Picture this: Aerosolized VX and sarin nerve gas descends on Navy ships. Biological and chemical agents are released over thousands of civilians. A germ able to wipe out a country’s wheat crop is stockpiled in secret.
What dastardly fiend is responsible? Iraq? Libya? North Korea? al-Qaida? No. The culprit is none other than our own government.
From 1962 to 1973, the Department of Defense planned 134 tests under Project 112, a chemical and biological weapons “vulnerability-testing program,” the Los Angeles Times reported. Earlier this year, the Pentagon admitted for the first time that some of the tests used real chemical and biological weapons, not harmless stimulants.

In all, 37 secret tests were conducted in California, Alaska, Florida, Hawaii, Maryland and Utah. Land tests in Alaska and Hawaii used artillery shells filled with sarin and VX gas — the same deadly stuff our government claims Saddam Hussein has been stockpiling. Navy trials off the coast of Florida, California and Hawaii tested the ability of ships and crew to perform under biological and chemical warfare. The code name for the sea tests Project Shipboard Hazard and Defense — “SHAD” for short. The Pentagon has said that both the crew and the team disseminating nerve gas wore protective gear and went through decontamination, according to the New York Times.
But the crew of ships exposed to biological agents wore no such protection. In effect, these sailors were guinea pigs.
Last Thursday on CNN, Navy vets George Brocklebank and Robert Bates told the Senate Armed Forces Subcommittee on Personnel how their ships sailed through mysterious mists released from planes. When Brocklebank asked the men who boarded his ship wearing funny suits what was going on, they told him to mind his own business. That was in 1965. Thirty-seven years later, he found out the truth.
That cloud encountered by the ship contained Bacillus globigii, a member of the anthrax family. Considered harmless at the time, it was later found to infect people with weak immune systems.
The Pentagon also admitted that 1,000 civilians might have been exposed to such germs in Oahu alone. How many people got sick? They did not keep track.
“I hear the sense of distress in your voices, that your government has let you down,” said Senator Max Cleland, who chaired Thursday’s hearing. Cleland can empathize. He lost both legs and his right arm to a grenade in Vietnam and felt disaffection at the government’s shabby treatment of disabled vets. Rather than give up, he worked to change the system and eventually headed the Veterans Administration.
With war against Iraq looming ahead, Cleland offered these words: “What an incredible irony that we are here focused on weapons of mass destruction in another country … and we’re having to pull like teeth from our own government information about what we did to our own people.”
One test occurred near Yeehaw Junction. No, it’s not a code name for the Pentagon, but a remote Florida town where our military tested wheat rust – a fungus not toxic to humans. Instead, it was developed to target Russia’s wheat crop. In case of war, we were prepared to kill millions of civilians.
The Cold War has ended, but our bad habits are hard to kick. In 2000, the London Observer reported that Congress was pressuring Columbia to eradicate coca plants using the deadly fungus Fusarium oxysporum, or Agent Green, as a condition for military aid. This fungus project employed many veterans of the Soviet germ warfare program. Fortunately, President Clinton retracted this condition, as it violated the treaties against biological warfare.
When our enemies begin to adopt our freedoms and liberties, we win. When we begin to adopt their evil tactics and disregard the value of human life, we lose. And we become our own worst enemy.