American Experience

Norm Covert, Camp Detrick Historian: It was the highest level of secrecy. In some cases, there were only four or five people who actually knew the extent of what was going on at Camp Detrick.

Mike Foster, Captain, Chemical Warfare Service: I remember one time we had a party and somebody said, “Hey, lot of bacteriologists here, aren’t there?” That was quickly shushed up. We were taught at Detrick, “Don’t talk about Detrick.”

Matthew Meselson, Biologist: If an activity is conducted in secret, people who can see the mistakes in it or the danger in it, or the false assumptions in it, may not know about it — even people within the government. And therefore, you might embark upon a course which is disastrous.

Narrator: Detrick’s scientific director was Ira Baldwin, the forty-seven-year-old chairman of the bacteriology department at the University of Wisconsin. In one sense, Baldwin was an unlikely choice to lead the project.

Norm Covert, Camp Detrick Historian: He had Quaker roots, very strict way of living. And their morality was that war was not the way you do things. You would think that Doctor Baldwin would have rejected the value of using biological warfare and the ethics of using biological warfare.

Narrator: Like other Detrick scientists, Baldwin struggled over his decision — but then quickly got down to work. It was wartime.

Norm Covert, Camp Detrick Historian: Not many people today can understand the mindset of 1941, when we were attacked by Japanese. The entire nation was at war, so we had a real mission to protect our nation.

Mike Foster, Captain, Chemical Warfare Service: Do I find anything morally wrong with biological warfare as compared with other warfare? No. I don’t see where there’s any difference. The purpose is the same in every case: kill 'em.

Jeanne Guillemin, Sociologist: The people who worked in the biological weapons programs were able to convince themselves that there was a patriotic reason for doing this work. That the nation-state would be in danger of not surviving if they did not do this work. They lived in a closed, moral order.

Narrator: The British had made two requests. One was for anthrax. Another was for a toxin produced by bacteria — botulinum — the most lethal substance ever discovered.

Richard Preston, Author: A person who is poisoned with botulinum toxin develops paralysis. Doctors can watch it creep through the body. And when the paralysis reaches the center of the chest, you have a breathing arrest and a heart attack. And you can’t be resuscitated.

Narrator: The British provided Detrick with the botulinum recipe. Scaling it up was Ira Baldwin’s job. He built a temporary tarpaper shack. Protected by guards armed with machine guns, it ran twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week. Researchers tested the deadly toxin on mice. But no one could say exactly what would happen in human beings.

Mike Foster, Captain, Chemical Warfare Service: One milliliter will kill a million mice. Now, how much would it take to kill a person? I can’t answer that. But it’s very, very toxic, very potent.

Narrator: A special plan provided for staff who might be accidentally killed on the job. They were to be buried on Detrick’s grounds, without any report on the cause of death, in airtight metal caskets.

For decades, nations had debated the use of unconventional weapons. In World War I, many saw Germany’s use of chlorine gas, a chemical weapon, as an outrageous violation of the norms of war and a corruption of science.

Jeanne Guillemin, Sociologist: Wonderful things came out of modern chemistry that improved people’s lives. But, unfortunately in World War I, you find that a great science can be exploited for military purposes.

Narrator: In 1925, in Geneva, over thirty nations signed a protocol banning first use of unconventional weapons — germs and chemicals alike.

Richard Preston, Author: A chemical weapon is a poison. And it kills usually very rapidly. A biological weapon is a microorganism. A biological weapon is alive. And like all other life forms, what it wants to do is survive and reproduce itself.

Narrator: The U.S. signed, but didn’t ratify the Geneva Protocol — an agreement which still permitted research and production of germ weapons. By the late 1930s, as tensions rose in Europe, the door was open to the scientific creation of new weapons of mass destruction.

Jeanne Guillemin, Sociologist: This war coming in 1939, 1940, was envisioned as a war of scientists against scientists. Whoever had the best scientists was going to win this war.

Narrator: In 1944, V-1 rockets launched from Germany pounded London, raising British fears of a Nazi biological attack. The fears would prove unfounded, but not before British Prime Minister Winston Churchill had placed an urgent order with the U.S. for half a million anthrax bomblets. “Pray let me know when they will be available,” he wrote. “We should regard it as a first installment.”

The British request far exceeded Detrick’s capacity. To fill it, Ira Baldwin began converting an old munitions factory in Vigo, Indiana. The new plant was designed as a gigantic industrial assembly line that could produce anthrax bacteria by the ton. Still, critics at the highest levels of American government voiced concerns about the germ program. Admiral William Leahy, President Roosevelt’s chief of staff, said that using germ weapons, “would violate every Christian ethic I have ever heard of and all of the known laws of war.” But in a time of national crisis, Leahy’s objections were not enough to slow the momentum of the U.S. program.

In December 1944, reports came of a potential germ attack on the United States — launched by Japan. Balloons began to fall from the western skies of North America. Amid worries that the balloons might contain a biological agent, Detrick dispatched a scientist to one of the crash sites. The balloons contained only explosives. Still, the incident fueled the fears that kept America’s biological program moving forward.

By August 1945, the American biological program had spent sixty million dollars. Thousands of workers at Detrick and satellite facilities had sacrificed over half a million experimental animals while investigating a dozen devastating illnesses. And soon the new Vigo plant would be ready for its first anthrax run. But then came surprising news from Japan. As citizens, the biowarfare researchers celebrated the American victory. But as government scientists, they knew they had a problem. Another unconventional weapon had proved itself in war.

Jeanne Guillemin, Sociologist: After Hiroshima and Nagasaki, biological weapons were put in a kind of a shadow. They didn’t look as powerful or promising as they had before the revelations about what a nuclear weapon could do.

Narrator: Nuclear weapons were now in ascendance. After three frantic years, the U.S. biological warfare program seemed headed for extinction.

Then, an unexpected reprieve. Not long after the war’s end, the U.S. received unconfirmed intelligence of biological weapons research conducted by America’s wartime ally — the Soviet Union. The looming Cold War would drive the American program for decades to come. The U.S. germ program was launched in World War II because of reports of German and Japanese bioweapons research. Now with the war over, America dispatched investigators to uncover the real extent of its defeated enemies’ germ technology. In Germany, the U.S. had expected to find a large biological program. But no one calculated that Hitler, wounded in a chemical attack in World War I, would constrain the development of a German program.

Brian Balmer, Author: As it turned out, the German program was very scattered, and Hitler himself had given an order very early in the war that there was to be no offensive biological weapons research.