Biohazard

In America, a secret biological warfare unit called the War Research Service was created to work with its British and Canadian counterparts. George W. Merck, president of Merck & Co. Inc., a leading U.S. pharmaceutical firm, was the unit's first director. Under his leadership, it soon took the leading role in planning biological weapons research for the Allied war effort.

Merck assembled a "brain trust" of scientists from universities and private industry to identify likely spots for research, production, and testing. They settled on four principal sites: a 2,000-acre tract on Horn Island near Pascagoula, Mississippi; the Dugway chemical warfare testing facility in the Utah desert; a 6,100-acre munitions manufacturing complex at Terre Haute, Indiana; and the old National Guard installation at Frederick, Maryland.

The Maryland site, renamed Camp Detrick, was to be the heart of American biological weapons research. Its purpose was kept as secret as the laboratories in Los Alamos, where Manhattan Project scientists developed the first atomic bomb. More than seventeen hundred people worked at Camp Detrick during the war years, investigating glanders, brucellosis, cholera, dysentery, plague, and typhus.

Anthrax was the largest project. Scientists built a pilot plant capable of producing anthrax in ten-thousand-gallon tanks. They were so successful that Britain placed an order for five hundred thousand anthrax bombs from the facility in September 1944.

None of the weapons developed in America was ever used in World War II. Fears that the Germans would use biological munitions in their unmanned "buzz bomb" raids over English cities, or to repel the D-Day force, never materialized. When hostilities ended in Europe, President Truman briefly flirted with the idea of using anticrop agents and antipersonnel munitions against Japan as an alternative to the new atomic bomb.

Victory in the war left America with an unused arsenal of biological weapons, a vast technological and research base, and a secret network that rivaled its nuclear weapons complex. Some facilities were phased out, but revelations about Japan's Unit 731 forestalled any serious discussion about ending the American program.

Like us, Americans learned about Japan's germ warfare operations from captured documents and prisoners of war. Camp Detrick sent scientists to Japan to interrogate the commanders of Unit 731, who gave details of their program in return for avoiding prosecution for war crimes. Their reports convinced Washington that biological weapons could be developed in greater quantities and with far greater effectiveness than anyone had suspected. The British came to a similar conclusion and decided to upgrade their testing and research unit at Porton Down and at a test site on the Scottish island of Gruinard.

Putting aside their initial skepticism, Americans began a sophisticated program of biological weapons development that would last more than twenty years and intensify an arms race no less threatening than its more well known nuclear counterpart.

Beginning in 1951, agricultural agents were developed at Camp Detrick and other facilities to attack the Soviet wheat crop and the rice paddies of Communist China. The pathogens were stored at Edgewood Arsenal in Maryland, as well as at Rocky Mountain Arsenal near Denver, which also manufactured plutonium for nuclear weapons.

U.S. bioweaponeers went on to explore antipersonnel agents such as tularemia, Venezuelan equine encephalitis, and staphylococcal enterotoxin B. Aerosols were tested on animals at Deseret Island in the Pacific Ocean and at Dugway Proving Ground in Utah. They conducted experiments with simulated weapons, as we did, in urban areas.

Human tests took place in 1955 on a group of young Seventh Day Adventists who volunteered as an alternative to military service. The volunteers were exposed to Q fever, which is not lethal and can be treated with antibiotics, in a program called Project Whitecoat, or Operation CD-22.

By the late 1960s, twenty-two microorganisms were under study, and there were plans to weaponize hemorrhagic fevers such as the Machupo virus and Rift Valley fever. The scientists at Fort Detrick were looking into the possibilities presented by genetic engineering when their program was dealt a fatal blow.

Twenty-five years after a presidential advisory board launched America's experiment with biological warfare, a panel appointed by President Nixon recommended killing it.