Biology of Doom: The History of America's Secret Germ Warfare Project FROM THE PUBLISHER
Few voices have been louder than the American government's in condemning the spread of biological weapons programs around the world. How astonishing, then, to discover that for thirty years the United States conducted its own large-scale covert biological weapons project.
Ed Regis tells the story of this project from its origins in World War II to its abrupt cancellation in 1969. At its peak, the program employed 4,036 people, tested pathogens on more than 2,000 live human volunteers, and secretly conducted open-air pathogen tests on American soil. By its end, the project's scientists had weaponized three lethal biological agents and toxins and four incapacitating agents, covertly sprayed its own cities with bacterial aerosols, and had stockpiled more than two million biological bombs ready for deployment on the battlefield. Yet, suprisingly, almost nothing has been published about the program before now.
Based on 2,000 pages of declassified documents, and personal interviews with many of the original project's top scientists, this expose of America's last Cold War secret is both fascinating and shocking.
FROM THE CRITICS
John Prados - Washington Post Book World
...entertaining and informative. This is a fine first cut at a hitherto shadowy subject.
Publishers Weekly
Regis (Virus Ground Zero, etc.) presents a thorough, frightening look at America's biological warfare program, from its inception during the late 1930s through the 1980s. He covers all the bases in looking at the strategic and scientific developments of biological warfare both in the U.S. and among its principal adversaries, including Japan, Germany and Russia. The topic is gruesome: Regis reveals that humans, as well as guinea pigs, rhesus monkeys and other animals, were exposed to live infectious agents. Bombs were created to remain underwater, then surface and spray out germs; tests were done on the efficacy of fleas as agents to carry plague. Regis writes for the layperson, and he is careful to depict the human dramas behind the science. He writes, for instance, of the scientist who tested psychotropic agents on unwitting co-workers and of the University of Wisconsin professor who had been drafted into the war effort and found it impossible to get out (as Regis puts it, "being in the profession was all too much like being in the Mafia: once you were in, you were in for good"). Along his way to reporting this important and underdiscussed aspect of the Cold War, Regis offers a great deal of startling evidence on the use of biological agents during the Korean conflict--and, also disturbing, that America used data from Japanese biological warfare tests done on Manchurian criminals. (Nov.) Copyright 1999 Cahners Business Information.
Scientific American
Regis, a former professor of philosophy, interested himself in what the U.S. and other countries did during and after World War II to develop methods of biological warfare. With the aid of the Freedom of Information Act, he obtained more than 2,000 pages of formerly secret U.S. government documents on the subject. They form the foundation of this account, which traces the U.S. biological weapons program from its inception in 1942 to its termination in 1969 on the grounds that "biological weapons have massive, unpredictable, and potentially uncontrollable consequences."
Stan Crock - BusinessWeek
Biology of Doom details everything from a secret test of benign agents inside the Pentagon to a fatal LSD experiment that led a scientist to commit suicide. Regis also uncovers interesting tidbits: He found that the Canadian program was bankrolled by Samuel Bronfman, head of Seagram Co., and some other executives. All in all, this volume offers a workmanlike account of how the world started down what could be a fateful biological path.
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