Great Britain and Canada began investigating biological agents and delivery systems in 1940, Ken Alibek explains (in Biohazard), but President Franklin D. Roosevelt didn’t establish a program until fifteen months after the United States entered World War II, in March 1943:
Based on what Patrick told me of the early history of their program, Americans knew nothing of the ambitious weapons-making drive we [the USSR] had launched in the 1920s.
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The Americans were not fully persuaded until their British and Canadian allies noted that the Germans were suspected of having used glanders against Romanian cavalry during World War I and seemed to be amassing a larger bacteriological arsenal. The Canadians had converted an agricultural experiment station in Suffield, Alberta, into a testing area for anthrax. In southern England, an old chemical warfare proving ground at Porton Down was adapted for the same purpose.
In America, a secret biological warfare unit called the War Research Service was created to work with its British and Canadian counterparts. George W. Merck, president of Merck & Co. Inc., a leading U.S. pharmaceutical firm, was the unit’s first director.
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They settled on four principal sites: a 2,000-acre tract on Horn Island near Pascagoula, Mississippi; the Dugway chemical warfare testing facility in the Utah desert; a 6,100-acre munitions manufacturing complex at Terre Haute, Indiana; and the old National Guard installation at Frederick, Maryland.
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More than seventeen hundred people worked at Camp Detrick during the war years, investigating glanders, brucellosis, cholera, dysentery, plague, and typhus.
Anthrax was the largest project. Scientists built a pilot plant capable of producing anthrax in ten-thousand-gallon tanks. They were so successful that Britain placed an order for five hundred thousand anthrax bombs from the facility in September 1944.
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Fears that the Germans would use biological munitions in their unmanned “buzz bomb” raids over English cities, or to repel the D-Day force, never materialized.
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Some facilities were phased out, but revelations about Japan’s Unit 731 forestalled any serious discussion about ending the American program.
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Camp Detrick sent scientists to Japan to interrogate the commanders of Unit 731, who gave details of their program in return for avoiding prosecution for war crimes. Their reports convinced Washington that biological weapons could be developed in greater quantities and with far greater effectiveness than anyone had suspected. The British came to a similar conclusion and decided to upgrade their testing and research unit at Porton Down and at a test site on the Scottish island of Gruinard.
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Beginning in 1951, agricultural agents were developed at Camp Detrick and other facilities to attack the Soviet wheat crop and the rice paddies of Communist China. The pathogens were stored at Edgewood Arsenal in Maryland, as well as at Rocky Mountain Arsenal near Denver, which also manufactured plutonium for nuclear weapons.
U.S. bioweaponeers went on to explore antipersonnel agents such as tularemia, Venezuelan equine encephalitis, and staphylococcal enterotoxin B. Aerosols were tested on animals at Deseret Island in the Pacific Ocean and at Dugway Proving Ground in Utah. They conducted experiments with simulated weapons, as we did, in urban areas.
Human tests took place in 1955 on a group of young Seventh Day Adventists who volunteered as an alternative to military service. The volunteers were exposed to Q fever, which is not lethal and can be treated with antibiotics, in a program called Project Whitecoat, or Operation CD-22.
By the late 1960s, twenty-two microorganisms were under study, and there were plans to weaponize hemorrhagic fevers such as the Machupo virus and Rift Valley fever.
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Nixon, convinced by his advisers that biological warfare was impractical, signed an executive order on November 25, 1969, renouncing the use of lethal biological agents and weapons and promising to confine American biological research to “defensive measures” such as immunization and bio-safety.
We didn’t believe a word of Nixon’s announcement. Even though the massive U.S. biological munitions stockpile was ordered to be destroyed, and some twenty-two hundred researchers and technicians lost their jobs, we thought the Americans were only wrapping a thicker cloak around their activities.
Nixon turned most of Camp Detrick’s buildings over to the National Cancer Institute and assigned to the complex the task of finding a cure for cancer.