US tested deadly weapons in US and UK

The US military conducted 50 secret tests of biological and chemical weapons during the 1960s, including a trial of deadly nerve agents in Britain, it emerged today.

Nearly 6,000 American troops took part in the tests to examine the combat uses of the agents and defences against them.

Many of the soldiers were not told what they were being exposed too.

An Anglo-American programme between 1967 and 1968 at the British Ministry of Defence’s chemical weapons establishment in Porton Down, on Salisbury Plain, compared the relative strengths of lethal agents sarin and VX.

Howitzer shells, crop sprayers and “massive bombs” filled with the poisons were used on the site to test the extent and length of a chemical attack.

Nerve agents tabun and soman were also tested in open grassland and wooded areas at the centre, documents released by the US Defence Department showed.

Details of all 50 tests were made public following a three-year US government probe.

The investigation was launched after claims by 260 American veterans that exposure to nerve agents had affected their health.

The tests, known as Project 112, began in 1962 and continued for more than a decade.

“We were in the Cold War, and we were concerned that Russia and perhaps China had chemical and biological capabilities that could be used against American troops and against us in the homeland,” said Dr Michael Kilpatrick, from the US Defence Department’s Deployment Health Support Directorate.

Headquartered at Deseret Test Centre at Fort Douglas, Utah, tests were also conducted in Hawaii, Alaska, Maryland, Florida, Georgia, Panama and aboard ships in the North Atlantic and Pacific oceans.

One 1968 test, called Blue Tango, entailed spraying two types of bacteria, including E-coli, in a rain forest in Hawaii to gauge how the bacteria would linger in the vegetation.

Dr Kilpatrick said troops were protected when biological and chemical agents were used.

Congressman Mike Thompson has urged US Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld to continue the probe into the tests, which officially concluded this week.

He said: “Veterans who may have been exposed during these tests deserve to know all the facts.

"The Department of Defence’s decision to close its investigation may unfairly deny them that right.”

The US scrapped its biological weapons program in the late 1960s and agreed in a 1997 treaty to destroy all of its chemical weapons.