Another entry from Lab 257,and it's secrets.

.... A few years before the Plum Island Animal Disease Center’s dedication day in 1956, the United States launched its first biological warfare program. A glimpse into the past reveals a surprising truth: Plum Island wasn’t exactly what it appeared to be to the public.

The gory details were kept secret at the time, but America’s germ warfare goals—national defense—were heralded by the nation’s leaders and press. A New York Times editorial in 1945 mused, “When the scientific story of the war is written, we have here an epic that rivals that of the atomic bomb.” The paper was right. A few months after the United States demonstrated its atomic warfare prowess on Japan, it announced the development of a second weapon: killer microscopic germs. While forty-five people participated in the British biological warfare effort, the American version involved four thousand men and women. The Army ran the innocuously titled “War Research Service” (WRS) program at Fort Detrick in Frederick, Maryland. Civilian chemist George W. Merck directed the work, advised by scientists from the nation’s top universities.

These men were motivated by the threats of the times. In ways, they were no different from the atomic fathers Einstein and Oppenheimer. Theodor Rosebury, a Columbia University microbiologist who worked on the WRS projects, said, “We resolved the ethical question just as other equally good men resolved the same question at Oak Ridge and Los Alamos.”

The aims of the biological warfare program didn’t trouble Dr. Albert Webb, a Fort Detrick scientist in the early years. “That aspect never worried me personally. People had been killing people for millennia. Whether you hit him over the head with a club, stab him with a spear, or give him a disease he might get anyway—let’s not balk at that.” One has to look at the whole picture and understand the enemy of the time, says Webb. “We knew other nations, Germany and Japan—and Russia—were working on this, and in self-defense, we had to know what the potential was. Maybe it’s not a popular thought today, but I still feel that it was necessary.”

https://exploringrealhistory.blogspot.com/2019/06/part-2-lab-257-disturbing-governments.html