In the 1970s, Americans learned that for decades they had been unsuspecting guinea pigs in a series of astonishing experiments conducted by the U.S. Army Military researchers had been secretly spraying clouds of bacteria over populated areas in order to study America's vulnerability to biological weapons. No precautions were taken to protect the millions of people exposed, despite known risks to their health.

        The army continues to assume the right to resume bacteriological testing at its own discretion - a 1986 report to Congress indicates that open air testing is now taking place at a military facility in Utah as part of the Reagan administration's expanded biological warfare program.

        CLOUDS OF SECRECY is a probing examination of the Army's germ warfare testing program from World War II to the present. Using extensive information from congressional hearings, courtroom testimony, interviews, and government documents, the author details the nature of the Army's biological experiments, the reasoning behind the tests, and the effects on exposed human populations.

        These experiments prompt questions not only about the rationale and conduct of the biological warfare research program, but also about the relation of science to contemporary society. Is such testing, as one critic described it, "science gone mad?"

        About the Author: Leonard A. Cole teaches political science at Rutgers University, Newark, in the program Science, Technology, and Society. He is the author of Blacks in Power: A Comparative Study of Black and White Elected Officials (1975) and Politics and the Restraint of Science (1983).

 

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