United States biological weapons program facts for kids

Kids Encyclopedia Facts

The United States biological weapons program was a secret project where the U.S. government researched and created biological weapons. It officially started in spring 1943 during World War II, ordered by President Franklin D. Roosevelt. The program continued after the war, building up a large collection of biological agents and weapons.

Over 27 years, the program developed and stored seven main biological agents. These included:

Bacillus anthracis (which causes anthrax)
Francisella tularensis (which causes tularemia)
Brucella spp (which causes brucellosis)
Coxiella burnetii (which causes Q-fever)
Venezuelan equine encephalitis virus
Botulinum toxin (which causes botulism)
Staphylococcal enterotoxin B

The program was kept very secret. Later, it was revealed that scientists did many lab and outdoor tests. Some outdoor tests used harmless substances on people who didn't know they were part of an experiment. The U.S. government's main goal was to stop other countries from using biological weapons against U.S. forces. If that failed, the U.S. planned to use its own biological weapons in return.

In 1969, President Richard Nixon stopped all parts of the U.S. biological weapons program that were meant for attacking others. In 1975, the U.S. agreed to two international treaties: the 1925 Geneva Protocol and the 1972 Biological Weapons Convention (BWC). These treaties made biological warfare illegal. However, some recent U.S. programs focused on defending against biological threats have caused concerns that the U.S. might be doing research that is not allowed by the United Nations.

How the Program Started and Grew

Early Ideas (1918–1941)

The U.S. first became interested in biological warfare near the end of World War I. At that time, the only substance tested was ricin, a poison from the castor plant. Tests showed that ricin could be attached to shrapnel and delivered by artillery shells. However, spreading ricin as a cloud in the air was less successful. Neither method was perfected before the war ended.

In the 1920s, some people within the U.S. Chemical Warfare Service (CWS) suggested starting a biological weapons program. But the head of the CWS, Amos Fries, decided it wouldn't be "profitable." Meanwhile, Shiro Ishii from Japan promoted biological weapons and visited research places around the world, including in the U.S. He wrongly thought the U.S. was developing biological weapons. During the years between the two World Wars, the U.S. did not focus on developing biological weapons.

World War II (1941–1945)

When World War II started, the United States Army still thought biological weapons were mostly impractical. But other countries like France, Japan, and the United Kingdom had already started their own programs. So, by 1942, the U.S. had no biological weapons.

Interest in biological weapons within the Chemical Warfare Service began in 1941. That fall, Henry L. Stimson, the U.S. Secretary of War, asked the National Academy of Sciences (NAS) to study biological warfare. He wrote that because of the dangers from potential enemies using biological warfare, investigations should start to look at the current situation and future possibilities.

The NAS formed a committee called the War Bureau of Consultants (WBC). In February 1942, this committee suggested that the U.S. should research and develop its own biological weapons program.

The British and the WBC's research pushed the U.S. to begin its program. In November 1942, President Franklin Roosevelt officially approved an American biological weapons program. He ordered Stimson to create the War Research Service (WRS). The WRS was officially meant to improve "public security and health," but its real job was to manage the U.S. biological warfare program. In spring 1943, the U.S. Army Biological Warfare Laboratories were set up at Fort Detrick in Frederick, Maryland.

The program grew quickly. By November 1943, the facility at Detrick was finished. The U.S. also built three other sites: a biological agent production plant in Vigo County, Indiana, a field-testing site on Horn Island in Mississippi, and another field site near Granite Peak in Utah. The security at Camp Detrick was so good that the public didn't learn about the wartime biological weapons research until January 1946, four months after the war ended.

Cold War Era (1947–1969)

After World War II, the U.S. biological warfare program became a strong, military-focused research and production effort, full of secrecy and debate. By 1950, the main U.S. biological weapons facility was at Fort Detrick in Maryland. Most research and development happened there, while production and testing took place at Pine Bluff, Arkansas, and Dugway Proving Ground, Utah. Pine Bluff Arsenal started making weapons-grade agents by 1954.

From 1952 to 1954, the Chemical Corps also had a biological weapons research facility at Fort Terry on Plum Island, New York. This facility focused on biological weapons that could harm animals. It researched more than a dozen possible agents. During the Cold War, the U.S. Army, Chemical Corps, and U.S. Air Force greatly expanded their biological warfare programs, especially for ways to deliver the weapons.

A report in 1969 to the Nixon administration stated that the American biological weapons ability was limited. It said there wasn't a large supply of dry (powdered) lethal or incapacitating biological agents.

Secret Testing on People

Field testing of biological weapons was done secretly using harmless substances and agents spread over large, open areas. The first large-scale test of how easily aerosols could spread, called Operation Sea-Spray, happened in the San Francisco Bay Area in September 1950. It used two types of bacteria, Bacillus globigii and Serratia marcescens, along with glowing particles. Bacillus species were chosen because they form spores and are similar to Bacillus anthracis (anthrax). S. marcescens was used because its red color made it easy to identify.

In 1966, the New York City Subway was contaminated with Bacillus globigii to see how anthrax might spread in a big city. More field tests using disease-causing species were done at Dugway Proving Ground, Utah, and animal studies were done at Eglin Air Force Base, Florida.

Scientists' Concerns

Many scientists disagreed with creating biological weapons. Theodor Rosebury, who worked at Fort Detrick, warned against their development during the Cold War. In 1945, Rosebury left Camp Detrick and published a book in 1949 called Peace or Pestilence?, explaining why biological weapons should be banned. In 1969, Harvard biologist Matthew Meselson argued that biological warfare programs would eventually hurt U.S. security because enemy nations could easily copy these weapons.

The public didn't know much about breakthroughs in biological warfare. This included new plants for producing anthrax, brucellosis, and anti-crop agents, as well as the development of the cluster bomb. The public was also unaware of ongoing studies, especially the outdoor experiments.

One controversial experiment in 1951 exposed a large number of African Americans to the fungus Aspergillus fumigatus to see if they were more likely to get infected. Scientists said this knowledge would help them prepare a defense against a deadlier form of the fungus. That same year, workers at the Norfolk Supply Center in Virginia were unknowingly exposed to Aspergillus fumigatus spores.

Another human research case was Operation Whitecoat. This experiment, which lasted ten years, involved volunteer servicemen from the Seventh Day Adventist church. They were exposed to tularaemia through aerosols and then treated with antibiotics. The goal of the experiment, unknown to the volunteers, was to figure out how to fill bombs with tularaemia for attacks on cities.

In the 1960s, the U.S. changed its main focus from biological agents that kill to those that would make people sick but not kill them. In 1964, research programs studied Enterotoxin type B, which can cause food poisoning. New research also included ways to prevent diseases (called prophylaxis). Pathogens studied included those causing anthrax, glanders, brucellosis, melioidosis, Venezuelan equine encephalitis, Q fever, coccidioidomycosis, and other plant and animal diseases.

The Vietnam War brought public attention to the U.S. biological weapons program. The use of chemicals and herbicides like Agent Orange led to international criticism and negatively affected how the U.S. public felt about biological weapons. Highly controversial human research programs and outdoor experiments were discovered.

The Nixon administration felt it needed to respond to the growing negative public opinion. The idea that biological weapons could become a "poor man's atom bomb" also helped end the program. President Nixon then announced that the U.S. would stop its biological warfare program on its own. He later signed the Biological and Toxin Weapons Convention in 1972.

End of the Program (1969–1973)

President Richard Nixon gave a speech on November 25, 1969, at Fort Detrick, officially ending all U.S. offensive biological weapons programs. Nixon said that biological weapons were unreliable. He stated:

The United States shall give up the use of deadly biological agents and weapons, and all other ways of biological warfare. The United States will only do biological research for defensive purposes, like making people immune and safety measures.

Nixon called his decision "unprecedented." It was the first review of the U.S. biological warfare program since 1954. Even without a review, the program's cost and size had grown since 1961. From 1943 to the end of World War II, the U.S. spent $400 million on biological weapons, mostly for research. By 1966, the budget was $38 million. When Nixon ended the program, it was costing $300 million each year. Nixon's statement limited all biological weapons research to defense only and ordered the destruction of the existing U.S. biological arsenal.

U.S. biological weapons were destroyed over the next few years. A $12 million plan was carried out at Pine Bluff Arsenal, where all U.S. anti-personnel biological agents were stored. This plan was finished in May 1972 and included cleaning up the facilities at Pine Bluff. Other agents, like anti-crop agents such as wheat stem rust, were stored at Beale Air Force Base and Rocky Mountain Arsenal. These anti-crop agents, along with agents at Fort Detrick used for research, were destroyed in March 1973.

International Agreements: Geneva Protocol and BWC

The 1925 Geneva Protocol banned bacteriological warfare. Most major countries agreed to it in the 1920s and 30s, but the United States had not yet signed it when World War II began. The Protocol faced opposition in the U.S. Senate, partly because the Chemical Warfare Service strongly lobbied against it.

Even so, on June 8, 1943, President Roosevelt stated that the U.S. would not be the first to use biological weapons. But opposition to the Protocol remained strong. In 1949, it was one of several old treaties returned to President Harry S. Truman without being signed.

When Nixon ended the U.S. biological weapons program in 1969, he also announced that he would resubmit the Geneva Protocol to the U.S. Senate. This showed that the Nixon administration was moving towards an international agreement to completely ban biological weapons. The Nixon administration became a leading voice against biological weapons, calling for an international treaty.

Talks about arms control eventually led to the Biological Weapons Convention (BWC), the international treaty that outlaws biological warfare. Starting in 1972, the Soviet Union, the United States, and more than 100 other countries signed the BWC. The United States finally signed the Geneva Protocol in 1975.

Agents Studied and Made into Weapons

When the U.S. biological warfare program ended in 1969, it had developed six mass-produced, ready-for-battle biological weapons. These were agents that cause anthrax, tularemia, brucellosis, Q-fever, Venezuelan equine encephalitis virus, and botulism. In addition, staphylococcal enterotoxin B was produced to make people sick but not kill them.

Besides these ready-to-use agents, the U.S. program researched how to turn more than 20 other agents into weapons. These included: smallpox, EEE and WEE, AHF, Hantavirus, BHF, Lassa fever, Coronavirus, melioidosis, plague, yellow fever, psittacosis, typhus, dengue fever, Rift Valley fever (RVF), CHIKV, late blight of potato, rinderpest, Newcastle disease, bird flu, and the toxin ricin.

The U.S. also developed a collection of biological agents to harm agriculture. These included rye stem rust spores, wheat stem rust spores, and the agent that causes rice blast.

A U.S. facility at Fort Terry focused mainly on biological agents that harm animals. The first agent considered for development was foot and mouth disease (FMD). Besides FMD, five other top-secret biological weapons projects were started on Plum Island. These researched RVF, rinderpest, African swine fever, and eleven other animal diseases.

Work on ways to deliver U.S. biological weapons led to the first mass-produced biological weapon in 1952, the M33 cluster bomb. The M33's smaller bomb, the cylindrical M114 bomb, was also ready for battle by 1952. Other delivery systems researched in the 1950s included the E77 balloon bomb and the E86 cluster bomb. The peak of U.S. biological weapons delivery system development was in the 1960s.

Claims of Use

Korean War Claims

In 1952, during the Korean War, China and North Korea claimed that mysterious disease outbreaks in their countries were caused by U.S. biological attacks. Even though the International Red Cross and World Health Organization disagreed, the Chinese government investigated. A committee led by Joseph Needham collected evidence, including stories from people who saw things, doctors, and four American Korean War prisoners who said the U.S. used biological weapons. In eastern Europe, China, and North Korea, many believed these accusations were true.

In 1998, Canadian researchers Stephen Endicott and Edward Hagerman argued in their book that the accusations were true. However, in the same year, other researchers released Soviet and Chinese documents that claimed the biological warfare accusation was a big disinformation campaign by the communists. A Japanese journalist also claimed to have seen evidence of a Soviet disinformation campaign and that the evidence supporting the attacks was faked.

In March 2010, the news program People & Power investigated these claims. Professor Mori Masataka looked at old bomb casings from U.S. biological weapons, documents from that time, and stories from people who saw things. He concluded that the United States did test biological weapons on North Korea during the Korean War.

In September 2020, U.S. author Jeffrey Kaye published declassified CIA reports that showed military units from North Korea and China reacting as if they were under biological weapons attacks, especially from bacteria-carrying insects. One report from February 26, 1952, said that a Chinese military unit found "a real flood of bacteria and germs from a plane by the enemy." Another report from March 6, 1952, said that a Korean People's Army brigade told its soldiers to take steps against 'bacteria' dropped by UN aircraft.

Cuba Claims

There have been rumors that the U.S. used biological weapons against the island nation of Cuba. Some people, like Noam Chomsky, claim there is evidence that the U.S. was involved in biological warfare in Cuba. These claims are debated.

In 1962, there were claims that CIA agents had contaminated a shipment of sugar in Cuba. Also in 1962, a Canadian agricultural technician helping the Cuban government claimed he was paid $5,000 to infect Cuban turkeys with the deadly Newcastle disease. Even though the technician later said he just kept the money, many Cubans and some U.S. citizens believed a secret biological agent caused a later outbreak of the disease in Cuban turkeys.

In 1971, the first serious outbreak of African Swine Fever in the Western Hemisphere happened in Cuba. The Cuban government claimed that U.S. secret biological warfare caused this outbreak, which led to the killing of 500,000 pigs to stop the disease from spreading. Six years later, a newspaper reported that anti-Castro saboteurs, with some support from U.S. Central Intelligence Agency officials, introduced the African swine fever virus into Cuba six weeks before the outbreak in 1971. This was supposedly done to hurt Cuba's economy and encourage people to oppose Fidel Castro.

Accusations continued from Cuba after the official end of the U.S. biological weapons program in 1973. The Cuban government blamed the U.S. for a 1981 outbreak of dengue fever that made more than 300,000 people sick. Dengue is carried by mosquitoes, the same type of yellow-fever mosquitoes used in Operation Big Buzz in 1955. Dengue 2 killed 158 people that year in Cuba, including 101 children under 15. This type of Dengue had not appeared in the Caribbean before this time. The fever appeared at the same time in three different areas hundreds of miles apart.

By July 1981, Cuba had widespread sugar cane rust, African Swine Fever, tobacco blue mold, Dengue 2, meningitis, hemorrhagic conjunctivitis, and several parasites affecting important crops like rice, corn, and potatoes. None of these had been present in the region before 1960.

Experiments and Tests

Insect Warfare Testing

The United States seriously researched using insects as weapons (called entomological warfare) during the Cold War. This type of biological warfare uses insects directly or as carriers of diseases. In the 1950s, the U.S. conducted several field tests using insect weapons. Operation Big Itch in 1954 tested bombs filled with uninfected fleas. In May 1955, over 300,000 yellow fever mosquitoes were dropped over parts of Georgia to see if they could survive and bite humans. These mosquito tests were known as Operation Big Buzz. The U.S. also did at least two other insect warfare tests, Operation Drop Kick and Operation May Day.

Clinical Trials

Operation Whitecoat involved controlled testing of many serious agents on military personnel. These individuals had agreed to the experiments and understood the risks. No deaths are known to have resulted from this program.

Outdoor Vulnerability Tests

In Military Areas

In August 1949, a U.S. Army Special Operations Division from Fort Detrick in Maryland set up its first test at The Pentagon in Washington, D.C.. Agents sprayed harmless bacteria into the building's air conditioning system and watched as the microbes spread throughout the Pentagon.

The U.S. military admits it tested several chemical and biological weapons on U.S. military personnel in desert facilities, including near Deseret Chemical Depot in Utah. However, they say these tests have only caused long-term illnesses in a few exposed people. Veterans who took part believe they were also exposed to Agent Orange. The Department of Veterans Affairs denies almost all claims for care and money made by veterans who believe they got sick from the tests.

For decades, the U.S. military kept silent about "Project 112," a series of tests overseen by the Army's Deseret Test Center in Salt Lake City. Project 112, starting in the 1960s, tested chemical and biological agents like VX, sarin, and E. coli on military personnel who didn't know they were being tested. After the Defense Department finally admitted to these tests on unknowing human subjects, it agreed to help the Veterans' Affairs Department find those who were exposed.

In Civilian Areas

Medical experiments were done on a large scale on civilians who had not agreed to participate. Often, these experiments took place in cities to test how widely substances would spread. Questions were raised about harmful health effects after experiments in San Francisco, California, were followed by a rise in hospital visits. However, in 1977, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention found no link between the testing and cases of pneumonia or influenza. The San Francisco test involved a U.S. Navy ship that sprayed Serratia marcescens from the bay; it traveled more than 30 miles. One test involved lab staff pretending to be passengers spraying harmless bacteria in Washington National Airport.

Scientists tested biological agents, including Bacillus globigii, which were thought to be harmless, in public places like subways. Light bulbs containing Bacillus globigii were dropped in New York City's subway system. The spread was strong enough to affect people prone to illness. Based on how widely it spread, thousands of people would have died if a dangerous microbe had been released in the same way.

A jet aircraft released material over Victoria, Texas, which was then tracked in the Florida Keys.

GAO Report Findings

In February 2008, the Government Accountability Office (GAO) released a report. It stated that tens of thousands of military personnel and civilians might have been exposed to biological and chemical substances during DOD tests. In 2003, the DOD reported it had identified 5,842 military personnel and estimated 350 civilians as possibly exposed during the testing, known as Project 112.

The GAO criticized the DOD's 2003 decision to stop looking for people affected by the tests, saying it was too soon. The GAO report also found that the DoD made no effort to tell civilians about their exposure. It also found that the United States Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) was not using available resources to inform veterans of possible exposure or to find out if they had died. After the DoD stopped looking for those affected, veteran health activists found about 600 more people who were possibly exposed during Project 112. Many of these newly identified people suffer from long-term illnesses that might have been caused by the biological or chemical testing.

Current Bio-Defense Program (After 1969)

Both the U.S. ban on biological weapons and the Biological Weapons Convention (BWC) limited any work in biological warfare to only defensive purposes. In reality, this gives countries that signed the BWC a lot of freedom to do biological weapons research because the BWC doesn't have rules for monitoring or enforcing it. The treaty is basically an agreement among members, supported by the long-held idea that biological warfare should not be used in battle.

After Nixon ended the U.S. biological weapons program, there was a debate in the Army about whether toxin weapons were included in the president's order. After Nixon's November 1969 order, scientists at Fort Detrick worked on one toxin, Staphylococcus enterotoxin type B (SEB), for several more months. Nixon ended the debate when he added toxins to the biological weapons ban in February 1970. The U.S. also did a series of experiments with anthrax, code-named Project Bacchus, Project Clear Vision, and Project Jefferson, in the late 1990s and early 2000s.

In recent years, some critics have claimed that the U.S. view on biological warfare and the use of biological agents has changed from how the BWC was understood in the past. For example, it's said that the U.S. now believes Article I of the BWC (which clearly bans biological weapons) does not apply to "non-lethal" biological agents.

During the 2022 Russian invasion of Ukraine, the Russians claimed they found "U.S. military-run biolabs in Ukraine" supposedly developing biological weapons. This claim was rejected as false by the U.S., Ukraine, the United Nations, Russian scientists, and Reuters. They stated the labs are doing public health research. The U.S. said the claims were propaganda and disinformation, stating the labs focused on preventing infectious disease outbreaks and developing vaccines. These laboratories are publicly listed, not secret, and are run by their own countries, like Ukraine, not by the U.S. The U.S. Department of Defense does provide "technical support to the Ukrainian Ministry of Health since 2005 to improve public health laboratories," but it does not control or provide staff to these facilities.

According to a 2008 report by the U.S. Congressional Research Service, new developments in biotechnology, including genetic engineering, might create many live agents and toxins that are hard to find and stop. Also, new chemical warfare agents and mixtures of chemical and biological weapons are being developed. The report noted that countries are using the natural overlap between weapons and civilian uses of chemical and biological materials to hide the production of chemical and biological weapons.