I don’t believe it. The government says we don’t do this.
On May 12, 2000, the CBS Evening News first reported that over 1,000 American sailors were unwittingly exposed to chemical and biological warfare (CBW) agents in the 1960s and early 1970s as part of secret military experiments to study the vulnerability of US Navy ships to germ warfare attacks. The Pentagon responded to the report by insisting that the sailors “were not exposed to any harmful chemical and biological compound” and they all “were fully informed about the details of each test.” Neither of those claims turned out to be true. Subsequent reports revealed that some of the deadliest biological weapons, including VX and sarin nerve gas, were sprayed over unsuspecting sailors during Project 112 and its offshoot, Project SHAD. For decades, the Pentagon denied the existence of these tests before concluding in the 2000s that there was “no clear evidence” of long-term health problems resulting from them. Veterans – including some who blame their serious health problems on the tests – are still waiting for answers over 50 years later.
A History of Secret Testing
In early 1961 Defense Secretary Robert McNamara issued a directive urging the Joint Chiefs of Staff to “consider all possible applications” for chemical and biological weapons, “including use as an alternative to nuclear weapons.” By that time, there had already been considerable CBW testing in the United States, almost always against unwitting citizens. Immediately after World War II, the United States struck deals with some of Japan’s leading germ warfare specialists, including members of Unit 731, a notorious army unit that conducted horrific lethal experiments that killed hundreds of thousands of Chinese civilians and soldiers as well as Allied prisoners of war, some of whom were dissected while still alive. In exchange for not pursuing war crimes charges, Japanese scientists and doctors shared their knowledge and expertise while working for the United States. German doctors and scientists, including Nazi war criminals, were also imported into the US under Operation Paperclip.
Armed with Nazi and Japanese CBW knowledge, the US military began its own germ warfare experiments in earnest in 1949. The following year in Operation Sea Spray the Navy sprayed San Francisco with a massive cloud containing two types of bacteria, Bacillus globigii and Serratia marcesens, to study cities’ vulnerability to bioweapons attacks. Around a dozen people in the San Francisco Bay Area were hospitalized after the experiment; one of them died three weeks later. The test may have permanently altered the Bay Area’s microbial ecology. The Army also sprayed zinc cadmium sulfide over dozens of US locations including the Pruitt-Into housing project in St. Louis, where 10,000 people lived, most of them poor and black, and at Clinton Elementary School in Minneapolis, where former students later reported an unusually high number of stillbirths and birth defects. Cadmium, a toxic metal, is now a known carcinogen.
These were but two of the hundreds of tests carried out by the US military on unsuspecting citizens during the Cold War era. American sailors were also exposed to Bacillus globigii, Serratia marcesens and zinc cadmium sulfide during Project SHAD tests.
Sailors Exposed to Sarin, VX Read the rest of this entry »
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