The bio-chemical warfare tests [2] in New York City, initially scheduled for two days ago, went ahead today. New York's ABC News [3] reports Aug. 8 that scientists in midtown Manhattan used perfluorocarbon, "a harmless gas," which was tracked with electronic monitors. The so-called Urban Dispersal Program was carried out by the Homeland Security Department with the Pentagon's Defense Threat Reduction Agency [4] and the Energy Department's Long Island-based Brookhaven National Laboratory. Technicians hope to produce a computerized model of air-flow patterns that could help authorities decide where and how to evacuate people in a bioterrorist attack. The test was carried out in an area from 61st to 36th streets and from 10th to Third avenues. Officials would not disclose the locations where the gas was released or the monitoring points, but ABC stated: "The gases were released at two locations near Rockefeller Center, one near Times Square and one on a subway platform at 50th Street and Broadway, serving the No. 1 line." Similar studies have already been conducted in Salt Lake City and Oklahoma.
For those who know their Cold War history, this invokes an uneasy sense of deja vu. The Federation of American Scientists page on Biological Weapons [5] notes:
Cities were unwittingly used as laboratories to test aerosolization and dispersal methods; Aspergillus fumigatus, B. subtilis var. globigii, and Serratia marcescens were used as simulants and released during experiments in New York City, San Francisco, and other sites. Concerns regarding potential public health hazards of simulant studies were raised after an outbreak of nosocomial S. marcescens (formerly Chromobacterium prodigiosum) urinary tract infections at Stanford University Hospital between September 1950 and February 1951, following covert experiments using S. marcescens as a simulant in San Francisco. A report from the Centers for Disease Control completed in 1977 found no association between reported morbidity and mortality from pneumonia and influenza and local simulant experiments.
The irony is that what the government had to do covertly during the Cold War it is now able to do overtly in the post-9-11 atmosphere...
