The United States Tested Biological Warfare on Its Own Citizens | Hacker News Reader

The United States Tested Biological Warfare on Its Own Citizens

todayifoundout.com

59 pointssigna1132 comments

it is now believed that the release of these bacteria over San Francisco permanently altered the microbiome of the region, leading to an epidemic of heart valve infections in hospitals and other serious infections among intravenous drug users throughout the 1960s and 1970s.

Yeah, we are actually performing a lot more "experiments" with creating new chemicals and using them commercially etc. In another hundred years, people may shake their head at some of that.

Yup. Definitely didn't know that. Americans sure don't get told this about the cold war. It is also omitted that mass testing of these bio weapons was done on black communities, hence the distrust of both doctors and the government. That part I learned about from the Tuskegee study, this is also really bad.

That’s one of the bleakest parts in US medical history. Just completely in opposition to the Hippocratic oath. They stood by and watched as so many Black patients died. And all of it was preventable with cheap penicillin.

Another thing that many are surprised by is how fashionable eugenics and forced sterilization were at one point in the US.

“I cannot read this sign, by what right have I children?” https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Eugenics_supporters_hol...

This seems extreme, but regular families are largely based on eugenic principles.

It's awful, but you also have to put yourself in the time period. I don't think this justifies it, but remember that in the 1950s the US defense and intelligence community believed that WWIII was going to happen eventually. They believed they faced the high probability of a full scale global thermonuclear war in their lifetimes.

It's easier to justify this kind of madness when "most of these people are going to die when the nukes hit anyway." There really were a lot of people thinking that way. "These people are already dead."

To get a sense of the mindset here's a good profile of Herman Kahn whose research helped name a death metal band (Megadeth):

https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2005/06/27/fat-man

"How many megadeaths (millions of deaths) will we absorb vs. the Soviets?" etc. A lot of this hideous research was to try to characterize the effects of a thermonuclear war and its aftermath to answer questions like that. The Soviets were doing similar things.

This I'm sure contributed to an environment where unethical research was tolerated and rationalized for other reasons too.

> believed that WWIII was going to happen eventually.

The 'bomber gap' and the 'missile gap' were fictions, with U-2 photo-intelligence showing the Soviets didn't have the capability to carry off a massive attack.

US politicians decided it was better to keep knowledge of the U-2 away from the US public - even though the Soviets knew about the U-2 starting on the first flight. The US even lied about the Powers U-2 crash in 1960, calling it a high-altitude research flight, with the possibility of an incapacitated pilot.

So I don't think it's right to say simply they believed the possibility, as that belief was deliberately inculcated by people who wanted a war, wanted increased war funding (the "military-industrial complex"), and/or wanted to leverage public fears for personal and political power.

People thought that if we didn't see the USSR's stuff it must mean they are even more advanced than we thought and must be imminently preparing first strike! Evidence of Soviet military power was evidence of Soviet military power, and lack of evidence was evidence of even more Soviet military power! People really non-ironically thought this.

It seems completely unhinged today, but this was right after the world had just been rocked by two successive bloodbath world wars. It wasn't that crazy in the 1950s and 1960s to think WWIII would be up in short order.

Another major factor was how much secrecy there was on both sides. Secrecy breeds conspiracy theories and paranoia. The Soviets were also preparing for a first strike from us and probably were following similar lines of reasoning.

Again, I think you're being too kind.

I think Curtis LeMay - one of those in your category - was unhinged already. I think he wanted a war. This is the guy quoted as "Well, maybe if we do this overflight right, we can get World War III started". He wanted to bomb and invade Cuba, and do even more bombing of North Vietnam, and he wanted the US to get rid of its "phobia" about using nuclear weapons.

That's someone who wants war, and will manufacture an interpretation that justifies having that war. That's far different than simply drawing that conclusion from negative data.

Again, yes, I agree with your "it wasn't that crazy" part. My point is that many of the people who believe that were deliberately lied to, to encourage spreading that belief. While connected with secrecy, as you say, it was a deliberate conspiracy carried out in part to support what Eisenhower termed the "military-industrial complex."

The experiment primarily focused on by the article was carried out on the general population of San Francisco in 1950. At the time San Francisco was 83% non-hispanic White alone. [1] The point of the Tuskegee experiment was to see if untreated syphilis affected blacks differently than whites, as was believed at the time. It was, in part, motivated by a previous experiment in Norway which had withheld treatment for white's suffering from syphilis, which formed the foundation of the modern understanding of syphilis. [2]

If it's unclear, I'm not defending or supporting any of this insanity, but emphasizing that the motivations were in no way racist. In general, if you want to learn more about the selection process for the various sociopathic experiments "we've" carried out through the years, the Wiki on MKUltra provides quite a lot of insight. [3]

[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographics_of_San_Francisco

[2] - https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/28004553/

[3] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MKUltra#Experiments_on_America...

Out of respect I wanted to reply and say thank you for the links, and justification for another view. While I would say deliberate prejudice very possibly wasn't in the decision making process, a risk assessment was made. One where the risk of gassing black communities in places like St. Louis was the "safer option" because black people were second class citizens. They had no means to challenge it. If they found out, who would believe them? Who would care? For this reason institutional racism was reinforced by the military and to say " well it wasn't to be mean, they had to gas someone unfortunately" doesn't really make the decisions behind it not a decision based on race to hurt those who couldn't stand up for themselves because of their race , and therefore racism. Were other cities that were mostly white gassed to test biological warfare distribution methods? Yes. Did it impact them negatively too? Yes. Did it affect them the same way? No. the white community had a chance to expose it? Yes. Did they have an opportunity to try? Yes. They tried, and it failed. But what of the mostly African-american counterparts? At the time, none of that. Looks.pretty racist from here.

St. Louis was chosen (alongside a number of other cities) because its climate/weather conditions were as close as the military could get to the USSR, with the goal of seeing how a biological weapons attack on Russia would play out. Here [1] are some images of Moscow from the 1950s. And this [2] is an image of the Pruitt-Igoe area (majority black housing project) that was sprayed in St. Louis. Those projects bear far more than a passing resemblance to the areas where we would have targeted.

I think really the point can be most boiled down that even if everybody was all the same race, those sprayings still would've happened. And, in fact, it did happen in many areas that were mostly white. The case in San Francisco was even worse. Instead of spraying people with chemicals, believed to be safe, they were spraying them with live bacteria - which near immediately caused numerous health effects. So by focusing on race, you ultimately end up ignoring the real underlying issue.

[1] - https://www.vintag.es/2017/03/46-rare-color-photos-document-...

[2] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pruitt%E2%80%93Igoe#/media/Fil...

> ... were in no way racist.

Apart from the whole "purposely only testing people having a specific skin colour" thing.

Gee, that doesn't sound racist at all. :p

I don't understand humans. It's easy to say "The United States" did this but really: people (working for the US government) did this. How do the employees releasing the chemicals — on their own people — justify their own behavior?

You only have to look at the Nuremburg trials for your answer here. We are social creatures, and following along with the "pack" (which includes following orders from authority) is a very powerful force.

Further, it's not just pack mentality but also the institutional and structural directive. The authority of your supervisor, and the greater authority of the institution and 'the good of the country'. Anarchists have been talking about these problems for a while.

It’s in the article: “At the time, all these simulants were considered harmless to humans.“

Web developers A/B test content on users all the time. What’s the premise of doing so? That it can’t hurt them, right?

Ever heard of the chain of command?

After all of that, many US and maybe UK Politicians are still baffled as to why the public no longer trust their Government.

In the 1950s and part of the 1960s trust in the US government was very high. This along with other things that has come out, only some people running for political office will state they trust the Gov.

>In the 1950s and part of the 1960s trust in the US government was very high.

Trust in one's government is always high after they win a war. Thatcher even bounced back in popularity after she wan the Falklands War. Winning a war against an external enemy ia sure way to be popular and trusted.

'Sea Spray' was pretty bad, but the 'Large Area Coverage'[0] experiment was also pretty horrific, and basically involved dusting St Louis and other cities with radioactive materials and random carcinogens.

[0] https://www.livescience.com/23795-large-area-coverage-danger...

I wonder if our governments are still capable of this…

Now it's psychological warfare testing :)

Personally I think what private companies are doing in that department is more egregious than what governments (even other governments) are doing.

Just pick up a mobile phone and start grabbing random games and apps and look at how they're built. They're all Skinner box devices built using the same control techniques as slot machines to suck people in and gradually addict them and then get them to make endless purchases or invite other people to the app. It's really incredibly toxic.

Then you have social media whose weighting and manipulation of content to "maximize engagement" drives not only social media addiction but a host of mental health problems across our entire culture including among the young.

If governments did half of this they'd be compared to Nazis.

Maybe governments just outsourced the work?

Profit motive provides plenty of motivation without government prodding. It's all about making you stare at that device as long as possible so you watch ads or making you send payments for loot boxes. It's just amoral profit seeking behavior.

Not saying there couldn’t be government involvement just that it’s not necessary to explain this stuff.

That does not mean that governments are not doing it as well, or that we should discount their practices just because corporations are doing it a lot as well.

Even just the fact that the US army allows Hollywood directors access to military equipment with a say on the script as an exchange, so that they can brainwash young uneducated men to enrol and go fight an imperialist war in some foreign country could easily be labelled internal propaganda.

I wouldn't be surprised. There are a large number of historical examples of human experimentation before 1975 when the Church committee did it's work.

I think these shady agencies figured out a new way to hide this kind of research after that date in ways that have made it much harder to show the world the truth.

Yes, absolutely nothing has changed. The national security complex regards itself as above the law and superior to all democratic control mechanisms. It does not see any reason to bother itself with public consent or constitutionality. If anything, it has gotten much worse.

There are things like this going on right now. We won't find out about them until later, absent somebody leaking the details. Indeed a lot of stuff in the Church committee findings mentioned by a sibling commenter has not only been massively expanded, but is widely accepted as normal and a good thing, actually.

The difficult thing is that the concept of law implies law enforcement, which leads to a national security complex.

Ideas like human rights etc are great but only get applied to the extent that the most powerful entities allow them to be applied.

This is why a proactive and well-informed (and some would say well-armed) citizenry is crucial. All entities like governments, corporations, the UN, the EU, down to individuals, will obey the laws of physics because they have to, and the laws of humans... if they are made to.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unethical_human_experimentat...

Used to be “List of” iirc

Not the only time shit like this was carried out by US gov. Tuskegee syphilis "experiment" is just one of others

The genesis of the US nuclear weapons program went hand in hand with the genesis of the US biological weapons program (and of course both were predated by the US chemical weapons program). An important date in both efforts was July 1941:

https://www.osti.gov/opennet/manhattan-project-history/Event...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/War_Bureau_of_Consultants

The nuclear effort is of course more well known and documented, while relatively few books have been written about the biological & chemical warfare programs, and those that have tend to suffer from large-scale omissions (Korean War, Vietnam War, covert CIA programs, cooperation with Canada and British BW programs, etc.). Nevertheless:

> "Secretary Stimson conveyed the committee's recommendations to President Roosevelt, who in May of 1942 authorized the secretary to create an organization within the Federal Security Agency to conduct the U.S. Biological Warfare Program so as to avoid public concern over America's vulnerability. The exchange of information on this subject with the United Kingdom and Canada, which had been inaugurated some months before, was continued, and provision was made for the interchange of biologic-warfare personnel among the 3 countries (U.S. Army 1977)... In 1942, the U.S. Army Chemical Warfare Service assumed the responsibility for a large-scale research and development program. Fort Detrick in Frederick, MD, was selected to carry out the biologic-warfare task."

https://nap.nationalacademies.org/read/5739/chapter/12

The entire history is fairly insane, as large-scale tests of actual pathogenic bacteria were also conducted over large barges full of animals scattered across large tracts of the open ocean, which also exposed naval soldiers, as revealed c.2001, in tests with names like "Shady Grove" from the early 1960s:

https://www.chicagotribune.com/chi-0110230264oct23-story.htm...

Notably, many elements of the US biological weapons program were revived in the 1990s following revelations of the scale of the Soviet BW programs that continued through the 1970s and 1980s, and many people think those public-private contractor-led programs were the actual source of the anthrax used in the 9/18/2001 and 10/9/2001 anthrax mailings to media and Congress, respectively. The justification was 'we have to make these weapons to study how to defend against them'. Examples include:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Clear_Vision

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Jefferson

This, incidentally, also explains some of the justifications for the gain-of-function research developments of the past two decades (many financed out of Project Bioshield-type funding approved after the anthrax attacks) that appear to have played a leading role in the genesis of the Covid pandemic.

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