American Experience (1988) s19e08 Episode Script

1
Transcribed and synchronized by Andante
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In November 1969, President Richard
Nixon made a startling declaration.
The United States of
America will renounce the
use of any form of deadly biological
weapons that either kill or incapacitate.
Nixon's announcement
was widely acclaimed.
Yet few Americans knew
that for more than 25 years,
the United States had been
operating an extensive research
program to harness germs as
weapons of mass destruction.
Born during a terrible world
war, America's bioweapons
program was fueled by fear
and insulated with secrecy.
Biological weapons are designed
to kill vast numbers of civilians.
You couldn't have these programs out in the
open because the public should not know.
American researchers
would enter uncharted territory
as they ran an escalating
series of experiments,
ultimately using human subjects.
I've read the day-to-day notebooks
of the laboratory scientists.
They never reached an endpoint.
They kept pushing that point
farther and farther every day.
There is an appeal to these weapons
to certain members of
the scientific community,
almost being seduced by the dark side.
It's essentially invisible.
You can't see it.
You can't hear it. You can't smell it.
A biological weapon is alive.
What it wants to do is
survive and reproduce itself
inside a host, a human body.
On December 9, 1942, the U.S.
government convened a secret
meeting at the National Academy
of Sciences in Washington, D.C.
Army officers had urgent questions
for an elite group of scientists.
America and its allies were
fighting a horrific world war.
Intelligence suggested
that Germany might soon
target Britain with a
terrifying new weapon,
a bomb packed with biological agents.
The meeting was called to
respond to a critical British request.
Could the Americans create a
large-scale biological warfare program
to help their allies and
do it virtually overnight?
If you brought all that we
knew about microbiology
and infectious diseases
into a military context,
you could develop a weapon
that would be amazingly effective.
It would be dangerous.
It could change the course of the war.
Only a few months before,
the President of the United States
had grappled with the issue
of biological weapons.
"I have been loathe to believe that any
nation," Franklin Roosevelt said,
"even our present enemies would
be willing to loose upon mankind
such terrible and inhumane weapons."
Secretary of War Henry
Stimson thought differently.
"Biological warfare is dirty
business," he wrote to Roosevelt.
"But I think we must be prepared.
"The President approved the launch
of America's biological warfare program.
For the first time, U.S.
researchers would be trying to
make weapons from the
deadliest germs known to science.
"Once you're looking at a science,
not strictly for the
benefits that it can bring,
but for the damage it can inflict on
an enemy, you're in a whole new world.
"Now, at the request of a desperate ally,
America was entering a realm lacking
clear ethical limits, where science
and secrecy would go hand in hand.
As the meeting broke up, the researchers
were now warned anyone who leaked
details of the discussion would face
40 years in prison, and a $10,000 fine.
By the time of the Washington
meeting, German bombs
had been raining down
on Britain for two years.
The English feared that the next
bomb might carry a biological payload.
"You can look at the British from 1940,
when the Blitz is going on.
That's when they decide that they're going
to start a biological weapons program.
They are absolutely at the
edge. They're really desperate,
and they want to seek any
kind of defense that they can.
"In July 1942, Britain began
secret trials of unconventional
weapons on a small Scottish
island called Gruenard.
"It was picked because of its
remoteness, partly for reasons of secrecy,
but also partly because there were very
few populated areas around the island.
"The British believed they had
a weapon that would disperse
infectious germs into the air.
In their labs, they had evaluated
a handful of lethal agents.
Now in the field, they would
test the most promising,
the bacterium that causes
the dreaded disease, anthrax.
Led by bacteriologists Paul Files,
the team first considered
how far beyond the island
wind might spread the germs.
Then they positioned their subjects,
a score of sheep,
purchased from local crafters.
A scaffolding held a bomb
packed with hearty anthrax spores.
They really have to turn
to an agent like anthrax
because the anthrax spore is able to
withstand the pressure of an explosion.
This was an anti-personnel bomb,
but obviously doing
experiments with humans
with anthrax was out of the question.
Over the next minutes, the cloud
of germs passed over the animals.
For several days, nothing.
Then the sheep began to
tremble and stagger,
blood oozed from their
bodies shortly before death.
What Files' experience on
Gerunard Island had shown was
that an anti-personnel biological
bomb could be produced.
What it did convince the Allies of was
that they had a really potent weapon.
A potent weapon, but one
exceedingly hard to contain.
The dead sheep were put at the
bottom of a cliff with some explosives.
The explosives were
let off to bury the sheep.
One or two of the sheep were
blown into the water and floated away.
Soon animals began to die on the mainland.
If word of the lethal experiment got
out, Files feared, the public would panic.
British security services
concocted a story.
Greek sailors had tossed
infected carcasses overboard.
The British reimbursed farmers
on behalf of the Greek government.
Files had a successful field
trial, but scant resources.
To move into production,
the British would need American help.
One of the advantages of bringing the
US into the research on biological warfare,
as far as British was concerned, was that
they didn't have the facilities,
the resources, the money.
A British politician of the day described
the United States as a gigantic boiler.
Once the fire is lighted under it, there
is no limit to the power it can generate.
Files had lit the boiler.
In spring 1943, American
scientists and staff began
arriving at a sleepy
airstrip in rural Maryland.
Operating under the army's
chemical warfare service,
Camp Dietrich would
become the top secret enclave
for enthusiastic American
bio-warfare researchers.
They were passionate about their science.
They were the best in the country.
If someone said to you,
"Here's an unlimited
budget, here's all the
equipment you need,
tell me which kind of building
you want to work in, we'll build it.
"You would jump at that opportunity,
and that's exactly what they did.
But the imperative was
we need results very quickly.
The American bio-weapons
program would embody the same
security precautions that
the British had adopted.
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 Dietrich.
I remember one time we had
a party and somebody said,
"Hey, a lot of bacteriologists
here, aren't they?
"That was a quickly shushed step.
We were taught at Dietrich,
"Don't talk about Dietrich.
"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.
Dietrich's scientific
director was Ira Baldwin,
the 47-year-old chairman of
the Bacteriology Department
at the University of Wisconsin.
In one sense, Baldwin was an
unlikely choice to lead the project.
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
Dr. Baldwin would have
rejected the value of
using biological warfare
and the ethics of
using biological warfare.
Like other Dietrich
scientists, Baldwin struggled
over his decision, but then
quickly got down to work.
It was wartime.
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.
Do I find anything morally wrong with the
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.
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.
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.
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.
The British provided de-trick
with the botulinum recipe.
Scaling it up was Ira Baldwin's job.
He built a temporary tar paper shack,
protected by guards
armed with machine guns.
It ran 24 hours a day, seven days a week.
Researchers tested the
deadly toxin on mice,
but no onecould say exactly what would
happen in human beings.
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.
A special plan provided for staff who
might be accidentally killed on the job.
It were to be buried on De-Trick'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.
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.
In 1925 in Geneva, over
30 nations signed a protocol
banning first use of
unconventional weapons.
Germs and chemicals alike.
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.
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 opened
to the scientific creation
of new weapons of mass destruction.
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.
In 1944, V1 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 Dietrich'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
voice 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,
Dietrich 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 60 million dollars.
Thousands of workers at
Dietrich 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.
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.
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 enemy's 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.
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.
But in Japan, Americans were
surprised by the ways the germ
research surpassed what
wartime intelligence had suggested.
The name of one officer
and physician kept coming up.
One informant called
him "the germ man.
"Another said his entire career
starts with germs and ends with germs.
He was Shiro Ishii,
the driving force behind
Japan's secret biological
weapons program.
Ishii was interrogated by
Dietrich investigators in May 1947.
And what came out exceeded anything
the British or Americans had imagined.
Dietrich researchers could
now piece together the
story of Japan's No Holds
Bar germ warfare program.
Its headquarters was a facility called Unit
731 in a Japanese-controlled
region of China.
The site housed 3,000
Japanese personnel and included
labs, a Shinto temple,
a cinema, and a brothel.
Ishii, like his allied counterparts,
understood the need for the utmost secrecy.
He operated under a cover as chief of
the water purification and epidemic corps.
He had tremendous access to human
subjects, to mostly peasant Han Chinese.
He would just pick people up
out of their homes or off
the street and bring them
in, and keep them captive,
and also then perform on them
really atrocious experiments
equal to anything that was ever
conducted in the Nazi death camps.
The human experiments
always ended in death.
Even those who recovered from
the disease were killed so that
their autopsies could be
completed and added to the files.
They sought the scientific information
so avidly they often did the autopsy
before the patient died so that
the tissues would be perfectly fresh.
If you look at the number of people
who were murdered in the facility
in experiments, they were at least 3,000
and more likely closer to 10,000 people.
Ishii and his team infected people
with germs causing plague, cholera,
dysentery, and typhoid, but
they had a preferred lethal agent.
They conducted human subjects
experiments with antrax, something that
the United States and the United
Kingdom scientists may have theorized,
but they had never brought
themselves to that actuality.
If you inhale, anthrax spores into
your lungs, you can come down with
pulmonary anthrax. It's a very bad
disease that is very hard to survive.
Your lungs fill up with
fluid, your skin turns blue.
The lymph nodes inside
the chest can swell up
to the size of tennis
balls and can rupture.
It's a very painful, grisly death.
The Japanese experiments
were not confined to the laboratory.
They also took place in Chinese cities.
One of the weapons that
Ishii developed were fleas
that had been infected
with the plague bacterium.
These were released from airplanes
and dropped over Chinese cities.
Outside Ishii's compounds,
thousands of Chinese were infected
with black death and other
diseases spread by Japan's forces.
The extent of Ishii's experiments
amazed the American investigators.
The more they learned about
the Japanese program,
the more they wanted to know
about the Japanese program.
The work that the
Japanese did was beyond
the experience of those
American scientists.
The Japanese had crossed an ethical line.
All of the work in America
had been done on animals.
The Japanese data was a proof test.
It showed that a weapon could kill people.
Ishii had kept what appeared to
be meticulous records,
including autopsy diagrams and
microscope slides of human tissue.
In exchange for his human
data, Ishii wanted immunity from
war crimes prosecution for
himself and his colleagues.
His case came to the top Allied
commander in post-war Japan.
General Douglas MacArthur.
He took the matter to
the Joint Chiefs of Staff.
They gave MacArthur a free
hand, but stressed the importance
of hiding by a warfare
information from the Soviets.
By early 1948, the
U.S. understood that
it was fighting a cold
war with its former ally.
Americans saw the Soviet
Union already in control of Eastern
Europe as a ruthless nation in
pursuit of unconventional weapons.
That March, MacArthur formally
approved a highly secret deal with Ishii.
In Nuremberg, Germany, Nazi
doctors had been convicted and hanged.
The Tokyo war crimes trial
would play out differently.
Not a single bio warfare
case was prosecuted.
The immunity deal was a disgrace.
The Japanese workers deserved
to be tried for their war crimes.
If that had happened, there would have
been a precedent against such things.
Dietrich researchers considered the deal
helpful for the American germ program.
It put unique human data in their hands.
It suppressed testimony that might
have encouraged Soviet scientists,
and it offered something
else just as important.
The United States got
secrecy around its own program.
Think of it.
If the Japanese scientists
had been prosecuted in Tokyo,
the world would have
reacted with such horror
that it would have been
very difficult for Americans
to move forward with an offensive
biological weapons program.
But thanks to the deal, the program was
advancing once again, faster than ever.
In the early years of the Cold
War, many Americans and
Dietrich workers in particular feared
the worst from the Soviets.
We felt very strongly
that the Soviet Union
had a very strong program
in biological warfare
and that we were putting our lives at risk
to work with all these nasty organisms.
The U.S. military concluded
it had to make plans,
despite not knowing if the Soviets
really had germ weapons.
If they do, do you need them yourself?
If you had no nuclear weapons,
I think the decision would have been
we'd better have a biological capability.
And we would be in bad
shape if we found out that
they did and had nothing
of that sort ourselves.
Because the U.S. still had few nuclear
bombs, germ weapons got a boost.
The biological weapons
program was able to step up
and at least claim that it could provide
a weapon of mass destruction.
It would augment the atomic arsenal.
With the American Biological
Warfare program ramping up,
Dietrich researchers had high hopes
for the human data from Japan.
They were deeply disappointed.
It turned out that sheer ishi was
not the kind of scientist they wanted.
What they wanted was a scientist
who would tell them how many
airborne bacteria would infect
people a half a mile downwind.
There was nothing like this
in the Japanese documents.
The U.S. had let war criminals go
free in exchange for junk science.
American bioweapons researchers
now came to a sobering realization.
If they wanted reliable human data,
they would have to get it themselves.
On a sticky August day in 1949,
technicians from Dietrich visited
the Pentagon on a secret mission.
Disguised as maintenance workers, they
used simulants, non-infectious bacteria,
to assess the vulnerability of
people inside large buildings to attack.
Only a few of the Pentagon's
employees were aware of the test.
A technical success, the
Pentagon trial revealed
the threat and promise
of germs for sabotage.
But the American biological program had
ambitions beyond workers and buildings.
The characteristic of biological
weapons is the ability
to cover very large areas with
wind-borne disease organisms.
Automatically, that tells
you that if there is any utility
to biological weapons, it
lies in the attack of civilians.
This is a great change in notions of
conducting war, waging
war in the 20th century.
You have to start thinking of the
enemy's civilian as aiding and abetting
the enemy as part and parcel of the
aggression that you're trying to overcome.
So your victory may depend
greatly on the killing of civilians.
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.
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 stimulant
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 stimulants.
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 by a warfare 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.
Biological warfare. What do they expect
me to do about it? It's not my headache.
You're wrong. You had better find out
the facts about biological warfare or BW.
There's a new poison. One ounce can
kill all the people in the United States.
Germ warfare can wipe out an entire city.
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 Dietrich.
They stepped up to a new
testing facility.
The eight-ball was a million-litre 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.
2,200 of them, called the
white coats, agreed to serve in
experiments, including inhaling
germs they knew might make them sick.
All human studies were approved
by the Secretary of Defense.
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.
Some white coat trials evaluated
new vaccines developed at Dietrich,
but curing disease was not
the primary goal of the studies.
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.
Bill Patrick helped prepare the
germs inhaled by the white coats.
You stick your nose into
a hood that's attached
to a tank, you don't smell it,
you don't see it.
The psychological impact of this, I think,
would be very, very difficult to take.
In the white coat era, Dietrich scientists
worked with a wider variety of germs.
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.
Hundreds of white coats
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, Dietrich scientists
prepared for America's
first outdoor test of infectious
germs on human subjects.
They arranged for a group of
white coats to be flown to Utah.
I know that they were not
initially going to harm us in any way,
that they had our best interests at heart.
You have to remember 18, 19-year-old kids.
It was all kind of a big adventure.
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 caused
Q fever, a debilitating infection.
Downwind, white coats waited.
A half-mile line of platforms held 30 men,
300 guinea pigs, and 75 monkeys.
The monkeys' 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
upset on the stool, face the
wind, just breathe naturally.
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
white coats were picked up.
Their contaminated clothes
were incinerated,
and the men boarded a flight
to return to Maryland that night.
Back at Dietrich, the white
coats passed the time,
as the researchers waited to see
if they'd come down with Q fever.
They had all kinds of
activities for us to do.
We could we played games, we
had ping pong, and we shot pool.
After about two weeks, most of
the exposed men began to fall ill.
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.
The ill men took antibiotics.
The one was hospitalized for months.
All of the white coats were covered.
With the cooperation of seventh-day
Adventists, researchers had proved that
wind-borne 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 test began early in 1965,
as barges took position near
a Pacific atoll called Johnston.
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
spacesuits and probably quite nervous.
A low-flying military plane
sprayed a 32-mile line of germs,
germs that cause a lethal
disease tuleremia, or rabbit fever.
Drifting over a vast swath of ocean, the
microbes remained infectious for 60 miles.
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.
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.
In theory, a single jet
could knock out a city.
It could perhaps infect as many as half
the people in Los Angeles with tuleremia.
Though skeptics said the results
were oversold,
Dietrich researchers were jubilant.
After 20 years of hard work,
they believed they had made the case
that biological weapons deserved
a place in the U.S. arsenal.
In fact, they may have
succeeded too well.
I think it frightened the U.S.
government. It was relatively easy
to make biological weapons,
relatively easy to disperse them.
It wasn't as difficult by any means
as building a hydrogen bomb.
There was a thinking
here that we don't really
want to publicize how
powerful these weapons are,
because all we're really
doing is proving
to the rest of the world that
biological weapons work.
Even as the trials were being
conducted in the Pacific,
other events were casting all
unconventional weapons
in a negative light.
New stories broke about the
American use of tear gas in Vietnam,
the first combat use of a chemical
weapon by the U.S. since World War I.
America was also spraying a chemical
defoliant tested at Dietrich, Agent Orange.
Public protests erupted.
Do you think German warfare
would be justified in Vietnam
if it shortened the war and saved
the lives of U.S. servicemen?
I feel that the best way to
save lives of U.S. servicemen
is to pull them out of Vietnam
immediately.
Adding to the controversy,
a news story in February 1969
disclosed an accident at the
Army's Dugway Proving Ground.
At a nearby Utah ranch,
an errant cloud of nerve gas
was claimed
to have killed 6,000 sheep.
The Army finally admitted
that they had conducted
experiments in the area
with nerve gas agents.
There are too many confusing
aspects. We have been working in
this area for 25 years in this
particular part of this country.
And we have never done anything
to damage the surrounding area.
If we are the cause of this,
we have a problem.
For critics, the incidents
strengthened the argument that
unconventional weapons of
all types could not be controlled.
For bio warfare researchers,
it reinforced the need
for secrecy established
long ago at Gruenard Island.
Germ weapons programs could not
survive the sunlight of public scrutiny.
In Washington, President Richard Nixon was
feeling the mounting political pressure.
His national security adviser,
Henry Kissinger, ordered a full review
of American chemical and
biological weapons policy in May 1969.
Among the invited contributors was
Harvard biologist Matthew Messelson.
Messelson had been
pushing for a reassessment
of America's unconventional
weapons strategy.
Working for the U.S. Armed Control
and Disarmament Agency,
he had visited Fort Dietrich.
I asked my hosts what value
they saw in these weapons.
And the main answer I got back was
that it would save money, that it
was cheaper than nuclear weapons.
I was amazed at this answer.
I took a little thought,
but not much, to realize that
to pioneer a cheap
weapon of mass destruction
is exactly what the United
States should never do.
Kissinger presented Nixon
with Messelson's brief,
arguing that biological weapons
were redundant with nuclear weapons
and easier for poor countries to make.
The U.S. had been developing
biological warfare since World War II.
Now the President's advisers
undercut the weapons.
They had a short shelf life.
They were sensitive to weather,
and germs might get out of control.
On November 25th, 1969,
Nixon surprised the world.
Biological warfare, which is
commonly called germ warfare,
this has massive unpredictable and
potentially uncontrollable consequences.
It may produce global
epidemics and profoundly
affect the health of future generations.
Therefore, I have decided that the
United States of America will renounce
the use of any form of deadly biological
weapons that either kill or incapacitate.
Mankind already carries in its own hands
too many of the seeds
of its own destruction.
Nixon was under great pressure
to do something, and disavowing
biological weapons was an
easy bone to throw to his critics.
Nixon had killed the American
offensive biological weapons program
after nearly
three decades of secret work.
It enabled us to take
the moral high ground
and to say we've ended our program,
and other countries should do the same.
I thought that the decision
he made was historic.
It was good for the United States,
even better good for all of humanity.
In 1975, the U.S. finally ratified
the 1925 Geneva Protocol
banning first use of germ weapons.
And a new international
agreement went further,
prohibiting the development
and possession of germ weapons.
The Biological Weapons
Convention outlawed
for the first time in history,
an entire class of weapons.
One of the ironies of the United
States biological weapons program
was that
it created its own monster.
Although it was designed
to reduce threats
to the United States, it in
fact increased the threats.
There's something in the military
thinking about war and honor
which puts biological weapons
in a very negative category.
It's like dirty weapons.
It's like poison.
It's like something that
somebody does on the sly
who really lacks a sense of honor.
We don't fight with poisons.
We don't fight with illness. This is alien.
There's more about the living
weapon at American Experience Online.
Watch Defense Department Films,
learn about diseases
that can be weaponized.
Access a map of bioweapon test sites
and go behind the scenes
with the filmmakers,
all this and more at PBS.org.
Major funding for American Experience is
provided by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation.
National Corporate Funding is provided
by Liberty Mutual and the Scots Company.
American Experience is also made possible
by the Corporation for Public Broadcasting
and by contributions to your PBS
station from viewers like you.
Thank you.
Transcribed and synchronized by Andante