Completed Projects

The Living Weapon

2007 WGBH/The American Experience

You can't see it. You can't hear it. You can't smell it. Yet a biological weapon could decimate an entire city. In 1942, the United States government, sanctioned by President Franklin Roosevelt, began a highly classified program to research and develop bioweapons. It was the first in a series of steps, each motivated by fear of powerful enemies, that took the United States down a path to develop a new weapon of mass destruction. This hour for american experience offers an unprecedented look at more than two decades of closed-door meetings, secret test sites, determined scientists, and human subjects that attempted to turn some of the world's most potent germs into some of the world's most effective weapons. For more than two decades testing took place not only at Camp (and later Fort) Detrick, Maryland, the headquarters of the program, but also at sites throughout the U.S., including the streets of St. Louis, the shores of San Francisco Bay, and the Utah desert. The most conclusive tests took place in 1965 near a Pacific atoll called Johnston, when a single military plane sprayed a long line of germs that cause a deadly disease, tularemia. But just four years later, the program came to an abrupt end. On November 25, 1969, President Richard Nixon made a stunning announcement: "Mankind already holds in its hands too many of the seeds of its own destruction.” While Nixon's declaration ended America's offensive bioweapons programs, military leaders and researchers had opened a door that could never be shut. "They've bequeathed on a world this knowledge," says historian Brian Balmer, "and we now have to control it and contain it and make sure the biological weapons are never used."