American Experience

Martin Furmanski, Pathologist: A series of tests were done on American cities. There was still some doubt that biological weapons could be effective against a target the size of a city.

Narrator: An early trial took place in San Francisco in September 1950. Outside the Golden Gate Bridge, a Navy ship sailed a carefully charted course. It released a plume of simulant bacteria that dispersed like anthrax germs. If the test had been real, most of San Francisco’s 800,000 residents would have been exposed to anthrax, and a large number would have been infected. Three years later, as the Cold War raged on, American planners took their secret exercises into the American heartland. In St. Louis and Minneapolis, two cities thought to resemble potential Soviet targets, sprayers hidden in cars dispersed invisible clouds of simulants.

U.S. citizens knew almost nothing about the American germ program. Nor did most of their representatives in Washington. Every year, the House Appropriations Committee approved biowarfare spending within the defense budget. In closed meetings, only a few selected congressmen were briefed on the details. What the American public was told was how to respond to a biological attack.

Actor 1, What You Should Know About Biological Warfare (archival): Biological warfare? What do they expect me to do about it? It’s not my headache.

Narrator, What You Should Know About Biological Warfare (archival): You’re wrong. You had better find out the facts about biological warfare, or BW.

Actor 2, What You Should Know About Biological Warfare (archival): There’s a new poison. One ounce can kill all the people in the United States.

Actress, What You Should Know About Biological Warfare (archival): Germ warfare can wipe out an entire city!

Narrator: In a period of escalating Cold War tensions, Americans were encouraged by their government to prepare for a germ assault by a ruthless Soviet enemy thousands of miles away. Few were aware of what the U.S. had already done within its own borders. Fewer still knew what was coming next.

In 1954, a group of American servicemen — all volunteers — began participating in a series of experiments at Detrick. They stepped up to a new testing facility. The “eight-ball” was a million-liter sphere, the largest known aerosol testing chamber in the world. Inside, a sprayer or bomb set up a cloud of microbes.

The human subjects were Seventh Day Adventists. Conscientious objectors, they refused to carry arms. But 2,200 of them — called the “Whitecoats” — agreed to serve in experiments, including inhaling germs they knew might make them sick. All human studies were approved by the Secretary of Defense.

Martin Furmanski, Pathologist: The Seventh Day Adventists presented an ideal population for testing biological weapons. Their religious beliefs prevented them from smoking, from drinking, and in general, their religion taught them to live a healthy lifestyle. Even among healthy army recruits, they were perhaps the healthiest.

Narrator: Some Whitecoat trials evaluated new vaccines developed at Detrick. But curing disease was not the primary goal of the studies.

Martin Furmanski, Pathologist: The Adventists were told that they were undergoing these experiments in order to save lives. But, in fact, they were undergoing the experiments in order to calibrate a weapon to take lives.

Narrator: Bill Patrick helped prepare the germs inhaled by the Whitecoats.

Bill Patrick, Microbiologist: You stick your nose into a hood that’s attached to a tank and you don’t smell it, you don’t see it. The psychological impact of this, I think, would be very, very difficult to take.

Narrator: In the Whitecoat era, Detrick scientists worked with a wider variety of germs.

Richard Preston, Author: The American biowarfare program seemed to emphasize research into non-lethal biological weapons — weapons that wouldn’t necessarily make an enemy soldier dead, but would make that person pig-sick for a long time. A sick soldier is more damaging to an Army than a dead soldier. If a soldier is killed, all you need to do is just leave the soldier and continue with the campaign. But an ill soldier is going to require several people to take care of that person.

Narrator: Hundreds of Whitecoats would eventually inhale germs, including those causing tularemia and sandfly fever. At least half of the exposed men became sick, but all eventually recuperated. Researchers knew that it’s one thing to test disease agents in the lab, but quite another to make them work on the battlefield. So in 1955, Detrick scientists prepared for America’s first outdoor test of infectious germs on human subjects. They arranged for a group of Whitecoats to be flown to Utah.

Lloyd Long, Whitecoat Volunteer: I know that they were not intentionally going to harm us in any way, that they had our best interests at heart. You have to remember we’re eighteen-, nineteen-year-old kids. It was all kind of a big adventure.

Narrator: The site chosen for the experiment was the Dugway Proving Ground, located on a remote stretch of desert. At the end of a July day, scientists prepared to release an aerosol of germs that cause Q fever — a debilitating infection. Downwind, Whitecoats waited. A half-mile line of platforms held thirty men, three hundred guinea pigs, and seventy-five monkeys.

Lloyd Long, Whitecoat Volunteer: The monkey’s faces were blue. It was cold. The wind was coming right at us. I took my blanket and I put it over the monkeys. We knew that when the siren blew, this was the signal to get up, sit on the stool, face the wind, just breathe naturally.

Narrator: It took four minutes for the infectious cloud to reach the test stands. After the trials, men, monkeys and guinea pigs sat in the silence of the desert. Forty-five minutes later, the Whitecoats were picked up. Their contaminated clothes were incinerated, and the men boarded a flight to return to Maryland that night. Back at Detrick, the Whitecoats passed the time as the researchers waited to see if they’d come down with Q fever.

Lloyd Long, Whitecoat Volunteer: They had all kinds of activities for us to do. We could eat. We played games. We had ping-pong. We shot pool.

Narrator: After about two weeks, most of the exposed men began to fall ill.

Lloyd Long, Whitecoat Volunteer: I woke up feeling I was coming down with the worst case of flu that I ever had. My eyes were very, very sensitive to light. I wanted the room dark. I ached everywhere. I was just incredibly sick, just very, very sick.

Narrator: The ill men took antibiotics. Though one was hospitalized for months, all of the Whitecoats recovered. With the cooperation of Seventh Day Adventists, researchers had proved that windborne germs could infect a small group of people under field conditions. Now with the help of monkeys, they would try to determine if a biological weapon could match the impact of a hydrogen bomb. The tests began early in 1965, as barges took position near a Pacific atoll called Johnston.

Richard Preston, Author: Inside the barges were cages filled with monkeys. The monkeys were both on the deck of the barge and inside the hold of the barge. There were also human beings wearing space suits and probably quite nervous.

Narrator: A low-flying military plane sprayed a thirty-two-mile line of germs, germs that cause a lethal disease — tularemia, or rabbit fever. Drifting over a vast swath of ocean, the microbes remained infectious for sixty miles.

Richard Preston, Author: The barges were towed back to the island. And in the next days, the monkeys became ill. Ultimately, about half of the monkeys became sick, and of them, most of them died.

Bill Patrick, Microbiologist: These large-scale field tests demonstrated, beyond any shadow of a doubt, the feasibility of biological warfare. And that is why we know that one particular agent, when properly stabilized and properly disseminated, is a terrific, very effective weapon system.

Richard Preston, Author: In theory, a single jet could knock out a city. It could perhaps infect as many as half the people in Los Angeles with tularemia.