Military
Used Nerve Gas In Open Air Tests In 1960's US
American
Servicemen Used As
Guinea Pigs
A Military Secret No Longer
Sailors Sprayed With Nerve Gas
in Cold War Test, Pentagon
Says
Germ-Warfare
Tests Gone Awry In Spotlight
Researchers
look at a time when the Army sprayed what it thought was
harmless on San Francisco and other cities.
By
Jim Carlton WALL STREET JOURNAL
SAN
FRANCISCO -- Fifty-one years ago, Edward Nevin checked
into a San Francisco hospital, complaining of chills,
fever and general malaise. Three weeks later, the 75-year-old
retired pipe fitter was dead, the victim of what doctors
said was an infection of the bacterium Serratia marcescens.
Decades
later, Mr. Nevin's family learned what they believe was
the cause of the infection, linked at the time to the
hospitalizations of 10 other patients.
In
Senate subcommittee hearings in 1977, the Army revealed
that weeks before Nevin sickened and died, the Army had
staged a mock biological attack on San Francisco, secretly
spraying the city with Serratia and other agents thought
to be harmless.
The
goal: to see what might happen in a real germ-warfare
attack. The experiment, which involved blasting a bacterial
fog over the 49-square-mile city from a Navy vessel offshore,
was recorded with clinical nonchalance: "It was noted
that a successful BW (biological warfare) attack on this
area can be launched from the sea, and that effective
dosages can be produced over relatively large areas,"
the Army wrote in its 1951 classified report on the experiment.
Now,
with anthrax in the mail and fear mounting of further
biological attacks, researchers are again looking back
at the only other time this country faced the perils of
germ warfare -- albeit self-inflicted.
In
fact, much of what the Pentagon knows about the effects
of bacterial attacks on cities came from those secret
tests conducted on San Francisco and other American cities
from the 1940s through the 1960s, experts say.
"We
learned a lot about how vulnerable we are to biological
attack from those tests," says Leonard Cole, adjunct
professor of political science at Rutgers University in
New Jersey and author of several books on bioterrorism.
"I'm
sure that's one reason crop dusters were grounded after
Sept. 11: The military knows how easy it is to disperse
organisms that can affect people over huge areas."
In
other tests in the 1950s, Army researchers dispersed Serratia
on Panama City, Fla., and Key West, Fla., with no known
illnesses resulting.
They
also released fluorescent compounds over Minnesota and
other Midwestern states to see how far they would spread
in the atmosphere.
The
particles of zinc-cadmium-sulfide -- now a known cancer-causing
agent --were detected more than 1,000 miles away in New
York state, the Army told the Senate hearings, though
no illnesses were ever attributed to them as a result.
Another
bacterium, Bacillus globigii, never shown to be harmful
to people, was released in San Francisco, while still
others were tested on unwitting residents in New York,
Washington, D.C., and along the Pennsylvania Turnpike,
among other places, according to Army reports released
during the 1977 hearings.
In
New York, military researchers in 1966 spread Bacillus
subtilis variant Niger, also believed to be harmless,
in the subway system by dropping lightbulbs filled with
the bacteria onto tracks in stations in midtown Manhattan.
The
bacteria were carried for miles throughout the subway
system, leading Army officials to conclude in a January
1968 report: "Similar covert attacks with a pathogenic
(disease-causing) agent during peak traffic periods could
be expected to expose large numbers of people to infection
and subsequent illness or death."
Army
officials also found widespread dispersal of bacteria
in a May 1965 secret release of Bacillus globigii at Washington's
National Airport and its Greyhound bus terminal, according
to military reports released a few years after the Senate
hearings.
More
than 130 passengers who had been exposed to the bacteria
traveled to 39 cities in seven states in the two weeks
following the mock attack.
The
Army kept the biological-warfare tests secret until word
of them was leaked to the press in the 1970s. Between
1949 and 1969, when President Nixon ordered the Pentagon's
biological weapons destroyed, open-air tests of biological
agents were conducted 239 times, according to the Army's
testimony in 1977 before the Senate's subcommittee on
health.
In
80 of those experiments, the Army said it used live bacteria
that its researchers at the time thought were harmless,
such as the Serratia that was showered on San Francisco.
In the others, it used inert chemicals to simulate bacteria.
Several
medical experts have since claimed that an untold number
of people may have gotten sick as a result of the germ
tests.
These
researchers say even benign agents can mutate into unpredictable
pathogens once exposed to the elements.
"The
possibility cannot be ruled out that peculiarities in
wind conditions or ventilation systems in buildings might
concentrate organisms, exposing people to high doses of
bacteria," testified Stephen Weitzman of the State
University of New York, in the 1977 Senate hearings.
For
its part, the Army justified its experiments by noting
concerns during World War II that United States cities
might come under biological attack. To prepare a response,
the Army said, it had to test microbes on populated areas
to learn how bacteria disperse.
"Release
in and near cities, in real-world circumstances, were
considered essential to the program, because the effect
of a built-up area on a biological agent cloud was unknown,"
Edward Miller, the Army's secretary for research and development
at the time, told the subcommittee.
But
in at least one case -- the bacterial fogging of San Francisco
--the research may have gone awry.
Between
Sept. 20 and Sept. 27 of 1950, a Navy mine-laying vessel
cruised the San Francisco coast, spraying an aerosol cocktail
of Serratia and Bacillus microbes -- all believed to be
safe -- over the famously foggy city from giant hoses
on deck, according to declassified Army reports.
According
to lawyers who have reviewed the reports, researchers
added fluorescent particles of zinc-cadmium-sulfide to
better measure the impact. Based on results from monitoring
equipment at 43 locations around the city, the Army determined
that San Francisco had received enough of a dose for nearly
all of the city's 800,000 residents to inhale at least
5,000 of the particles.
Two
weeks after the spraying, on Oct. 11, 1950, Nevin checked
in to the Stanford Hospital in San Francisco with fever
and other symptoms. Ten other men and women checked in
to the same hospital -- which has since been relocated
to Stanford University in Palo Alto -- with similar complaints.
Doctors
noticed that all 11 had the same malady: a pneumonia caused
by exposure to bacteria believed to be Serratia marcescens.
Nevin died three weeks later. The others recovered. Doctors
were so surprised by the outbreak that they reported it
in a medical journal, oblivious at the time to the secret
germ test.
After
the Army disclosed the tests nearly three decades later,
Nevin's surviving family members filed suit against the
federal government, alleging negligence.
"My
grandfather wouldn't have died except for that, and it
left my grandmother to go broke trying to pay his medical
bills," says Nevin's grandson, Edward J. Nevin III,
a San Francisco attorney who filed the case in United
States District Court here.
Army
officials noted the pneumonia outbreak in their 1977 Senate
testimony but said any link to their experiments was totally
coincidental.
No
other hospitals reported similar outbreaks, the Army pointed
out, and all 11 victims had urinary-tract infections following
medical procedures, suggesting that the source of their
infections lay inside the hospital.
The
Nevin family appealed the suit all the way to the U.S.
Supreme Court, which declined to overturn lower court
judgments upholding the government's immunity from lawsuits.
Today,
the U.S. military is again patrolling San Francisco's
coastline, guarding against someone who might try to copy
the Army tests of half a century ago. Local officials
say such an attack is unlikely, given the logistical problems
of blasting the city without Navy ships.
Partly
as a result of Nevin's death, says Lucien Canton, director
of San Francisco's emergency services, "One thing
we now know is that it takes an awful lot of stuff to
produce casualties, especially in a place like San Francisco
that always has a stiff breeze."
http://www.contracostatimes.com/news/attack/stories/
wsjmicrobe_20011023.htm
