There was considerable gloom and doom in Frederick and Fort Detrick in 1969 when the decision to stop offensive biological warfare research was made by President Richard M. Nixon. It meant a loss of jobs and struck hard at both the employees and the community. Fort Detrick was the largest corporate employer in Frederick County.
The intervening 25 years have seen steady growth and the realization that the installation is a singular asset in the world of biomedical and communications technology. No other industry in Frederick County could challenge the installation's status as largest corporate employer. As a whole, Fort Detrick activities injected more than $260 million into the county economy in 1993.
In retrospect, the 1960s were a period of national dissent, a time of self-evaluation in America. Distrust of the Fort Detrick program and questions on the morality of BW prompted a wholesale review and eventual major revision of Fort Detrick's mission.
Congressional investigations into the chemical/biological warfare programs were begun in 1969 by Senator Eugene McCarthy. He claimed that between 1954 and 1962, there were 3,300 accidents in the BW program under Fort Detrick's auspices.
McCarthy said a study showed that half the accidents involved such things as broken test tubes and scratches to laboratory workers from needles. McCarthy had been given a secret briefing by the Army describing the various incidents that can occur and the steps prescribed to ensure no further injury occurs or to arrest any exposure to BW agent. McCarthy found willing listeners for his charges, but Senator Margaret Chase Smith investigated on her own. She visited Fort Detrick, interviewing scientists and inspecting facilities and records.
Senator Smith's words of support for the safety and scientific excellence of Fort Detrick effectively blunted McCarthy's gross generalizations.
On April 21, 1969, McCarthy urged the U.S. to join inter-national efforts to ban chemical and biological warfare (CBW) agents. He urged President Nixon to resubmit the 1925 Geneva Accord to seek inclusion of bans on nausea and tear gases.
The 1969 budget for CBW research was reported to be $300 million with $5 million for herbicides designed to kill food crops or strip trees of foliage to deprive enemy forces of ground cover.
President Nixon ordered a review of the CBW programs and on June 27, 1969, Fort Detrick Commander Colonel E.M. Gershater conducted a seminar for leading civic and political leaders. He reported such efforts as development of an automatic warning device that detected the presence of dangerous biological contaminants. He said efforts included creating biological munitions and the study of biological agents known to have usefulness in military operations and defenses against those agents.
Colonel Gershater emphasized that safety was foremost in Fort Detrick operations and the installation and its facilities were the safest of their kind in the world.
The biological effort was caught up in a major investigation by the National Security Council into the chemical warfare (CW) program centered at Edgewood Arsenal. The BW effort, like the chemical, was under the Chief of the Army Chemical Corps and Army Materiel Command in 1969. This caused considerable confusion in investigations and press reports.
Maryland Senator Charles McC. Mathias asked for suspension of the nerve gas testing program that summer and as a result demonstrators showed up at the main gate of Fort Detrick-the wrong location, to protest those research programs.
Demonstrations were not new at Fort Detrick. In 1961, a group seeking an end to BW research, maintained a 24-hour vigil for slightly more than a year. The group ended its vigil by planting a "Peace Tree" outside the fence. Post engineers attempted to keep the tree living, transplanting it to a better location with better soil, but it never had a chance. A replacement tree was planted by the engineers.
In August 1969, Congress cut $16 million from the CBW programs. Colonel Gershater spoke to the Frederick Chamber of Commerce in October and said he had been assured no jobs were being cut from the current budget. He returned to his office to learn that 47 jobs would be lost in the nationwide cutback at military installations around the world.
On Veterans Day, November 11, 1969, the Nation's press reported President Nixon had asked the Senate to ratify the 1925 Geneva Protocol prohibiting use of chemical and biological weapons. Nixon assured Fort Detrick its research would continue. President Nixon, scoring a major international diplomatic victory on November 25, 1969, signed an executive order outlawing offensive biological research in the United States.
The shock was felt dramatically in Frederick in economic terms. Questions were asked about the order's effect on Fort Detrick, specifically what would happen to its civilian scientists and support personnel. Nixon said the Nation would destroy its stockpile of bacteriological weapons and limit its research to defensive measures.
Lieutenant Colonel Lucien Winegar, then deputy commander of Fort Detrick, said it would "be fair to assume" the installation would continue to work with dangerous organisms used in offensive BW since any defense required knowledge of those agents. Continuation of the defensive research program was authorized in the BW Convention. The decision to continue the defensive program and its expansion in 1983 ensured American military members had a measure of protection in such actions as the Persian Gulf War.
The vigilance in BW matters was not easily maintained because of constant opposition at home and abroad. Insiders say the Nation owes a debt of gratitude to the persuasiveness and sound advice of such former Fort Detrick experts as Colonel Richard F. Barquist, Dr. Riley D. Housewright, Colonel David L. Huxsoll, and William Patrick. Their warnings of Soviet viola-tions were evidenced by such incidents as the "Yellow Rain" attacks in Southeast Asia investigated by Dr. Sharon Watson of the Armed Forces Medical Intelligence Center (AFMIC), Fort Detrick. These were proved correct in February 1993 when Newsweek magazine published what the American intelligence community had been reporting since 1978, namely that the Soviet Union never stopped its BW research program.
The collapse of the Soviet Union provided the opportunity for the Russian government to respond to Free World diplomacy to end such work and admit its violations. Russian President Boris Yeltsin admitted the Soviet Union continued offensive BW research programs at several locations in spite of the 1972 Biological Weapons Convention.
The death of nearly 80 persons near Sverdlosk in 1979 was the so-called "smoking gun" evidence reported by such agencies as AFMIC and USAMRIID through the U.S. Department of State. Yeltsin said the deaths at Sverdlosk were directly attributable to an accident, which occurred during an offensive BW experiment using Bacillus anthracis and not to distribution of contaminated cattle feed as the Soviet government originally reported and perpetuated.
Harvard's Dr. Mathew Meselson has since visited Fort Detrick to gather information on a special paper he prepared with Fort Detrick's leading expert in Bacillus anthracis , Dr. Joseph Jemski. The paper, published in Nature in the summer of 1994, discusses the incident and the fact that it was indeed the result of an accident at the USSR offensive BW facility in Sverdlosk. Dr. Jemski shared all of his personal work with Dr. Meselson in a typical instance of professional courtesy shown by Fort Detrick's scientists.
The entire issue of Soviet BW provided the opportunity wherein Fort Detrick was proved again to have provided wise counsel. Based on its record of 50 years service to the Nation, the soundness of Fort Detrick's scientific advice should have come as no surprise.