The American Experience? 2.06.2007 | 0 Comment(s)

Last night on PBS, I caught the program "The American Experience". The featured story focused on the race to develop biological weapons in the United States and the rest of the world's efforts to develop those same weapons. The timeframe the show mostly dealt with was from WWI to the early 1970's. The history that unfolded on the TV screen truly was more frightening than anything Hollywood could come up with, and the real-life footage from actual tests on animals and humans were just...disturbing.

For all this talk of The United States being the moral compass of the world, our scientists sure wanted to sock it to our enemies in the most painful ways. And they weren't shy about using American citizens & pacifists as guinea pigs. I was pretty shocked to learn that secret tests were conducted at the Pentagon and in several American cities...including St. Louis... to determine how germs would spread.

From "The American Experience" website:

In the early 1950s, the Army established the St Jo Munitions Expenditure Panel to test the effectiveness of biological aerosol attacks on urban environments. Camp Detrick scientists dispersed simulants from the top of automobiles in St. Louis, Minneapolis and Winnipeg -- all selected based on their similarities to particular Soviet cities.

While the Americans mostly tested these weapons on monkeys, Japan tested there weapons on the humans whom they kidnapped. The Japanese controlled a small part of China around WWII and that is where the Japanese set up a base, complete with a brothel, to develop & test biological weapons. The Japanese would kidnap people from the local Chinese villages and use those Chinese as test subjects. The number of Chinese citizens that were killed by the Japanese is estimated to be close to 10,000. The United States & UK didn't try the Japanese responsible for all of those deaths for war crimes because a deal was struck. In exchange for the Japanese information about the affects of biological weapons on humans, the Japanese testers would not be tried for the thousands of deaths they had been responsible for.

Sorry to be such a downer, but I was really affected by last night's show. The human capacity to kill, even in the name of protection, even in service to the state, is frightening. Given our violent nature, sometimes I wonder how we made it this far.