The U.S. Army secretly tested carcinogenic chemicals on unknowing residents of Canada in Winnipeg and Alberta during the Cold War in testing linked to weaponry involving radioactive ingredients meant to attack the Soviet Union, according to classified documents revealed in a new book Behind the Fog: How the U.S. Cold War Radiological Weapons Program Exposed Innocent Americans by Lisa Martino-Taylor, an associate professor of sociology at St. Louis Community College.
The incidents occurred between July 9, 1953 and Aug 1, 1953 when they sprayed six kilograms of zinc cadmium sulfide onto unsuspecting citizens of Winnipeg from U.S. Army planes. The Army then returned 11 years later in 1964 and repeated the experiments in other parts of Canada including Suffield, Alta. and Medicine Hat, Alta., according to Martino-Taylor, National Post reported.
“In Winnipeg, they said they were testing what they characterized as a chemical fog to protect Winnipeg in the event of a Russian attack,” Martino-Taylor said. “They characterized it as a defensive study when it was actually an offensive study.”
Canada knowingly participated in this experiment as part of an agreement it held with the U.S. and England but was allegedly not told about what was being sprayed on its citizens, according to Martino-Taylor.
In 1964, a memo from Canadian officials expressed concern that an “American aircraft was emitting distinctly visible emissions,” Martino-Taylor said.
Instant Access to Current Spot Prices & Interactive Charts
In Canadian and U.S. documents, the tests were referenced as biological and chemical when documents suggest they actually involved combining the two with radiological components to form a combined weapon.
The U.S. was working on producing a radioactive nerve agent that combined the dangerous phosphorus-32 and VX chemical compounds.
Behind the Fog
Best Price: $35.00
Buy New $35.00
(as of 07:20 UTC - Details)
“The zinc cadmium sulfide acted as a fluorescent tracer which would help the U.S. Army determine how the radioactive fallout from a weapon used on the Soviets would travel through wind currents,” Martino-Taylor said.
An additional 1964 memo from Suffield mentions that the U.S. Army wanted to travel Suffield to “discuss the use of radioactive tracer techniques in chemical weapons trials.” While preparing for other tests involving BG, a bacteria, the U.S. Army drafted the number of hospitals and hospital beds available in the area, showing a potential further connection to the CIA’s human experimentation MK-Ultra project.
It’s a known fact the Allan Memorial Institute in Royal Victoria Hospital is seen as the cradle of modern torture, and that Scottish-born Dr. Donald Ewen Cameron was heavily involved in subproject 68. Cameron also had partial funding funneled by the CIA (approx. $62,000) and the Canadian government for its brainwashing experiments and torture, according to The McGill Daily.
So was the U.S. planning on expanding its torture experiments into Suffield?
For decades the massive Suffield Base in Alberta was one of the largest chemical and biological weapons research centers in the world. A 1989 Peace Magazine article explained, “For almost 50 years, scientists from the Department of National Defence have been as busy as beavers expanding their knowledge of, and testing agents for, chemical and biological warfare (CBW) in southern Alberta,”Global Research reported.
“The U.S. was very aggressive,” Martino-Taylor said. “Canada seemed less on board as I read through the documentation.”
Until now it was thought the U.S. only experimented on its own people, but it’s now known that they also experimented on their neighbors in Canada and tried to expand that experimentation to the levels it did in the U.S.
