One component, cadmium, is highly toxic and can cause cancer. The potential toxicity of that controversial compound zinc cadmium sulfide is debated. They told city officials that "the tests involved efforts to measure ability to lay smoke screens about the city" to "hide" it in case of nuclear attack, according to Cole's account. To prevent suspicion, the military pretended that they were testing a way to mask the whole city in order to protect it. In the book, Cole cites military reports that documented various Minneapolis tests, including one where chemicals spread through a school. These sprays were tested on the ground too, with machines that would release clouds from city rooftops or intersections to see how they spread. Low flying airplanes would take off, sometimes near the Canadian border, "and they would fly down through the Midwest," dropping their payloads over cities, says Cole. The military tested how a biological or chemical weapon would spread throughout the country by spraying bacteria as well as various chemical powders - including an especially controversial one called "Every one of the agents the Army used had been challenged" by medical reports, he says, despite the Army's contention in public hearings that they'd selected "harmless simulants" of biological weapons.Ī C-119 Flying Boxcar, one type of plane used to release chemicals. "But when you talk about exposing millions of people to potential harm, by spreading around certain chemicals or biological agents, the quantitative effect of that is just unbelievable." "All these other tests, while terrible, they affected people counted in the hundreds at most," he says. In one shocking, well-known incident, government researchers studied the effects of syphilis on black Americans without informing the men that they had the disease - they were told they had "bad blood." Researchers withheld treatment after it became available so they could continue studying the illness, despite the devastating and life-threatening implications of doing so for the men and their families.īut it was the germ warfare tests that Cole focused on. Other experiments involved testing mind-altering drugs on unsuspecting citizens. but also because of the extraordinary coincidence that took place at Stanford Hospital, beginning days after the Army's tests had taken place." Leonard Cole, who documented the episode in his book " Clouds of Secrecy: The Army's Germ Warfare Tests Over Populated Areas."Ĭole, now the director of the Terror Medicine and Security Program at Rutgers New Jersey Medical School, tells Business Insider that this incident was "notable: first, because it was really early in the program. Of the 239 known tests in that program, San Francisco was notable for two reasons, according to Dr. "Fundamental to the development of a deterrent strategy was the need for a thorough study and analysis of our vulnerability to overt and covert attack."
The goal "was to deter against the United States and its allies and to retaliate if deterrence failed," the government explained later. It was one of the first large-scale biological weapon trials that would be conducted under a "germ warfare testing program" that went on for 20 years, from 1949 to 1969. The Navy continued the tests for seven days, potentially causing at least one death.
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