass destruction is exactly what the United States should never do.

[Narrator]: Kissinger presented Nixon with Meselson's brief, arguing that biological weapons were

redundant with nuclear weapons and easier for poor countries to make.

The U.S. had been developing biological warfare since World War II. Now, the president's

advisors undercut the weapons: they had a short shelf life, they were sensitive to weather, and

germs might get out of control.

On November 25, 1969, Nixon surprised the World.

15

[President Nixon (archival)]: Biological warfare -- which is commonly called "germ

warfare." This has massive unpredictable and potentially uncontrollable

consequences. It may produce global epidemics and profoundly affect the health of

future generations. Therefore, I have decided that the United States of America will

renounce the use of any form of deadly biological weapons that either kill or

incapacitate. Mankind already carries in its own hands too many of the seeds of its

own destruction.

[Martin Furmanski, Pathologist]: Nixon was under great pressure to do something. And disavowing

biological weapons was an easy bone to throw to his critics.

[Narrator:] Nixon had killed the American offensive biological weapons program after nearly 3 decades

of secret work.

[Richard Preston, Author]: It enabled us to take the moral high ground and to say "We've ended our

program. And other countries should do the same."

[Matthew Meselson, Biologist]: I thought that the decision he made was historic. It was good for the

United States and -- even better -- good for all of Humanity.

[Narrator:] In 1975, the U.S. finally ratified the 1925 Geneva Protocol banning first use of germ

weapons.

And a new international agreement went further -- prohibiting the development and

possession of germ weapons. The Biological Weapons Convention outlawed -- for the first time

in history -- an entire class of weapons.

[Martin Furmanski, Pathologist]: One of the ironies of the United States' biological weapons program

was that it created its own monster. Although it was designed to reduce threats to the United

States, it in fact increased the threats.

[Jeanne Guillemin, Sociologist]: There's something in the military thinking about war and "honor" which

puts biological weapons in a very negative category. It's like dirty weapons, it's like poison. It's

like something that somebody does on the sly who really lacks a sense of honor.

[Matthew Meselson, Biologist]: "We don't fight with poisons. We don't fight with illness. This is alien."

16

Weapons Pioneer

In 1943, Ira Baldwin -- then chair of the Bacteriology Department of the University of Wisconsin --

was appointed by the United States military to lead the nation in the development of biological weapons.

For the rest of World War II while he directed the biological weapons program at Camp Detrick,

Maryland, Baldwin remained a full-time employee of the university. He also joined the nation's

Chemical Corps Advisory Council and served as a consultant to the CIA.

Baldwin returned to Wisconsin and served as a professor of Bacteriology, dean of the Graduate

School, dean of the College of Agriculture, and vice president of Academic Affairs and continued to

advise the U.S. military during the Cold War. When the university began an oral history program,

Baldwin became its 4th

interview subject in a series of conversations with Donna Taylor Hartshorne in

1974; additional recordings were made in 1985 and 1987. In 1999 at the age of 103, Ira Baldwin died in

his home in Tucson, Arizona.

Listen to Baldwin's candid recollections on the process of developing biological

weaponry as a civilian researcher.

Justifications for Biological Weaponry

"The immorality of war is war itself."

Safety Measures

"We developed many new techniques to handle things much more safely."

Civilian Command

"I wasn't even on the payroll of the Department of Defense."

Ira Baldwin at

the University of

Wisconsin, 1948

17

America's Bioweapons Program

On November 18, 1941 at the National Academy of Sciences in Washington, D.C., United States

Secretary-of-War Henry Stimson convened a committee to investigate the threat of biological warfare.

Over the next year, this committee catalogued a myriad selection of possible biological and germ

warfare agents.

In June 1942, they issued their recommendation to the War Bureau of Consultants: "In biological

warfare, the best defense is offense and the threat of offense." While American forces were entrenched

in the Pacific and European theaters, scientists began developing and testing biological weapons on the

homefront -- classified programs that would continue after the end of WWII and into the Cold War.

Find some of the declassified United States biological weapons program sites on this map.

WWII Weapons Production

Secured Area Tests

Public Airborne Tests

Large Airborne Tests

Biological Weapons production and Testing

Special Ops team

Project 112

WWII Weapons Production In November 1942, the head of Britain's biological weapons program Paul Fildes traveled to

Washington, D.C., to seek assistance from the U.S. in the production of biowarfare agents for

Britain.

Special Projects Division Production Facility / Vigo, Indiana 1944-1946

18

Biological Agent: Bacillus anthracis, Bacillus globigii

In May 1944, the Army's Special Projects Division converted a munitions plant to produce

anthrax spores for bombs: half for the British military, half for the U.S. At the end of World War II,

the Army shut down the Vigo plant before it ever went beyond the testing stage.

Horn Island Chemical Warfare Service Quarantine Center / Pascagoula, Mississippi 1943-1945

Biological Agent: Clostridium botulinum

On October 29, 1943, the Army opened this testing facility on this isolated island off the

southern coast of Mississippi. Scientists detonated 4-pound bombs filled with botulinum toxin over

guinea pigs confined in boxes, but only one died from inhalation of the botulinum (others died from

licking the botulinum off of their fur). By 1945. the Army closed the facility.

Camp Detrick / Frederick, Maryland 1943-1945

Biological Agent: Clostridium botulinum

On March 9, 1943, the Army took over this site from the Maryland National Guard to house their

chemical warfare personnel who were soon joined by their biological warfare counterparts. The first

order of business at Camp Detrick was the production of botulinum for the British. Production

operations shut down at the end of World War II. But the "camp" was renamed Fort Detrick and

continued to house the headquarters of the biological weapons program.

Secured Area Tests Even though World War II had ended -- and the atomic bomb had been added into the U.S. military

arsenal -- America's biological warfare program continued.

Granite Peak Installation / Dugway Proving Ground, Utah 1945

Biological Agent: VKA (vegetable killer acid)

The Army established a massive chemical weapons testing facility in the Utah desert in 1942. In

January 1945 after spending $1.3 million, they converted an area of the site for biological weapons

testing. One weapon tested was a 91-pound bomb containing vegetable killer acid that could be used

to destroy Japanese rice crops. The facility was shut down at the close of World War II.

Suffield Experimental Station, Area E / Alberta, Canada 1944

Biological Agent: Brucella suis

Army scientists from Camp Detrick field tested 4-pound bombs filled with Brucella suis in this

remote Canadian test site, jointly established by Canada and Britain in 1941 for chemical weapons

testing and later adapted for biological tests.

Public Airborne Tests In October 1948, Ira Baldwin -- the chairman of the United States' Committee on Biological Warfare

-- issued a report detailing the threat of covert biological threats on American soil. In May 1949, the

Army established their own covert group at Camp Detrick -- the Special Operations Division -- to

test the vulnerability of American targets and the effectiveness of biological warfare.

The Pentagon / Arlington, Virginia August 1949

Biological Agent: Serratia marcescens

John Schwab -- chief of Camp Detrick's Special Operations Division -- persuaded Pentagon

officials to allow his group to conduct a covert test of the building's defense against biological

attack. Small groups of operatives set up fake "air pollution tests" in the hallways spraying Serratia

marcescens, a harmless bacteria. The ventilation system distributed the bacteria efficiently

throughout the building.

19

Atlantic Ocean near Hampton, Virginia / April 1950

Biological Agents: Serratia marcescens and Bacillus globigii

Camp Detrick's Special Operations Division coordinated the large scale spraying of microbe

spores from the decks of the USS Coral Sea and the USS K. D. Bailey. The clouds of spores --

chosen for their similarity to the anthrax spore -- blew in from the ocean into the cities of Hampton,

Norfolk and Newport News.

Pacific Ocean near San Francisco, California / September 1950

Biological Agents: Serratia marcescens & Bacillus globigii

Camp Detrick's Special Operations Division repeated their offshore tests later the same year off

the coast of San Francisco. This time, they added clouds of fluorescent particles to the mix which

would appear visible when exposed to ultraviolet light. The entire population of the city was

exposed to the simulants and traces of the sprayed particles were found 23 miles inland.

St Jo Program / St. Louis, Minneapolis, Winnipeg January - September 1953

Biological Agent: Bacillus globigii

In the early 1950s, the Army established the St Jo Munitions Expenditure Panel to test the

effectiveness of biological aerosol attacks on urban environments. Camp Detrick scientists

dispersed simulants from the top of automobiles in St. Louis, Minneapolis and Winnipeg -- all

selected based on their similarities to particular Soviet cities.

Large Airborne Tests

Seeking to incorporate meteorological understanding of "large air masses" that regularly swept over

the continent into their distribution tests, the Army embarked on large scale airborne biological tests

in 1957.

Operation Large Area Coverage / South Dakota to Minnesota; Ohio to Texas; Michigan to Kansas

via Illinois December 1957

Agent: Zinc Cadmium Sulfide

Building on the airborne tests conducted off the coasts of Virginia and California, the Army

tested the dispersal of particles over huge swaths of the Country. Using planes loaned from the Air

Force, 3 separate tests dumped large clouds of simulant over the continental United States with some

particles traveling over 1,000 miles. These tests proved that a single plane equipped with biological

weapons could devastate an entire continent.

Biological Weapons production and Testing

In the early 1950s, the Army's biological weapons program began developing and testing actual

weapons to be deployed.

"8-ball" Tests /Camp Detrick Frederick, Maryland 1949-1951

Biological Agents: Pasteurella tularensis, Brucella suis, Bacillus anthracis.

Herbert G. Tanner -- the head of Camp Detrick's Munitions division -- envisioned an enclosed

environment where biological tests could be conducted on site, rather than at remote places like

Dugway and Horn Island. The result was the "8-ball" -- a 4-story high, 131-ton other-worldly

sphere that could withstand the internal detonation of "hot" biological bombs without risk to

outsiders. Live animals were inserted into the ball along with biowarfare bombs for exposure tests.

M33/Brucella Cluster Bomb Field Tests /Dugway Proving Ground, Utah August, 1952

Biological Agent: Brucella suis

Having perfected a true biological weapon with the aid of the "8-ball", the Army set about

conducting a field test. In 1952, scientists constructed a mock city at the Dugway Proving Ground

20

with plywood houses and over 3,000 guinea pigs set up in cages. On August 9, an Air Force B-50

bomber flying from Florida dropped several cluster bombs -- each containing over 100 biological

bombs -- on a well-marked bullseye in the center of "town". The official report concluded that

atomic bombs were much more devastating, deadly, and efficient than the Brucella bombs.

Directorate of Biological Operations Pine Bluff Arsenal / Pine Bluff, Arkansas 1953-

Biological Agents: Bacillus anthracis, Francisella tularensis, Brucella suis, Coxiella burnetii,

Venezuelan equine encephalitis virus, Clostridium botulinum, Staphylococcal enterotoxin B

In 1953 the Army converted an arsenal -- originally built in 1941 to store chemical weapons -- to

manufacture and stockpile biological weapons. The Army continued to produce and store biological

agents at Pine Bluff until President Richard Nixon discontinued America's biological weapons

program in 1969. The Army's cleanup effort took over 2½ years at a cost of over $10 million.

Project CD-22 Human Test / Dugway Proving Ground, Utah July 12, 1955

Biological Agent: Coxiella burnetii (Q fever)

In the mid-1950s, the Army began testing biological weapons on live human test subjects:

Seventh Day Adventist Army volunteers. 30 volunteers participated in the first test of Project CD-

22 (also known as "Project Whitecoat") along with dozens of rhesus monkeys and guinea pigs.

Instead of a cluster bomb drop, the Army sprayed microbes upwind from the test subjects. Some of

the subjects did contract Q fever. They were effectively treated with antibiotics.

Special Ops team

In the early 1950s, the Army's biological weapons program began developing and testing actual

weapons to be deployed.

Greyhound Bus Terminal; Washington National Airport / Washington, D.C. May 1965

Biological Agent: Bacillus globigii

Special Operations agents entered these high volume transportation hubs armed with specially

outfitted briefcases to spray an anthrax simulant. Other agents -- armed with briefcases containing

vacuum pumps -- took samples from various points within the locations.

New York City Subway / New York, New York June 1966

Biological Agent: Unknown simulant

Teams from Detrick's Special Operations division descended into the New York City subway

system with a new delivery mechanism -- a light bulb filled with powdered simulant. Agents

dropped the light bulbs between moving cars, creating a cloud of simulant that was pushed through

the tunnels by each succeeding train. Other agents equipped with quiet "Mighty Mite" vacuum

samplers tested the effectiveness of the transmission at various points throughout the subway system.

Project 112

In 1961, Secretary-of-Defense Robert McNamara created Project 112 -- one of dozens of projects --

to test the effectiveness of biological and chemical weapons in warfare. Under this directive, the

Army began conducting larger scale tests in remote locations outside of the continental United

States.

Deseret Test Center --Fort Douglas, Utah 1962 - 1973

In May 1962, the Army established a new center for biological warfare studies at Fort Douglas,

Utah named the Deseret Test Center. The facility was used to organize and deploy dozens of large

scale remote tests in areas including Alaska, Panama, Hawaii, remote areas of Canada and the

Pacific Ocean. The Army closed the Deseret Test Center in 1973.

Project SHAD

21

Project SHAD ("Shipboard Hazard and Defense") was a group of tests conducted in remote

waters, most in the Pacific Ocean. In some tests, biological agents or simulants were released from

the decks of warships and their spread was monitored from other ships. In other tests, aircraft

sprayed materials over animals on ships or islands.

22

Diseases As Weapons

Glossary

Disease -- A distressed condition of a biological system in reaction to external stimuli -- such as

infection by bacteria or virus -- and characterized by a set of identifiable symptoms.

Bacteria -- One-celled organisms that can replicate themselves.

Virus -- Genetic material that needs to invade a cell in order to replicate.

Bacterium vs. Virus -- A single bacterium can be grown to the desired amounts whereas a virus

requires a host organism to be grown to large quantities. Both bacteria and

viruses are considered "agents" of a disease.

Weaponize -- Creating an aerosol or other form that would spread and infect people easily through

ingestion, inhalation, or skin contact.

Reservoirs -- Organisms that host the agent in nature -- the natural environment of the germ, which

often causes no harm to its host. The reservoir determines whether a disease could ever

be fully controlled and in the case of viruses, suggests the medium required to make more

of the agent. Natural reservoirs could also be used to spread a disease -- dropping a rat

infected with plague into a city, for example.

Categories for Bioweapons Agents (as defined by the Center for Disease Control)

Category A - Agents that spread easily and have a high mortality rate.

Category B - Agents that spread moderately and have lower death rates.

Category C - New, possibly genetically engineered diseases.

Anthrax

Bacteria Bacillus anthracis

Category A

Reservoir cows, sheep, goats and others; spores live for decades in the earth

Transmission skin contact, inhalation or ingestion

The cycle of anthrax transmission typically begins

when grazing animals eat infected soil. It can then be

passed on to humans who consume meat contaminated

with Bacillus antracis, inhale dust while rendering

hides, or come in skin contact. Cutaneous (skin)

anthrax first appears as a bump on the skin that soon

ulcerates. Inhalation anthrax is typically flu-like at

first, but rapidly progresses into difficult breathing and

shock. Mortality rates for untreated cases range from

20% for skin anthrax to nearly 100% for inhalation.

While early treatment with antibiotics can work, the

shock late-stage anthrax cases are usually fatal.

See a photograph of a victim of anthrax (i.e, not caused

by weaponry. Be advised -- it is a graphic image.

23

Anthrax is quite rare in the U.S. with only a handful of cases over one 21 period. Inhalation anthrax

in particular has typically been limited to industries that handle dead animal wool or skin. Its occurrence

is more common in developing countries. Anthrax spores can be extremely difficult to eradicate,

lingering in soil for up to 70 years. They are also heat resistant, another factor that made them attractive

to wartime scientists.

During World War II, Paul Fildes supervised the making of 5 million linseed cakes contaminated

with anthrax bacterial spores for possible use against German livestock. When the War ended, the U.S.

was beginning work on the production of a million anthrax bombs. The actual application of anthrax

bacterial spores for weapons use has been quite rare -- one tragic case being the attacks during the fall of

2001 that utilized envelopes containing anthrax bacterial spores which infected 22 people in the U.S.

and caused 5 deaths.

Botulism

Bacteria Clostridium botulinum

Category A

Transmission Injestion

Botulinum toxin -- among the most deadly

substances in the World -- was one of the first agents

considered for use as a biological weapon. An ounce

has the potential to kill everyone on Earth.

The toxin causes botulism, which is today quite

rare with about 110 cases reported annually in the

United States. The vast majority arise from the

consumption of contaminated home-canned foods like

green beans and corn. Infants are also susceptible to

botulism if they eat honey.

Left unchecked, botulism presents with muscle

paralysis and respiratory failure. Treatment is often the

administration of an antitoxin and -- in severe cases --

use of a breathing machine until the patient's lungs can

function once more. (The muscle paralysis is exploited when botox -- a form of the toxin -- is used for

cosmetic applications.)

Current death rates from botulism are under 10%. But in the World War II era, more than half of

patients died. That made it appear attractive for weapons use to scientists like Paul Fildes. But

botulinum toxin (called "Agent X" by the Allies) was difficult to produce in the large quantities. And

the aerosol form necessary for widespread use is unstable. Although the first production order placed by

the British for Camp Detrick was 7 pounds of dried botulinum toxin, field tests conducted by the

Americans at Horn Island were a notable failure and the Army concluded that botulinum toxin would

likely not be a good bioweapon agent.

See a photograph of a wound complicated by

botulism (i.e, not caused by weaponry. Be

advised -- it is a graphic image.

24

Brucellosis

Bacteria Brucella suis

Category B

Reservoir cows, sheep, pigs, camels and others

Transmission Injestion

This lesser-known disease agent became a staple of

the United States biological weapons program in the

1950s. Like anthrax bacteria, Brucella bacteria are

spread to humans by infected animals or animal

products -- often through the ingestion of

unpasteurized milk and cheese.

Unlike anthrax, brucellosis has a very low

mortality rate -- around 2 percent. It can, nonetheless,

incapacitate its victims with waves of flu-like

symptoms for months.

Today brucellosis strikes from 100-200 people a

year in America and is treated with antibiotics. But it

remains a much more widespread problem elsewhere in

the World. Though not readily passed from human-to-human, brucellosis is very infectious. A high

percentage of people exposed to its bacteria are likely to come down with the disease.

The Brucella bacteria are fairly easy to grow. To U.S. planners in the early Cold War years,

Brucella bacteria therefore appeared an effective yet "humane" biological weapon. In 1952, the first

large-scale field tests began at Utah's Dugway Proving Ground. That summer, thousands of guinea

pigs in mock enemy cities were exposed to Brucella bacteria bombing runs, leading one general to

remark, "Now we know what to do if we ever go to war against guinea pigs."

Results were favorable enough to officially add Brucella bacteria to the U.S. arsenal. But there was

a key production problem. The bacteria decayed completely in a few months. So empty bomb casings

had to be prepared and a facility made ready to produce large quantities of the agent at a moment's

notice. Such a facility was completed in December 1953 in Pine Bluff, Arkansas and the Army

eventually assembled more than 2.5 million empty bomb casings.

Q Fever

Bacteria Coxiella burnetii

Category B

Reservoir cows, sheep, goatshers

Transmission inhalation of animal products

Q Fever -- named for its discovery in Queensland, Australia in the 1930s -- makes victims very sick

with flu-like symptoms (fever, sort throat, headache, nausea, vomiting, diarrhea among others). Only

fif50ty percent of those infected with the C. burnetii bacteria show any symptoms. And of those who

do, the fatality rate is about 4%. The bacteria lives in domestic livestock and can be transmitted to

humans through inhalation of barnyard dust.

See a photograph of a victim of brucellosis (i.e,

not caused by weaponry.

25

Q fever can be treated with antibiotics and an

effective vaccine has been developed, primarily for

people who work with animals. The ability to treat Q

fever and its low morbidity are 2 reasons why the U.S.

made it a staple of the human testing conducted in

Operation Whitecoat.

Smallpox

Bacteria variola

Category A

Reservoir humans

Transmission bodily fluids

Smallpox was the first biological weapon used in

America when British soldiers gave infected blankets

to Native Americans.

Rashes appear on the skin of smallpox victims, the

bumps become pustules -- they feel like there is a

small object under the skin -- and then the pustules

scab and fall off. Direct contact with the bodily fluids

of infected persons or their infected clothing is

necessary for transmission. However, smallpox has

been known to spread in enclosed environments where

the air is re-circulated.

Smallpox was weaponized by the secret Soviet

bioweapons program. Unlike most other bioweapons

agents, smallpox viruses are easily spread from person-

to-person and this -- combined with a mortality rate of about 10% to 30% -- meant it could devastate a

target community.

But smallpox can be prevented by vaccination. In fact, a global public health campaign completely

eliminated smallpox -- a disease that had affected human beings for millennia -- in the United States by

1949. Because human beings are the only natural reservoir for smallpox, after the last known case of the

disease in Somalia in 1977, the disease has been considered eradicated. Regular vaccination for

smallpox is no longer required. Stores of smallpox viruses remain in U.S. and Russian laboratories,

however. And bioterrorism fears have led to recent vaccination campaigns and the stockpiling of

vaccine for potential future use.

See a photograph of a victim of smallpox (i.e.,

not caused by weaponry). Be advised -- it is a

graphic image.

26

Yellow Fever

Bacteria yellow fevera

Category A

Reservoir primates

Transmission mosquitoes

One of the most historically deadly viral

hemorrhagic fevers is yellow fever which killed

thousands of Americans in epidemics that terrified the

Nation. The fatality rate of this disease is around 10-

20%. But because light cases tend to go undetected,

the mortality rate is perceived to be much higher.

Victims of this viral hemorrhagic fever have their

liver attacked (leading to a yellow complexion) and

their clotting mechanisms destroyed. Victims produce

black vomit -- the result of bleeding into their

stomachs -- before dying. Many believed that the

fluids produced in death were the carriers of this virus

until Walter Reed and a U.S. Army team proved that

mosquitoes were the source of infections.

In the 1930s, Japanese agents had tried to purchase strains of the yellow fever virus from the

laboratories of Rockefeller University where a vaccine was being developed. They were unsuccessful.

An American attempt to weaponize yellow fever involved raising hundreds of thousands of

mosquitoes a month at Fort Detrick. Tests included dropping uninfected mosquitoes on Savannah,

Georgia in 1956 to see how far the insects would spread. Technical difficulties in infecting and

maintaining the insects -- and then the development of an effective yellow fever vaccine -- made the

weapons program irrelevant. "Fortunately, this never got beyond the research stage," says Dr. Thomas

Monath, a leading yellow fever researcher.

The last outbreak of yellow fever in the United States occurred in New Orleans in 1905. Recent

American deaths from the disease have involved travelers to tropical Africa or South America -- regions

where yellow fever is still present.

Other viral hemorraghic fevers include Ebola and Marburg viruses which are deadlier because they

can be spread directly from person-to-person without the need for an animal host.

Others

A number of other diseases were considered as part of various bioweapons programs. During World

War II, the Japanese dropped plague-infested fleas from airplanes and caused disease outbreaks in

China. The South African government allegedly released cholera into the water sources of particular

villages. Other diseases that the CDC is keeping a watch on include tularemia and genetically-altered

diseases.

Other biological weapons that would infect food supplies have also been researched.

See a photograph of a victim of yellow fever (i.e.,

not caused by weaponry).

27

See 2 photographs of victims of plague (i.e., not

caused by weaponry).

See a photographs of a victim of cholora (i.e., not

caused by weaponry).

See 2 photographs of a victim of tularemia (i.e.,

not caused by weaponry). Be advised -- it is a

graphic image!

28

People and Events

Paul Fields (1882-1971)

Knight and germ warrior, Sir Paul Fildes ran the biology department at

Britain's secret Porton Down facility and oversaw his country's first attempts

to develop biological weapons.

Becoming a Bacteriologist

Son of a noted painter who had illustrated books by Charles

Dickens, Fildes was born in 1882 in London. As a young

schoolboy, he already displayed a scientific bent -- even drafting a

paper on "The passage of food to the stomach". Although he

entered medical school in 1904 with the intent of focusing on

surgery, Fildes soon moved into bacteriology. After working in a

Royal Navy hospital, he joined Great Britain's Medical Research

Council and became head of its Bacterial Chemistry Unit, editing a

9-volume treatise on the field.

In 1940 with Britain at war with Nazi Germany, a new

biology department was established at Porton Down -- a secret

British facility near Salisbury that had been established in 1916 to deal with the threat of chemical

weapons. Fildes became the head of this department and began conducting

research into offensive biological weapons. One early project dubbed

"Operation Vegetarian" investigated the practicality of dropping linseed

cakes containing anthrax bacterial spores over Germany that would kill any

cattle that ate them. Although Fildes ordered the production of 5 million of

these cakes, they were never used.

Fildes would later claim he participated in another biological warfare

project that did go forward, however. The May 1942 assassination by the

British Secret Service of high-ranking Nazi leader Reinhard Heydrich near

Prague. Heydrich was ambushed and later died of what had appeared to be

minor wounds. Although his claims could not be substantiated, Fildes later

said he "had a hand" in Heydrich's death -- possibly by supplying the

assassins with grenades containing botulinum toxin that were used in the attack.

An experiment being carried out

at the chemical defence

establishment in Porton Down,

Wiltshire, U.K.

Reinhard Heydrick on

a visit to Paris

29

Anthrax Island

Individual grenades were one thing. But llarge-scale biological

weapons another. As Fildes' anthrax experiments continued, he

sensed the need for testing beyond that which could be conducted

near a populated area like Salisbury.

In the summer of 1942, Fildes and his colleagues settled on

Gruinard Island -- a remote 522-acre island off Scotland's northwest

coast -- as a field test site. After the military had bought the island

and declared it off-limits, Fildes' team prepared it to become Great

Britain's first outdoor biological weapons test site.

On July 15, they dropped a bomb filled with anthrax bacterial

spores from a 1-foot wooden gallows about a hundred yards

upwind from a group of 15 sheep, each of whom had been placed in crates with openings for their necks.

The sheep began to present with symptoms of anthrax three days after the test. 13 of the animals

eventually perished. Another similar test was successfully conducted on July 24.

Some months later on September 26, an airplane dropped a bomb filled with anthrax bacterial spores

onto the island. But the bomb became lodged in a bog and thus none of its payload was released.

Fildes' team then repeated that experiment a month later on a beach in Wales and this time it went off

without a hitch. The British now became convinced that they could make anthrax bombs work but

realized they needed help with the large-scale production of anthrax bacteria. For this, they sought

America's help.

Turning to America

The Americans had been slower to investigate biological

weapons than the British. But in terms of industrial capacity,

they had no peer.

In November 1942, Fildes and a colleague arrived in

Washington where they requested that the United States set

up production facilities sufficient to produce large amounts

of anthrax bacterial spores (called "Agent N") and botulinum

toxin ("Agent X"). Their initial order was for 7 pounds of

Agent X, and an American team overseen by Ira Baldwin at

Camp Detrick began working on this in June 1943. They

were able to fulfill this order within a couple of months.

Anthrax Bombs

Not everyone on the British side approved of the mass production of biological weapons. For

example, when they learned of Fildes' activities, 2 members of the Biological Warfare Committee that

oversaw Porton Down raised strenuous objections. But they were overruled by Prime Minister Winston

Churchill who in March 1944 ordered 500,000 anthrax bombs from America. That summer, Fildes

drew up plans for massive anthrax bombing raids of Germany, including the resumption of Operation

Vegetarian.

Although Allied military victory ended the war in Europe before any of these operations were

conducted, Fildes continued his research and development program and was rewarded for his services

Gruinard -- the island used by

British scientists during WWII to

test a series of anthrax bombs

researcher works in one of several size

aerobiology chambers at Camp

Detrick for work on microbial

aerosols and the spread of disease

30

with knighthood in 1946. He carried out open-sea testing of weapons during the winter of 1948-49 near

the British colony of Antigua.

With the rise of British nuclear capacity during the 1950s, interest

in offensive biological weapons lessened and eventually Fildes left

Porton Down. He died a year before the 1972 Biological Weapons

Convention that banned offensive biological weapons came into

being.

Gruinard Island remained contaminated until 1986 when British

scientists finally found a way to kill the bacterial spores that had been

infesting "Anthrax Island" since Fildes' tests more than 40 years

earlier.

Ira Baldwin (1895-1999)

An Indiana farm boy, World War I veteran, and part-time preacher, Ira Baldwin became a noted

agricultural bacteriologist at the University of Wisconsin and the civilian science director of the United

States biological weapons research program at Camp Detrick.

Roots

Baldwin was born on a 40-acre farm in 1895 and spent the

summers of his youth husking corn and selling ducks to earn

money for college. Deeply religious with Quaker grandparents,

Baldwin also preached in local churches that lacked regular

ministers.

In World War I, he served state-side as a second lieutenant in

an artillery unit, commanding a burial detail during the 1918

influenza epidemic. And although Baldwin attended college

at Purdue, he sought his Ph.D. at the University of Wisconsin

in Madison -- a place he remembered fondly from a summer

spent cultivating cucumbers there for the Heinz Company.

Baldwin began his graduate work at University of Wisconsin in the mid-1920s and by the time the

United States entered World War II, he had become chair of the bacteriology department. Then in

November 1942, Baldwin got a call from Colonel William Kabrich of the Army's Chemical Warfare

Service, requesting his presence at a top secret meeting in Washington.

The War Effort

At first it was just speculative talk. But after announcing that Germany and Japan were supporting

biological warfare programs, Kabrich asked Baldwin and other assembled scientists whether they

thought the U.S. could produce tons of its own bacteriological agents. Absolutely, Baldwin replied. "If

you could do it in a test tube, you could do it in a 10,000-gallon tank" and "if you get enough tanks, I'm

sure you will get tons."

researcher works in one of several size

aerobiology chambers at Camp

Detrick for work on microbial

aerosols and the spread of disease

Malcolm Broster --of the Ministry of Defence Chemical

Defence Establishment at Porton Down -- alongside one of

the warning signs at Gruinard Island which has been sealed

off from the public for almost 45 years (1986)

31

A month later, Kabrich was on the phone again, asking Baldwin to

lead the effort to do just that. Baldwin considered the moral

implications of this request. But it only took him 24 hours to decide.

"You start out with the idea in war of killing people," he would later

say. "And that to me is the immoral part of it. It doesn't make much

difference how you kill them."

Armed with this rationalization, Baldwin again headed East -- this

time in charge of the science and administration of America's biological

weapons research program.

A Red Tie

Baldwin remained a civilian and found certain advantages to that;

he would later say. "As long as I wore a red tie, I could say no to

anybody."

But the absence of military rank did not mean Baldwin lacked

responsibility. He first undertook to find a home for the program,

eventually settling on a little-used National Guard airfield in

Frederick, Maryland known as Camp Detrick. Baldwin recruited

scientists for his facility, later observing that unless the person was

also needed by the Manhattan Project, he usually got the men he requested. And aided by a

production manual written by British bacteriologist Paul Fildes, Baldwin's team began work on the

production of botulinum toxin and anthrax bacterial spores.

In 1943, he scouted locations for outdoor biological weapons testing, eventually settling on Horn

Island off the Mississippi coast. As the War dragged on, Camp Detrick expanded, employing more than

2,000 people at its height and conducting tests responsible for the death of 658,039 animals. Faced with

requests for a million anthrax bombs from the U.S. and British governments, Baldwin helped set up a

large-scale manufacturing facility in Vigo, Indiana. But the War ended before any biological weapons

were actually produced by the Vigo plant.

Back to Wisconsin

After World War II ended, Baldwin returned to University of Wisconsin,

becoming vice president of academic affairs in 1948 and special assistant to

the university's president a decade later. He continued to advise the United

States on biological weapons, evaluating the threat posed by Cold War

adversaries and suggesting a series of tests on U.S. cities with supposedly

harmless bacteria in order to evaluate how pathogens might spread if released

by enemy agents. He officially retired from University of Wisconsin in 1966

but continued working in the field of international agriculture for a number of

years. Baldwin died in 1999, just a couple of weeks before he would have

turned 104.

1943 Chemical Warfare Agents

a Fort Detrick researcher using

a Class III safety hood

32

Shiro Ishii (1892-1959)

Both the United States and Great Britain tested biological weapons during

World War II. But for ethical reasons such tests were limited to animal

subjects.

Japanese medical officer Shiro Ishii had no such scruples and he

unleashed some of nature's deadliest pathogens on helpless humans with

horrifying results.

Purification

Ishii was born in Japan in 1892 and became a doctor in 1920, graduating from Kyoto Imperial

University. He had a reputation for being thoughtless towards colleagues but obsequious to superiors.

Ishii married the daughter of the university's president and joined the Army Medical Corps.

When the 1925 Geneva Protocol banned the use of

bacteriological and chemical weapons in war, he began to urge the

creation of a Japanese bacteriological weapons program. Ishii

reasoned that such weapons must be very effective; otherwise they

wouldn't have been prohibited. Ishii traveled through Europe and

the United States for several years with an interest in the

bacteriological weapons used in World War I.

Upon his return he was appointed professor of immunology at

the Tokyo Army Medical School and given the rank of major.

While there Ishii quickly made a name for himself, inventing an

effective water purification filter that he allegedly demonstrated before the Emperor. But the fame and

riches that this invention brought were not enough for Ishii. He continued advocating that the Japanese

army develop biological weapons. In 1932, the government put him in charge of a testing and

production facility in the Chinese province of Manchuria which the Japanese had invaded the previous

year. As head of what would be euphemistically named the "Anti-Epidemic Water Supply and

Purification Bureau", Ishii eagerly got to work.

Unit 731

Ishii's first facility was in the city of Harbin. However, the need for secrecy made it necessary for

Ishii to relocate his group to a prison camp 60 miles away. After this camp was blown up by escapees,

an installation called 'Ping Fan' was constructed about 14 miles from Harbin. When completed in 1940,

what became known as 'Unit 731' housed some 3,000 personnel.

At a ceremony honoring the event, the now General Ishii made the

facility's purpose crystal clear. A doctor's "god-given mission," Ishii said,

was to block and treat disease. But the work "upon which we are now about

to embark is the complete opposite of these principles." In the name of

defeating Japan's enemies, Ishii and his staff spent the next 5 years mixing

witch's brews of pathogens that cause some of the World's most horrific

diseases: anthrax, plague, gas gangrene, smallpox, and botulism, among

others. They then used Chinese prisoners (dismissively termed maruta or "logs") as guinea pigs, forcing

First building for 'Unite 731'

33

them to breathe, eat, and receive injections of deadly pathogens. Allied POWs were also allegedly

targeted.

Reign of Horror

Victims were often killed before the diseases had run their

course so autopsies could show their progress through the

body. Ishii's men also supplied the Japanese Army with

typhoid, cholera, plague, and dysentery bacteria for battlefield

use. In addition, they contaminated water sources, released

disease-carrying fleas, and dropped contaminated wheat from

airplanes. Although dissolution of Unit 731 in 1945 led to the

destruction of many of its records, there is no doubt that Ishii

and his men had caused the death of many thousands of

Chinese and possibly hundreds of Russian and Allied prisoners

of war.

Immunity

No doubt aware that his activities constituted war crimes of the highest

order, Ishii faked his own death in late 1945 and went into hiding. When

American occupation forces learned that Ishii was still alive, they ordered the

Japanese to hand him over and investigators from Camp Detrick began

interrogations.

At first, Ishii denied any human testing had taken place but -- aware that

the Soviets also wanted to talk to him and their methods might not be so mild

-- he later offered to reveal all the details of his program in exchange for

immunity from war crimes prosecution. Anxious to learn the results of

experiments that they themselves had been unable to perform, the American

military accepted Ishii's offer and approval was then given by the highest

level of government.

Ultimately Ishii's materials proved to be of little value, but the United States kept its end of this

dubious bargain. Biological weapons were never mentioned in the Japanese war crimes trials and Ishii

died a free man in 1959.

Operation Whitecoat

Although they had experimented on animals during and after

World War II, Camp Detrick scientists were still unsure of the

effects of biological agents on human beings.

Operation Whitecoat aimed to solve that problem by providing

volunteers to enable the military to test the effects of a range of

disease agents on human subjects.

Group of Biological Warfare

technical advisers at Camp Detrick.

Ira Baldwin is on the left.

Japanese 'Unit 731' doctor stands with

face covered in fron of pile of Chinese

prisoner bodies

34

Ideal Test Subjects

The first task for the scientists was to find people willing to be

infected by pathogens that could make them very sick. They found

them in the followers of the Seventh-day Adventist faith. Although

willing to serve their country when drafted, the Adventists refused to

bear arms. As a result, many of them became medics. Now the U.S.

was offering recruits an opportunity to help in a different manner: to

volunteer for biological tests as a way of satisfying their military

obligations.

When contacted in late 1954, the Adventist hierarchy readily

agreed to this plan. For Camp

Detrick scientists, church members were a model test population since

most of them were in excellent health and they neither drank, smoked,

nor used caffeine. From the perspective of the volunteers, the tests gave

them a way to fulfill their patriotic duty while remaining true to their

beliefs.

And there was another factor: participation in these tests meant

avoiding possibly more hazardous service abroad. For example, one

participant -- Carl Walker -- had orders for his deployment to Laos

reversed when he volunteered for Operation Whitecoat. An officer told him, "You guys are worth a lot

more to your country as guinea pigs than as cannon fodder."

The "8-Ball"

Many of the Adventists were recruited at Fort Sam

Houston, Texas -- a training center for medics. The first

volunteers were sent to Camp Detrick where biological tests

began in late January 1955.

The site for these experiments was a million-liter sphere

called "the 8-Ball" that looked to one recruit like an enormous

grapefruit.

After having entered the '8-Ball', subjects were placed in

structures resembling telephone booths that contained rubber

hoses leading to face masks. They put the masks on and then

breathed in the current contents of the '8-Ball'. Perhaps air or

another harmless substance, or perhaps aerosols that

contained pathogens that caused such diseases as tularemia or Q fever.

Many tests involved Q fever -- a disease first observed in the 1930s that caused intense fever but was

rarely fatal. One recruit recalled that he had "never been any sicker"; another's temperature reached

106° F; and a third's gums swelled to the point he "could no longer see my teeth". Once the disease

appeared, recruits were given antibiotics and almost all made a quick and complete recovery.

Fort Detrick in late-50s or

60s. Whitecoats and staff.

Workers perform a test on the 1-million

liter sphere the "8-Ball" -- the largest

aerobiology chamber constructed

35

Dugway and Beyond

After the success of its first experiments, the decision was made to attempt an outdoor release of Q

fever bacteria. 30 recruits traveled to the Dugway Proving Ground in Utah. On the evening of July 12,

1955, they were lined up across a ½-mile of desert next to cages of monkeys and guinea pigs.

Located slightly more than 3,000 feet away, several generators

filled with pathogens began spraying an infectious mist into the

night air. The volunteers were told to breathe normally and

within a few minutes, the mist was upon them.

Some had been vaccinated against Q fever and never got sick.

Others became ill and ended up in bed for days. From the

military's perspective, the Dugway field test proved that under

the right meteorological conditions, biological weapons would

work.

The human experiments continued for almost 20 years, ending

in 1973. All told, about 2,200 Adventists participated in Operation Whitecoat. And to this day, many

remain proud of their service which resulted in the development of several vaccines and, presumably,

the generation of much information on how biological weapons work in the field.

For its part, the Army holds up Operation Whitecoat as a model of "informed consent" in testing on

humans. The Army also maintains there were almost "no adverse health effects" for the recruits -- a

view disputed by some volunteers. The truth may never be known. Ffollow-up questionnaires were sent

to fewer than half of the participants in Operation Whitecoat.

Secret Testing in the United States

The start of the Cold War brought new foes and new fears for the officials running America's

biological weapons program. Determined to anticipate possible Soviet attacks, the U.S. staged more than

200 domestic tests aimed at assessing national vulnerabilities to biological warfare.

From the Pentagon to the Pacific

Ira Baldwin -- Camp Detrick's scientific director during World War II -- left his position after the

Allied victory in 1945 and returned to teaching at the University of Wisconsin. He continued to advise

the government on issues concerning biological weapons, however -- particularly the threat that might

be posed by enemy spies releasing biological agents in American cities.

In an October 1948 report, Baldwin posited that the U.S. was "particularly vulnerable to this type of

attack." But in order to determine the precise nature of these vulnerabilities, secret field tests would

have to be done to ascertain the vulnerability of targets of potential

interest to the enemy. The Army's Chemical Corps -- which ran

Camp Detrick -- agreed with Baldwin's assessment and set up a

Special Operations Division at Camp Detrick to carry out the tests.

Its first target was to be the Pentagon.

In August 1949, the Special Operations Division operatives

infiltrated the World's largest office building and sprayed bacteria

Whitecoat test group heading out

to Dugway

36

into the Pentagon's air handling system which then spread them throughout the structure.

The operatives moved to larger scale testing, releasing clouds

containing supposedly harmless bacteria from Navy ships off Norfolk,

Virginia in April 1950 and the San Francisco coast in September 1950.

The San Francisco experiments showed exposure among

almost all of the city's 800,000 residents. Had the bacteria released

been anthrax bacteria or some other virulent pathogen, the number of

casualties would have been immense.

The St Jo Program and Large Area Concept

The success of the first field tests only increased demand for more experiments. In response to an

Air Force request, in 1953 the Chemical Corps created the St Jo Program and operatives staged mock

anthrax attacks on St. Louis, Minneapolis, and Winnipeg. The bacteria were released from generators

placed on top of cars, and local governments were told that "invisible smokescreens" were being

deployed "to mask the city on enemy radar".

The next stage was to increase dispersal patterns, dispensing particles from airplanes to find out how

wide of an area they would affect. The first Large Area Concept experiment in 1957 involved

dispersing microorganisms over a swath from South Dakota to Minnesota. Monitoring revealed that

some of the particles eventually traveled some 1200 miles away. Further tests covered areas from Ohio-

to-Texas and Michigan-to-Kansas. In the Army's words, these experiments "proved the feasibility of

covering large areas of the country with [biological weapons] agents."

Airports and Subways

Open-air testing continued through the 1960s with the Special

Operations Division operatives simulating even more audacious

assaults. In 1965, they spread bacteria throughout Washington's

National Airport. A year later, agents dropped light bulbs filled with

organisms onto the tracks in New York's subway system. I think it

spread pretty good," participant Wally Pannier later said, "because

you had a natural aerosol developed every few minutes from every

train that went past."

President Nixon's 1969 termination of the United States

offensive biological weapons program brought an end to the open-air

testing. But the American public did not learn of this testing until

1977. Relatives of one elderly man Edward Nevin -- who had died

of a nosocomial infection 6 months after the San Francisco tests --

sued the Government in 1981, arguing that the supposedly harmless Serratia marcescens bacteria used in

that test had in fact caused his death. In the event the courts ruled against them, the main reason being

that the plaintiffs could not prove that the bacteria used in the test were the same as those that killed Mr.

Nevin.

USS Coral Sea -- one of the ships

involved in the spraying of

bacteria off Norfolk, Virginia in

April, 1950.

37

Nixon Ends U.S. Biological Weapons Program

In November 1969, President Richard Nixon surprised the American public and the World by

ordering the United States to unilaterally discontinue its biological weapons program, thus ending

further research into their development.

Though this decision came as a shock to many who operated the offensive biological warfare

program at Fort Detrick, Pine Bluff Arsenal, Dugway Proving Ground, and elsewhere, its seeds had

been planted years earlier.

Growing Pressure

On the surface, the U.S. biological weapons program

appeared to be going swimmingly in the 1960s. frequent tests

of simulated pathogens proved the efficacy of biological

weapons and in 1967, the Fort Detrick scientists developed a

bacteriological missile warhead.

But opposition was growing to the U.S. use of

unconventional weapons like napalm and Agent Orange in

Vietnam. And biological weapons began to be tarred with the

same broad brush. Matters weren't helped by a March 1968

accident in which the Air Force mistakenly dropped VX nerve

agent outside the Dugway Proving Ground, apparently resulting

in the death of over 3,000 sheep (some estimates claim that over

6,000 sheep were killed) in Skull Valley, Utah.

That same year Seymour Hersh published a book called Chemical and

Biological Warfare: America's Secret Arsenal and news arose of the large-

scale tests the military had conducted in the Pacific with biological agents. A

plan to sink ships filled with old chemical weapons in the ocean off Long

Island met with furious public protest. Congressional representatives began

to demand more scrutiny of what had been heretofore a largely secret

program.

The scientific community was also raising alarms. Harvard

biology professor Matthew Meselson had already circulated a

petition in 1966 signed by 5,000 scientists asking the U.S. to halt

the use of chemical weapons in Vietnam and conduct a top-to-

bottom review of American biological and chemical weapons policy.

Working Together

Against this backdrop, word came from Great Britain and Canada that it might be possible to get an

international convention passed banning biological weapons if the U.S. made some gesture of good faith

in the area. Newly-inaugurated President Nixon decided that the time was right to look into the matter.

Kissinger's Review and Nixon's Decision

Nixon's National Security Advisor Henry Kissinger headed up the review process which began in

late spring 1969. A chance encounter with Meselson at an airport led Kissinger to ask his old Harvard

Napalm bombs explode on Viet

Cong structures south of Saigon in

the republic of Vietnam, 1965

Matthew Meselson in Vietnam

where he was studying the effects

of chemical weapons, 1969-70

38

colleague to submit a position paper on the subject of biological weapons. Meselson's conclusion was

that biological weapons were both dangerous because the technology could readily fall into the hands of

enemy groups or nations and unnecessary because of the U.S.'s massive nuclear arsenal.

His arguments were reinforced by other submissions. In fact, when the

National Security Council met with Nixon on November 18, only the

chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff argued for the retention of biological

weapons. One week later, Nixon made his announcement. "I have decided

that the United States will renounce the use of any form of deadly biological

weapons that either kill or incapacitate," the president said. "Our

bacteriological programs in the future will be confined to research in

biological defense, on techniques of immunization, and on measures on

controlling and preventing the spread of disease."

In taking this step, Nixon cited the "massive, unpredictable, and potentially uncontrollable

consequences" of biological weapons. He added, "By the examples that we set today, we hope to

contribute to an atmosphere of peace and understanding between all nations." Privately, Nixon showed

more realpolitik. America had no need for biological weapons, he declared. If an enemy used them on

the U.S., we would retaliate with nuclear bombs.

The Biological Weapons Convention

Whatever Nixon's motivations, his decision had the desired international effect. Negotiations on a

treaty banning all biological weapons intensified and -- after the Soviet Union dropped its opposition --

in April 1972, the Biological Weapons Convention was completed and became open for signature by the

nations of the World. The U.S. Senate ratified the convention in December 1974 and it went into effect

in March 1975 -- the same year the Senate also finally ratified the 1925 Geneva Protocol banning the

wartime use of bacteriological weapons.

The Biological Weapons Convention was a historic accomplishment -- not merely restricting

biological weapons, but pledging their complete elimination.

Unfortunately, one of its key signatories -- the Soviet Union -- continued a secret biological

weapons program in direct violation of the treaty's terms, a fact that would only become known years

later.

39

Primary Sources: Charts

These 2 charts were prepared for a briefing called "USAF Operational concepts for BW [biological

weapons] and CW [chemical weapons]" in November 1952. This occurred in the period in the early

1950s when weapons of mass destruction research was pursued aggressively.

Although the Army Chemical Corps developed the biological and chemical weapons, the Air Force

was responsible for delivering the ordnance; these charts show how the weapons would be used in a

battle situation. Specifically, the scenario envisioned a Soviet invasion of Western Europe and required

some method of slowing the advance until American troops could reinforce Allied positions in Europe.

In 1952, the atomic arsenal was still limited and to be kept in reserve for major Soviet positions or

retaliation in kind for attacks on American cities. Chemical and biological weapons presented a way to

retard the enemy.

Martin Furmanski -- an expert on WMD policies -- writes: "Ultimately, the 1952 Air Force 'crash

program' was a failure because the Army Chemical Corps could not produce a useful biological weapon,

Britain would not allow biological weapons to be stockpiled on her soil, and the CW nerve gas

production plants did not become operational for several more years. By the mid-1950s, the atomic

arsenal had greatly expanded and hydrogen bombs had been developed. The Eisenhower administration

decided to rely entirely upon nuclear weapons for the 'retardation' operation."

These charts then, represent a hypothetical response that remained a possibility for only a few years

before other factors rendered it moot.

40

More Information

1. Experts Q & A

Martin Furmanski and Raymond Zilinskas answer questions about biological weaponry.

2. Behind the Scenes

Follow filmmaker John Rubin into the Nevada desert where scenes of "Operation Whitecoat" were

filmed.

3. More About Biowarfare

Learn more on other PBS sites about how bioweapons work and the history of the Soviet program.

4. Declassified Films

Watch recently declassified military films on biowarfare.

5. Timeline of Biological Weapons

if on the Internet, Press <BACK> on your browser to return to the

previous page (or go to www.stealthskater.com)

else if accessing these files from the CD in a MS-Word session, simply <CLOSE> this file's

window-session; the previous window-session should still remain 'active'

41