CHEMICAL AND BIOLOGICAL WARFARE

America's Hidden Arsenal by Seymour M. Hersh

Dugway Proving Grounds

===The sign outside the only entrance to the Dugway, Utah, Proving Grounds reads: "Warning: Dangerous instrumentalities of war Are being tested on this post. Caution: Do not handle any unidentified objects. Report their location to security."
===The CBW base is well insulated. Many of its one million acres are spread across the barren great salt desert in western Utah. Its eastern edge and the only road leading to and from the post is about eighty mountainous miles from Salt Lake City. The rest of Dugway's 210 mile border is patrolled by air.
===The base has served the Chemical Corps as a testing station for agents and weapons since 1942. After the war the huge base 25 per cent larger than the state of Rhode Island was used for testing GB. In 1953 its activities were broadened to begin the first major testing of biological munitions.
===Dugway is also the site of a high level CBW weapons orientation course for all the services. The course lasts less than one week and is theoretically open only to officers with the rank of lieutenant colonel or higher and to top level civilians. About 1,000 men a year have taken the seminar since it opened in 1959.
===It's a lonely life for the 1,000 civilians and 600 military men and their families who must live and work year round in the desert. Most families have quarters on the base, in what is known as "Easy Area" or the city of Dugway. The nearest test facilities are about fifteen miles to the west, but for most civilians just about everything outside of the immediate area is off limits. The entire proving ground is constantly patrolled by guards and military aircraft, and all personnel, including the children over ten years of age, are issued identification cards that they are required to carry at all times.
===Good salaries help to ease the discontent. The payroll totals about $8.4 million per year for the 1,000 civilian wage earners  an average of $8,400 per year for each. Dugway's overall budget is about $15 million a year. And the money may answer other questions: when I visited the base in late June, 1967, one secretary told me she had "found that after five or six weeks I'd forgotten what they're doing here."
===Along with conducting field and evaluation tests for the CBW program, Dugway has been conducting extensive research into ecology and epidemiology in an attempt to determine just what happens to an area after many years of testing with lethal chemicals and highly infectious biologicals. Such work is handled by the base's EE (epidemiology and ecology) division. The problem is incredibly complex: more than 10,000 species of life are known to exist on the huge base. At one time the Chemical Corps hired the University of Utah to see if disease was spreading in wild animals as a result of the testing. Similarly, the Public Health Service was charged with assuring the safety of the human population surrounding the proving grounds.
===The Army has admitted some accidents with biological and chemical agents at Dugway: one colonel told a group of reporters who made the first and only press trip to the base in 1960 that a number of artillerymen were contaminated when a freak wind shift pushed a portion of a GB cloud in their direction. There were no serious results, the colonel was quoted as saying: "Most were up and around the next day."
===Dugway has six major divisions: biological, chemical, meteorological, test, technical systems, and administrative and production control. There also is a large animal colony. The meteorologists were added in 1953, shortly before the first testing of biologicals. The station was redesigned and vastly overhauled in 1962; chief contractor for that project was the Geophysics Corporation of America. In 1966 Dugway awarded the Atlantic Research Corporation of California a $400,000 contract to design, test, and set up an automatic system to gather information on weather conditions at low altitudes. Despite vast improvement in weather forecasting, some tests still are canceled at the last minute because of wind shifts.
===The main testing center for chemicals is fifteen miles beyond the city of Dugway. There, shells or bombs containing agents are exploded from a steel tower twenty seven stories high. As the agent cloud moves through the air, countless attempts are made to catch and measure fallout on strategically located filters. Other thousands of battery operated samplers read the contents of the desert atmosphere. The samplers are collected and later analyzed in a mass production lab.
===Ten miles farther on is another test area, this one built into the side of a mountain. During the 1960 press visit, newsmen were taken there and allowed to watch nerve gases kill goats and pigeons in a demonstration of the lethality of G agents. Twelve GB filled rounds of 155 mm howitzer shells were fired into a concrete command post constructed halfway up the mountain. The results prompted one reporter to write that "pigeons react to nerve gas attacks with the same characteristics as humans That is, they die. Quickly."
===There were no demonstrations, however, for the biological testing program. That subject was taboo during the 1960 press tour and little is publicly known about Dugway's operations in this area. The biological compound is known as Baker Laboratory, and is located eight miles away from everything else. It is closed to visitors and even GI's on the base cannot get into it unless they are regularly assigned to biological operations. It is known that the laboratory has elaborate sanitary precautions inside air is scrubbed and burned before being released. If there have been any severe accidents at Baker, such information has never been made public.
===There are, however, many rumors and stories of chemical test accidents told by present and former military personnel at the installation. The story most consistently repeated concerns a group of soldiers who were convinced that someone had tampered with their gas masks shortly before an experiment. Most received a dose of the agent, or were "bitten," as the Dugway GI's say. There is no proof of such an occurrence, informants said, but it was one of the first stories GI's heard when they began at Dugway. Most chose to believe it. One former enlisted man wrote me a remarkable letter telling of some of his impressions during a thirteen month stay as a chemist in the late 1950's.

===One seldom heard objections to the use or development of CBW. This did bother me a great deal. . . No one seemed very concerned with the inhumane possibilities of the stuff. What the Chemical Corps did have there was a group of pretty able young graduates who would gladly have worked contentedly at the most dastardly of weapons had the situation been even faintly resembling a research or development laboratory.

===[The] civilians, whether Ph.D.'s or not, were a strange breed of people . . . They all had credentials, degrees, etc., but from the time they arrived at Dugway they just turned off. It was another world, ostensibly a scientific testing operation but in reality a home for derelicts of all kinds: people who could not possibly cope with the demands of anything closely approximating a real life situation.

=== I cannot speak for the veracity of other tests conducted at Dugway, but there were certainly a number of cooked up results submitted by our group. The tests were supposed to be done when weather conditions were proper, usually meaning that the wind was not to be too strong. Unfortunately the wind and the ambition of the test officers and section heads were not always the same. On one occasion the wind was 20 to 30 miles per hour too fast but the test officer said "by the time we fire the wind will die down." Of course it was only a few minutes between the time the wind speed was measured and the shell was fired.
=== When these so called tests came into our lab to be computed it was obvious that the wind was too strong . . . When this happened there was usually hell to pay. If we were honest about the results we would then have to interpret them over again. This meant processing these thousands of catch apparata again. And if the results were the same we would usually be chewed out for our poor technique. Very often we "dry labbed" it (gave them the result they wanted) or else the section heads would.
=== It took no idiot to figure out that the more tests there were the more people who would be needed and this was exactly the way most of our superiors could improve their position. It was Parkinson's Law gone wild. For a while we worked two shifts to do more tests. V agent (VX) was just beginning to be tested on a big scale so the people at Dugway were trying to test as much of this as possible in addition to matching the G agent tests from previous years, even when there wasn't much more to be learned about G.