The United States maintained massive, highly secretive chemical and biological weapons manufacturing programs for most of the 20th century. Originally built as a deterrent against foreign adversaries during World War I and World War II, these offensive programs stockpiled thousands of tons of lethal agents before they were permanently dismantled under international treaties.

Initiated by President Franklin D. Roosevelt in 1943, the US biological weapons project grew into a massive, secret industrial operation comparable in scale and secrecy to the Manhattan Project.

Federal law strictly prohibits the testing of chemical or biological agents on American civilian populations for warfare or general research purposes. Under 50 US Code § 1520a, the Secretary of Defense is explicitly barred from conducting any test or experiment involving chemical or biological agents on a civilian population, either directly or through contractors.

But there are legal loopholes.

The law allows for “limited testing involving human subjects” but only under highly specific, non-warfare conditions, which are governed by strict oversight. 1) Peaceful Purposes: Activities related to medical, therapeutic, pharmaceutical, agricultural, industrial, or research fields; 2) Protective Purposes: Testing directly related to developing defenses against toxic chemicals or biological weapons; and 3) Law Enforcement: Ominously, limited applications are allowed to be used on large crowds for the sake of “riot control” [i.e., tear gas, the brown note…].

Even if a test falls under one of the allowed exceptions above, the government must fulfill rigid legal criteria before any testing can occur. The Department of Defense must obtain the explicit, advance informed consent of every single human subject involved.

The Secretary of Defense must also notify Congress at least 30 days before any such experiment takes place.

These strict restrictions were enacted by Congress to prevent a repeat of past unethical human experimentation in the United States. Prior to the late 20th century [1980s], government and military agencies occasionally conducted secretive open-air vulnerability tests and chemical exposure experiments on unwitting citizens without their knowledge or consent. Current statutory laws make those historical, non-consensual operations entirely illegal.

Fort Detrick in Maryland served as the research epicenter. The military also built mass-production facilities at the Pine Bluff Arsenal in Arkansas to manufacture and load bioweapons into munitions. The program successfully weaponized seven distinct biological agents to kill or incapacitate enemy targets:

Bacillus anthracis (Anthrax); Francisella tularensis (Tularemia); Brucella spp (Brucellosis); Coxiella burnetii (Q-fever); Venezuelan equine encephalitis virus; Botulinum toxin (Botulism) and Staphylococcal enterotoxin B

In 1969, President Richard Nixon unilaterally renounced the use of biological weapons. The US destroyed its entire offensive bio-stockpile by 1973 and later signed the 1972 Biological Weapons Convention (BWC) to ban their development worldwide.

The chemical weapons program began during World War I in response to poison gas warfare in Europe. Over the following decades, the US manufactured an incredibly vast and lethal chemical arsenal. Production shifted from World War I-era choking and blistering agents like chlorine and mustard gas, to highly lethal nerve agents [such as VX and Sarin] during the Cold War. Rocky Mountain Arsenal produced tens of thousands of tons of toxic agents. By the time production halted, the US held over 30,000 metric tons of chemical weapons stored at military depots across the nation.

The US signed the Chemical Weapons Convention (CWC) in 1993, committing to destroying its entire stockpile. After a multi-decade, highly complex environmental destruction campaign using high-tech incineration and neutralization plants, the United States only completed the destruction of its final declared chemical weapon in July 2023.

But there is a darker side to the story of America’s chemical and biological weapons programs.

Leonard Cole’s seminal 1988 book, Clouds of Secrecy: The Army’s Germ Warfare Tests Over Populated Areas, exposed the US military’s secret history of testing biological agents on unwitting American civilians.

Using declassified government files, congressional testimonies, and personal interviews, Cole completely dismantled the official US government narrative that the military had never exposed its own public to biological risks.

Cole found that the US military conducted at least 239 secret open-air vulnerability tests across the country between 1949 and 1969.

Operation LAC [Large Area Coverage] was a secret 1957–1958 US Army Chemical Corps project that dropped tons of zinc cadmium sulfide across North America to test biological and chemical weapons dispersion. Conducted during 1957 and 1958 by the US Army and Air Force. Using A C-119 “Flying Boxcar” planes and ground blowers, the Air Force sprayed thousands of pounds of fluorescent powder into the skies above America. It covered vast regions of the US: from the Rocky Mountains to the Atlantic Ocean, drifting into Canada and Mexico. The goal was to track how far airborne particles traveled, to see if large populations could be blanketed by a biological attack.

American citizens were clearly exposed without their knowledge or consent. The government later claimed the chemical levels were too low to cause harm, but local groups and subsequent studies pointed to potential toxic and carcinogenic risks.

Further secret operations included spraying bacteria from ships over San Francisco, exposing nearly all its 800,000 residents. The CIA also famously released LSD into the New York City subway system.

To avoid public outcry, the military used active cover stories to keep the press mollified. During tests in Minneapolis, officials lied to local authorities, claiming they were testing “smoke screens” to hide the city from Soviet nuclear attacks.

The military long maintained that it only sprayed harmless, benign bacteria [simulants] like Serratia marcescens and Bacillus globigii to mimic how bioweapons would disperse.

But Leonard Cole’s research proved that these “harmless” organisms actually caused severe infections, illnesses, and even deaths—particularly among the elderly, children, and those with compromised immune systems. Today, the medical community officially classifies the exact strains the military sprayed as active opportunistic pathogens.

Clouds of Secrecy provided concrete historical evidence for why the public remains deeply skeptical of so-called biodefense operations. Cole highlighted a profound structural breakdown in constitutional democracy: a small group of government [CIA] scientists and military planners could legally choose to bypass human consent and risk public health under the shield of “national security.”

The public outrage amplified by Cole’s work ultimately forced Congress to strip the military of its autonomy regarding domestic experimentation. It directly contributed to the creation of 50 US Code § 1520a, the federal law that now strictly bans the Department of Defense from testing chemical or biological agents on civilian populations without explicit, advance informed consent.

UNIT 731

The relationship between Japan’s Unit 731 and the United States’ post-WWII biodefense program is one of the most disturbing and controversial chapters in modern military history. It had a profound impact on the foundational knowledge, research priorities, and ethical frameworks of early US bioweapons development at Fort Detrick.

The relevance of this historic connection centers on a secret deal that traded accountability for scientific data.

Based in occupied Manchuria during World War II, Unit 731 was a covert imperial Japanese military research division commanded by General Shirō Ishii.

The unit conducted horrific, lethal human experimentation on thousands of Chinese civilians, Russian prisoners, and Allied POWs, whom they called “maruta,” or logs [which gives you an idea of how viewed prisoners…]. Experiments included infecting subjects with anthrax, cholera, and the bubonic plague; conducting vivisections without anesthesia; performing forced amputations; and testing open-air biological bomb drops on bound victims.

As WWII ended, the United States desperately wanted to prevent the Soviet Union from acquiring Japan’s biological warfare expertise. General Douglas MacArthur and US military intelligence struck a secret bargain with General Ishii and his top scientists between 1945 and 1948.

Instead of having them executed, the US granted Ishii and his staff complete immunity from war crimes prosecution. In exchange, Ishii handed over thousands of tissue slides, autopsy reports, and detailed accounts of human biological weapon exposure. At the time, top US officials explicitly concluded that the data was of such immense value to national security that it, “far out-weighed the value accruing from war crimes prosecution.”

But the US didn’t simply archive Ishii’s files; it actively integrated Unit 731’s findings into its own fledgling biological weapons hub at Camp [now Fort] Detrick in Maryland.

In one of history’s greatest ironies, at the same time the United States was prosecuting and executing Nazi doctors during the Nuremberg Trials for human experimentation, it was actively sheltering and collaborating with Japanese ‘doctors’ who had committed identical atrocities.

Following the war, General Ishii lived a quiet, comfortable life of relative obscurity in Tokyo, entirely unpunished for his actions. Protected by the absolute immunity granted to him by General Douglas MacArthur and CIA, Ishii was shielded from both the Tokyo War Crimes Trials and Soviet extradition requests.

Because the US protected them, Ishii and his staff were never disgraced. They returned to civilian life, and some even came to lead Japan’s postwar medical and pharmaceutical renaissance, serving as university presidents, heads of the National Institute of Health, and ironically enough as founders of commercial blood banks.

While Ishii was never officially employed as a government official, he and his top lieutenants traveled to Fort Detrick to lecture American military scientists and provide “deep-dive” briefings[!] on their research. He hosted American bioweapons experts from Camp [Fort] Detrick at his home in Tokyo, walked them through his extensive logs, data sheets, and slides, and provided strategic advice on how to effectively scale up pathogen production and mass-disperse biological agents.

US military researchers utilized Unit 731’s data on mass pathogen production and environmental dispersion. Historians note that early US biological test designs—including the use of disease vectors like pathogen-infected fleas—heavily mirrored the methods developed by Unit 731.

Decades later, declassified files showed that impartial scientists who reviewed the files realized the human data was largely scientifically worthless. The experiments lacked proper scientific controls, and they were driven more by cruelty than rigorous medical inquiry. The legacy of the Unit 731 immunity deal fundamentally compromised the moral integrity of the postwar international order, and it continues to resonate today.

This deal established a historic precedent wherein the US biodefense establishment prioritized geopolitical advantage over human rights and transparency—fueling decades of public skepticism surrounding secret government research. For good reason.

In May 2026, CIA operations officer James Erdman III testified under oath before the Senate Homeland Security Committee, alleging a coordinated intelligence community cover-up regarding the origins of COVID-19. He claimed Dr. Anthony Fauci intentionally influenced CIA findings by steering analysts toward a curated list of experts who favored natural zoonotic origins over a lab leak. For years, the so-called lab leak hypothesis was labeled by top public health officials as a “conspiracy theory,” or at least some sort of wacky fringe idea.

Erdman said it was always the prevailing theory within the intelligence community, but some of the officers’ reports and analyses were suppressed or rewritten.

“Intelligence community leaders and senior analysts downplayed the possibility that the COVID pandemic originated as a result of a lab incident,” he said.

CIA managers supposedly retaliated against analysts who followed the science and voiced their support for the lab leak theory. They refused to sign off on upper management’s middle-of-the-night anonymous rewrite of the analysis, which changed the assessment from a critical leak to a non-call judgment.

The CIA criticized the hearing as political theater and stated the committee acted in bad faith by subpoenaing an active officer without proper notice. Which is laughable considering it’s the CIA. Note that this was not a denial of anything Erdman said. They just didn’t like having one of their spooks subpoenaed.

Republican senators led the oversight hearing and highlighted the CIA’s lack of transparency, while Democratic members simply boycotted the proceeding. It’s a shame that Rand Paul and the other right-wing nutcases like Josh Hawley are the only ones willing to actually get to the bottom of this. Because it’s serious – despite what the MSM would have us believe.