U.S. Prepping for Possible Germ Warfare
C A M P 12, N E V A D A T E S T S I T E, Nev., Sept. 4 -- In a remote corner of the Nevada desert, a highly restricted area once used to test nuclear bombs, the U.S. government has been running a secret experiment called Project Bachus.
It is a small germ warfare factory, set up inside an abandoned government building. U.S. officials say they built it to better understand how to detect similar operations in places like Iraq or Afghanistan or even by terrorists here at home.
The factory, built by the Pentagon's Defense Threat Reduction Agency, has been brought to full production for several weeks on two occasions — in 1999 and again in 2000. Technicians grew several pounds of a harmless bacterium with characteristics similar to deadly anthrax.
"A terrorist could easily grow anthrax in a facility like this," Jay Davis, who was DTRA director at the time the factory was built, said in an interview at the one-time classified facility, "and produce enough quantity in a covert delivery to kill, say, 10,000 people in a large city."
The DTRA team bought all materials for the small-scale laboratory from local hardware stores and the Internet. Included in their shopping list was a 50-liter fermenter purchased "used" from overseas. "Commercial item. Off the shelf," Davis said. "Easy to find."
At no time did any of the purchases cause law enforcement to be suspicious, Davis added.
'Fairly Concealable'
Asked if this was how a terrorist group might put together such a laboratory, Davis said: "A terrorist group would choose to do this, yes … This is the size of thing you would be afraid a non-state group would do, either people in our country or people in some other country. This is fairly concealable."
The primary reason for conducting the experiment was to place sensors outside of the building to create what the intelligence community calls a "signature," according to intelligence sources. Once in operation, technicians measured heat changes, emissions that could be sampled in the air and soil as well as patterns of energy consumption.
