Disease Control and Prevention, testified before the Senate in 1977. If you get the right concentration at the right place, at the right time and in the right person, something is going to happen. 2

The Army has acknowledged that between 1949 and 1969, 239 populated areas from coast to coast were blanketed with various organisms during tests designed to measure patterns of dissemination in the air, weather effects, dosages, optimum placement of the source and other factors. Testing over such areas was supposedly suspended after 1969, but there is no way to be certain of this. In any event, open-air spraying continued at Dugway Proving Ground in Utah.3

Following is a small sample of the tests carried out in the 1949-69 period. Watertown, NY area and Virgin Islands

1950: The Army used aircraft and homing pigeons to drop turkey feathers dusted with cereal rust spores to contaminate oat crops, to prove that a cereal rust epidemic could be spread as a biological warfare weapon. 4

San Francisco Bay Area

September 20-27,1950: Six experimental biological warfare attacks by the US Army from a ship, using Bacillus globigii and Serratia marcescens, at one point forming a cloud about two miles long as the ship traveled slowly along the shoreline of the bay. One of the stated objectives of the exercise was to study the offensive possibilities of attacking a seaport city with a BW [biological warfare] aerosol from offshore, (emphasis added). Beginning on September 29, patients at Stanford Universitys hospital in San Francisco were found to be infected by Serratia marcescens. This type of infection had never before been reported at the hospital. Eleven patients became infected, and one died.5 According to a report submitted to a Senate committee by a professor of microbiology at the State University of New York at Stony Brook: an increase in the number of Serratia marcescens can cause disease in a healthy person and...serious disease in sick people. 6

Between 1954 and 1967, other tests were carried out in the Bay Area, including some with a base of operations at Fort Cronkhite in Marin County.7

Minneapolis

1953: 61 releases of zinc cadmium sulfide in four sections of the city, involving massive exposure of people at home and children in school. The substance was later described by the EPA as potentially hazardous because of its cadmium content , and a former Army scientist, writing in the professional journal Atmosphere Environment, in 1972, said that cadmium compounds, including zinc cadmium sulfide, are highly toxic and the use of them in open atmospheric experiments presents a human health hazard . He stated that the symptoms produced by exposure to zinc cadmium sulfide include lung damage, acute kidney inflammation and fatty degeneration of the liver.8

St. Louis

1953: 35 releases of zinc cadmium sulfide over residential, commercial and downtown areas, including the Medical Arts Building, which presumably contained a number of sick people whose illnesses could be aggravated by inhaling toxic particles.9

Washington, DC area

1953: Aerial spraying from a height of 75 feet of zinc cadmium sulfate combined with lycopodium spores. The areas sprayed included the Monocacy River Valley in Maryland and Leesburg, Virginia, 30 miles from the capital. 10

In 1969, the Army conducted 115 open-air tests of zinc cadmium sulfate near Cambridge, Maryland.11

Earlier in the 1960s, the Army covertly disseminated a large number of bacteria in Washingtons National Airport to evaluate how easy it would be for an enemy agent to scatter smallpox through the entire country by infecting air travelers. The bacterium used, Bacillus subtilis, is potentially harmful to the infirm and the elderly, whose immune system is impaired, and to those with cancer, heart disease or a host of other ailments, according to a professor of microbiology at the Georgetown University Medical Center. A similar experiment was carried out at the Washington Greyhound bus terminal.

Sometime during Richard Nixons time in office (apparently 1969), the Army assassinated him with germs via the White House air conditioning system. 12

And at a building used by the Food and Drug Administration, the Army surreptitiously placed a (supposedly harmless) colored dye into the water system. Whether anyone suffered harm from drinking a certain quantity of that water is not known.13

Florida

1955: The CIA conducted at least one open-air test with whooping-cough bacteria around the Tampa Bay area. The number of whooping cough cases recorded in Florida jumped from 339 and one death in 1954 to 1080 and 12 deaths in 1955. The Tampa Bay area was one of three places that showed a sharp increase in 1955.14

Savannah, Georgia and Avon Park, Florida

1956-58: The Army, wishing to test the practicality of employing Aedes aegypti mosquitos to carry a BW agent , released over wide areas hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of this mosquito, which can be a carrier of yellow fever and dengue fever, both highly dangerous diseases. The Army stated that the mosquitos were uninfected, but prominent scientists said that, for several reasons, the experiment was not without risk,

and was a terrible idea . 15 The actual effects upon the targeted population will probably never be known.

New York City

Feb. 11-15, 1956: A CIA-Army team sprayed New York streets and the Holland and Lincoln tunnels, using trick suitcases and a car with a dual muffler.16

June 6-10, 1966: The army report of this test was called A Study of the Vulnerability of Subway Passengers in New York City to Covert Attack with Biological Agents . Trillions of Bacillus subtilis variant niger were released into the subway system during rush hours. One method was to use light bulbs filled with the bacteria; these were unobtrusively shattered at sidewalk level on subway ventilating grills or tossed onto the roadbeds inside the stations. Aerosol clouds were momentarily visible after a release of bacteria from the light bulbs. The report noted that When the cloud engulfed people, they brushed their clothing, looked up at the grating apron and walked on. 17 The wind of passing trains spread the bacteria along the tracks; in the time it took for two trains to pass, the bacteria were spread from 15th Street to 58th Street.18 It will never be known how many people later became ill from being unsuspecting guinea pigs, for the United States Army exhibited not the slightest interest in this question.

Chicago

1960s: The Chicago subway system was the scene of a similar Army experiment.19 Stockyards

November 1964 to January 1965: The Army conducted aerosol tests over stockyards in Texas, Missouri, Minnesota, South Dakota, Iowa and Nebraska, using anti-animal non-biological simulants .20 Its not clear why stockyards were chosen, or what effect this might have had upon the meat consumed by the public.

Nuremberg

The International Military Tribunal at Nuremberg, Germany, 1946-1949, revealed many details of the Nazi medical experiments on involuntary subjects, leading the judges to formulate a set of principles that came to be called The Nuremberg Code; in effect, a bill of rights for people selected for medical experimentation. The Codes first tenet states: The voluntary consent of the human subject is absolutely essential. Very shortly thereafter, the US Army-CIA testing program began, and although the tests were of course nowhere near as gruesome as those of the Nazis, and the subjects of the tests were not humans as such, but rather the behavior of certain substances released in the air, the fact remains that the testers knew that untold numbers of humans were being directly contaminated by the tests, and none of the reports of the tests mentions a word about obtaining the consent of any of these humans. If the testers did not know that the contaminating substances were potentially dangerous, it can only be because they didnt