The idea of biological warfare attacks on U.S. soil absolutely scares the pants off of me.
Remember that Facebook hoax that clogged our newsfeeds a few years ago about oranges from Libya being injected with HIV-infected blood? I didn’t eat an orange for at least six months after reading that article.
And while our thoughts concerning biological attacks often stem from other countries wanting to do us harm, the truth remains that these attacks don’t necessarily have to come from the outside. In fact, the U.S. military has been conducting biological tests in our own country for years.
These tests became quite frequent during the 1950s and ’60s. Here are seven of the most notable biological warfare tests conducted on U.S. soil.
1. San Francisco was pumped full of microbes in 1950.
The U.S. Navy took advantage of San Francisco’s infamous fog to help complete a successful biological weapons test. On September 20, 1950, an offshore ship used a hose to pump thousands of microbes into the air for the purpose of testing what a biological attack on the city would look like.
The nearly 800,000 civilians living in the city were exposed to Serratia marcescens and Bacillus globigii. This testing continued for seven days straight and was responsible for only one reported death