WASHINGTON — The U.S. military admitted Wednesday that its secret germ and chemical warfare testing program involved experiments on American soil, as well as Canada and Britain — far wider than originally believed.
Declassified reports disclosed by the Department of Defense show the army tested several lethal nerve gases, including Sarin, VX and Tabun, as well as a variety of possibly dangerous chemical agents in a series of tests between 1962 and 1973 in Alaska, Hawaii and Utah.
In one Alaska test called Elk Hunt, the nerve gas VX — which the Pentagon called “one of the most toxic substances ever synthesized” — was loaded into land mines and detonated underground and underwater. Army personnel in protective clothing “traversed the contaminated test grids” so the amount of VX picked up on their clothing could be measured.
“We would wear all this rubber gear and crawl through the grids,” said Jerrel Cook, 58, of Joplin, Mo., who was an Army private and an Elk Hunt volunteer in 1964.
The military also experimented with other more benign substances, including a wheat fungus in Florida in 1968 to determine its value as a biological warfare agent against agricultural crops.
William Winkenwerder Jr., a top Defense Department health official, told a House Veterans Affairs hearing Wednesday that the servicemen involved in tests using live biological agents were vaccinated beforehand. He said protective clothing also was used.
Many veterans who participated in other, earlier-disclosed secret tests have said that in their cases — regardless of the military’s assurances — they were neither given protective clothing nor told the nature of the tests.
Many of them now believe that they suffer similar ailments, including assorted types of cancer and respiratory problems, because of their involvement in the tests.
Cook, the Missouri veteran involved in the VX tests, said he had suffered from chronic respiratory problems since the 1970s. “We got into a mess and didn’t realize what we got into,” he said.
He recalled in an interview that when they asked about the nature of the tests, they were told that the army was experimenting with nerve agents to find the “right mixture to make people feel badly sick without really killing them real quick.”
Jonathan B. Perlin, deputy undersecretary for health for the Department of Veterans Affairs, testified that the agency was trying to reach all 5,000 SHAD veterans and the additional 500 involved in the latest land-based tests. He also said a $3 million, three-year study of the medical effects of Project SHAD was under way.
Rep. Christopher Smith, a New Jersey Republican and chairman of the Veterans Affairs Committee, said the VA needed to aggressively reach out to those veterans.
“There needs to be a sense of accountability,” Smith said. “Some of these men and women are sick and don’t know what to attribute it to.”