THE UNWITTING CHEMICAL WARFARE GUINEA PIGS
A new book reveals the shocking extent to which unsuspecting civilians were exposed to dangerous substances in Britain and its outposts
The British government used the public as biological and chemical warfare guinea pigs during the Cold War on a much greater scale than previously thought, according to new research. In more than 750 secret operations, hundreds of thousands of ordinary Britons were subjected to “mock” biological and chemical warfare attacks launched from aircraft, ships and road vehicles.
Up until now, historians had thought that such operations had been on a much more limited scale. But a major investigation, carried out by Ulf Schmidt, a professor of modern history at the University of Kent, has revealed that British military aircraft dropped thousands of kilos of a chemical of “largely unknown toxic potential” on British civilian populations in and around Salisbury in Wiltshire, Cardington in Bedfordshire and Norwich in Norfolk.
Substantial quantities were also dispersed across parts of the English Channel and the North Sea and off the west coast of Scotland. It’s not known the extent to which coastal towns in England and France were affected.
The research reveals, for the first time, that about 4,600kg of zinc cadmium sulphide (now thought to be potentially carcinogenic) were dispersed from ships, aircraft and moving lorries between 1953 and 1964. Mr Schmidt’s investigation — published as a book, Secret Science — has revealed that commuters on the London Underground were also used as guinea pigs on a substantially larger scale than previously thought. The new research has discovered that an unknown biological warfare field trial was carried out in the capital’s Tube system in May 1964.
The secret operation — carried out by scientists from the chemical and biological warfare research centre at Porton Down, Wiltshire — involved the release of large quantities of bacteria called Bacillus globigii. The scientists were keen to discover whether “long distance travel of aerosols” in the Tube network “was due to transportation within trains” or via air ventilation systems.
At the time, the scientists thought Bacillus globigii bacteria were harmless — but they are today regarded as a cause of food poisoning, eye infections and even septicaemia. It is not known whether the authorities attempted to properly test the bacterium before releasing it onto Tube trains.
An earlier series of Underground trials, in July 1963, has been known to historians for many years.
It can also be revealed that some of the British scientists involved had grave misgivings about the trials and several felt it was not politically advisable to conduct large-scale trials in Britain with live bacterial agents.
Following a test involving live plague bacteria which was carried out off the west coast of Scotland in 1952 when a fishing vessel inadvertently passed through a cloud of bacteria, scientists were eager to carry out any further potentially very hazardous field trials outside the UK. Prime Minister Winston Churchill therefore approved a plan to carry out tests in the Bahamas, a British overseas territory.
Scientists took the view that the islands were the best place “on the surface of the globe” to carry out tests “without restrictions”.
In 1954, the British government sent Cold War biological warfare scientists to the sea around the Bahamas to release clouds of dangerous Venezuelan Equine Encephalitis viruses. These organisms can cause humans high fever, long term fatigue, headaches and occasionally death.
In another British imperial possession, Nigeria, a location was found for chemical warfare field trials.
In Obanaghoro, in the south of the country, four British Cold War scientific missions spent a total of about 15 months dispersing and assessing the effects of large quantities of experimental nerve gas weapons.
The advantage of the location was that it permitted field trials to be carried out in a tropical environment — and that it was not in Britain or Australia. The extent that local people (including locally employed field trial personnel) were affected by the nerve agents is not known.
“The government records I’ve been looking at are conspicuously silent on all this,” said Mr Schmidt.
“Officials had clearly good reasons as to why the kind of experiments undertaken in Nigeria were strictly prohibited on the British mainland, which is why the files and photographic records surrounding Britain’s post-war nerve agent testing in Africa were regarded as particularly sensitive,” he said.
Mr Schmidt’s research has also revealed the vast scale of Cold War chemical warfare tests carried out on “volunteer” British service personnel in the UK — involving much greater numbers of people than previously thought.
His investigation now suggests that up to 30,000 secret chemical warfare substance experiments were carried out, mainly at Porton Down, on more than 14,000 British soldiers between 1945 and 1989.
He believes that, in most cases, the servicemen were not given sufficient information to allow them to give their properly informed consent.
Military aircraft dropped thousands of kilos of a chemical of ‘largely unknown toxic potential’ on British civilian populations