Against the unthinkable: The government’s secret chemical weapons defense
What would happen if a chemical weapons attack happened here? The government has been making secret plans for years
Excerpted from American Coup
Existing disaster plans may include provisions for mass fatalities but should be reviewed and tested regularly to determine if these plans are appropriate for the relatively long period of increased demand which is characteristic of a pandemic, as compared to the shorter response period required for most disaster plans. There are currently no national plans to recommend mass graves or mass cremations. This would only be considered under the most extreme circumstances. The use of the term mass grave infers that the remains will never be re-interred or identified. Therefore, the term mass grave should never be used when describing temporary interment.
– Pandemic Influenza Mass Fatality Response Plan, 2007
A month before 9/11, scientists from Livermore and its sister Los Alamos laboratory conducted a test using live microbes in a sealed chamber at the West Desert Test Center of Dugway Proving Ground, eighty-five miles from metropolitan Salt Lake City. Dugway is a huge, remote high-desert military installation surrounded on two sides by mountains and the Great Salt Lake Desert to the north, acoustically and electronically quiet and free of light pollution, about as remote as one can get in the continental United States. Since 1942, through ups and downs, the post has hosted development and testing of and countermeasures to biological and chemical weapons. Until the United States renounced its own biological weapons in 1972 and destroyed its inventory, ten different biological agents were tested at Dugway.
Since the Nixon years Dugway base has served as the off-the-books black hole of the weapons of mass destruction national mission forces, the commando, SWAT, and technical arm of the Program. Dugway is where secret lethality tests are performed to gauge foreign and terrorist capabilities but also American equipment, protective clothing, detectors, and destroyers. If not literally the birthplace of the guinea pig, then it is certainly the place where the executive agents can play out their darkest fears and fantasies with humans and animals alike; it is the only U.S. facility equipped to test with aerosolized Bio-Safety Level 3 agents, the most deadly.
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BioWatch, DNDO, food defense — merely three more envoys of the apocalypse: nightmarish vulnerabilities turned into homeland security make-work and dogmas to indoctrinate the private sector into the primacy of defense and the need to standardize everything. In just two years after 9/11, federal government spending in preparation for Biological warfare increased by a factor of fifteen. The biological and chemical weapons workload at the Dugway Proving Ground increased almost eight times. BioWatch’s annual budget is more than $125 million a year; DNDO’s is triple that. Over the decade after 9/11, spending — federal, state, and local — on programs relating to biological, chemical, and nuclear defenses in the United States totaled as much as $25 billion a year, according to an independent strategic analysis firm. Spending to address just possible biological terrorist incidents during this stretch was about $57 billion, equal to about 10 percent of what the federal government spent during the same period on public health. Warren Stern, director of the Domestic Nuclear Detection Office, told Congress in early 2011 that countering nuclear terrorism was a “whole-of-government challenge” and that his office was working with federal, state, local, international, and private-sector partners. “In every layer and pathway we will seek to increase detection coverage and capability and deter terrorists from planning or attempting nuclear terrorism,” he said. Particularly challenging were scenarios including “threat pathways” that involved noncommercial general aviation, maritime craft under 300 tons, and the borders between the official ports of entry. More investment was needed, DNDO said, because “False alarms can be onerous for the many legitimate transporters of radioactive materials on America’s roadways, at its ports, and in its storage facilities, not to mention bulk transporters hauling scrap metal, granite, bananas, and even kitty litter — all of which emit isotope signals that sensors can pick up as ‘hot.’”
“The threat is determined and patient, will attempt to use our freedoms against us, will search for any path to produce violent events, and harbors no qualms about killing innocent men, women, and children to achieve its objectives,” said Admiral James A. Winnefeld, Jr., the Obama-selected commander of Northern Command and later Obama’s vice chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. WMD was first on Winnefeld’s list of domestic concerns.
They were destroyers in more ways than one, these weapons of mass destruction. They threatened everyone, or so it seemed, and thus were the perfect accompaniment to a lifetime of extraordinary response. But they were also phantoms, purveyors of fear that allowed a permanent and unassailable shift from the general welfare to national security. Warning mechanisms and special preparations could blanket the land, but even there, true security was unattainable, the treadmill of inertia thus another tool to benefit a select few who toiled between the lines, going through the motions of safeguarding the ABCs.
