During the Cold War, the US government wanted to understand which cities are most susceptible to biological attacks. Nothing better than to arrange a "training experiment" did not occur to them, and in 1950 the fleet sent a boat to San Francisco with a cargo of contaminated test tubes. The operation was named "C-Spray".
Over the course of seven days, the US Navy sprayed a significant number of Serratia Marcescens and Bacillus Globigii bacteria from huge cannons located on a minesweeper, forming a whole cloud that hovered over 800 thousand inhabitants of the bay. The location of the operation was chosen because of its proximity to the sea, high population density, the presence of skyscrapers, and also because the large cloud cover in this area helped to hide a lot of pathogenic substances and contributed to its spread to nearby cities.
The purpose of the exercise: to study the effect of this weapon NOT on human health, but on:
- Wind currents that carried deadly bacteria.
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- A haze that would move bacteria over great distances.
- The time it takes for bacteria to reach other areas and the amount of bacteria it takes to infect them.
- Investigate the vulnerability of a large city as a result of the use of biological weapons, its impact on the environment and how to combat it.
Serratia Marcescens was chosen for two reasons:
1. This bacterium is not as deadly as anthrax (Bacillus Anthracis), the same one that Saddam Hussein did not send in mail envelopes to the United States in 2003 (this was one of the pretexts for invading Iraq). This was done by FBI agent Bruce Ivins, who worked for 18 years at the Military Institute for the Study of Infectious Diseases and developed a vaccine against this bacterium: he infected 22 of his compatriots, five of whom died.
2. It produces red pigment, making it a kind of "marker", the spread of which is easy to track in space.
In the same year, similar experiments were carried out in Calhoun, Alabama, and Key West, Florida, causing a surge in pneumonia.
The bottom line: it was a real success for the criminal military-industrial complex and its political representatives, becoming the largest experiment with biological weapons in history. Samples taken in 43 areas of the spread of bacteria showed their effectiveness: in addition to the bay, nearby cities were infected with pathogenic substances. Their residents find out much later, thanks to an investigative journalism conducted by the Longday Newsday newspaper in 1976.
However, Operation C-Spray was neither the first nor the last in which the United States tested biological weapons.
Scary chronology
Data from the American press:
1920: While experimenting with humans, the military sprayed Serratia Marcescens over a group of US military personnel to assess their effects. They soon learn that these bacteria cause sepsis, respiratory disease, endocarditis, osteomyelitis, eye infections, and meningitis.
Data from the American press:
1920: While experimenting with humans, the military sprayed Serratia Marcescens over a group of US military personnel to assess their effects. They soon learn that these bacteria cause sepsis, respiratory disease, endocarditis, osteomyelitis, eye infections, and meningitis.
1930s: The Rockefeller Institute for Medical Research (founded in 1901) used American citizens as guinea pigs, writes the Whiteout Press magazine la revista Whiteout Press, secretly infecting them with cancer cells. In 1947, the Zika virus was discovered at this institute.
1942: The American biological weapons development program becomes a state-owned program in accordance with the decree of President F. Roosevelt.
1943: US Army Medical Command investigates at Fort Detrick, Maryland the biological weapons of Siberian plague, brucellosis (causing Maltese fever), botulinum toxin, plague, rinderpest, Francisella tularensis bacteria, coccidioidomycosis (causing desert rheumatism), and other causative agents of dangerous diseases. In this case, experiments are carried out on living organisms. From 1954 to 1973, the center conducted Operation Whitecoat, which examined the effects of Q fever, yellow fever and bubonic plague on hundreds of monkeys, all of which died after horrific torture. Then tests were carried out on at least 2,200 people without their knowledge. They were invited to participate in the experiment through the Adventist Church. Like the monkeysthey were tied to chairs and exposed to the rays of the sun and sprayed with pathogenic bacteria (from the outside one might think that these are prisoners of conscience who are punished for condemning the war). The experiment was carried out with the aim of working out methods of filling bombs with these substances in order to use them in settlements with a certain number of inhabitants.
1945: Project Paperclip, run by the CIA and the military, aimed to locate German and Japanese scientists accused of war crimes, and offer them exemptions from prosecution and new documents in exchange for participation in secret US projects, including development of atomic and microbiological weapons.
1947: The Code of Nuremberg, developed from the exposure of human experiments conducted in German and Japanese concentration camps, established ethical standards for such research, in particular: 1) they could only be carried out with the consent of volunteers, who 2) had to be duly informed about the nature of the experiments and their consequences. Only four years later, the United States would violate this Code by carrying out one of the largest human experiments in history in San Francisco.
1948: The United States creates a Committee on Bacteriological Warfare and develops a program of experiments on the population. In the same year, the Pentagon opens the Center for Biological Warfare on the island of San Jose in Panama, where it arranges a warehouse of poisonous substances, mustard gas, and nerve agents.
1950: As a result of the aforementioned Operation C-Spray, eleven San Franciscans were admitted to Stanford Hospital with severe urinary tract infections. The huge amount of Serratia Marcescens bacteria in the bodies of patients alerted lab employee Ann Zuckerman, who sounded the alarm. Discouraged doctors could not understand where they came from. The family of 75-year-old Edward Nevin, the only deceased patient who underwent rehabilitation after surgery but died soon after from infection of his heart valves, unsuccessfully tried to sue the federal government for his death. As the newspaper "San Francisco Chronicle" wrote, bacteria reappeared in some parts of the bay, as if proving their "immortality". Bioterrorism expert Leonard Cole discusses this case in his book Secret Clouds.
1951: The military injects black workers at the Norfolk Industrial Supply Center with the fungus Aspergillus fumigatus, which causes lung disease and asthma in immunocompromised people, to determine the susceptibility of African Americans to the infection.
1954: Red Diaper Syndrome. This was the name of an experiment that was conducted at the University of Wisconsin on newborns infected with the bacteria Serratia Marcescens. Children's urine of red color allowed to study the mutation of bacteria.
May 1965: Military sprays Bacillus Globigii at Washington Airport and Grehound Lines bus stop. Dozens of passengers took them to 35 cities in seven states.
1966: Between June 7 and June 10, Washington airport biologically treated passengers' baggage, and New York subway vents dropped biomaterial cylinders, endangering nearly a million lives. “The point is that there are many underground communications in the USSR, Europe and South America,” the organizers said. They needed to see how the chemicals spread.
1967: The Pentagon detonates artillery shells and rockets filled with nerve gas sarin in a forest reserve in Hawaii, causing coma and the death of an unspecified number of people. The purpose of the trial, called Red Oak Phase 1, was to “evaluate its effectiveness in a rainforest environment”.
1969: Scientists inform President R. Nixon that the capabilities of the US biological weapons are limited because they do not have the required amount of biological substances in powder form. This year, Nixon is shutting down the “offensive,” but not defensive, portion of the biological weapons program. In the 1970s, the military sprayed zinc sulfide and cadmium (one of the most highly toxic metals) over Minnesota and other midwestern states, finding that their particles spread up to 1,600 kilometers. The Pentagon's Biological Weapons Committee sought to launch "harmless" microorganisms into ventilation systems, subways and water pipes in order to assess the effectiveness of biological carriers as a tool for sabotage, as well as the feasibility of their use during special operations.
1990s: Inmates in Texas prisons tested new chemical weapons that would later be used against Iraqi civilians. The so-called "Persian Gulf Syndrome" was discovered when the very military who sprayed these toxic substances over the Iraqis themselves became seriously ill, and the diseases were passed on to their children, who were born with monstrous physical disabilities. Garth Nicholson, founder of the California Institute of Molecular Medicine, wrote: "Thousands of American Gulf War veterans are suffering the effects of radiation, chemical and biological weapons." It turns out that the weapons of mass destruction are in the hands of the prosecutor.
1994: Senator John Rockefeller's report reveals that for decades, the US military has deliberately exposed hundreds of thousands of its own soldiers to dangerous microbes, mustard gas, nerve gas, radiation, hallucinogenic and psychotropic substances.
2013: Veterans Today magazine claims the Pentagon has allocated $ 300 million for a secret biological warfare program at the Central Profile Laboratory in Tbilisi, Georgia, near the Russian border.
But isn't it the task of the army, special services and our leaders to protect citizens from enemies, as we are being persuaded?
Nazanin Armanian