Source: Washington Monthly, July-August, 1985 by Leonard A. Cole
“It would have been hard to pick them out of a crowd: average-looking men walking through Washington’s National Airport, carrying suitcases. But the men were agents of the United States Army, and the suitcases were something out of a James Bond movie–disguised atomizers which imperceptibly sprayed unsuspecting travelers with a bacteria-laden mist. The undercover operation, which took place in 1964-65, was part of a nationwide program of so-called ‘vulnerability’ testing designed to gauge the impact of an enemy-launched epidemic of smallpox.
For 20 years ending in 1969, the Army staged hundreds of these secret germ ‘attacks’ in a number of cities, using microorganisms the Pentagon claimed were harmless to humans. It wasn’t until 1977, during a hearing before the Senate, that civilian experts suggested that vulnerability testing may have caused outbreaks of disease which occured in some of the test areas.
Although vulnerability testing took place only two decades ago, it seems like a bad memory from a distant era–when, for example, we were rehearsing troops for atomic combat by marching them through radioactive fields following nuclear detonations. Many of these soldiers were never informed about the risks to their health; neither were the civilians who lived downwind from the explosion sites in Utah and Nevada, among other places.”
