Operation 'Large Area Coverage' (LAC): U.S. Gov't Covertly Sprays Airborne Toxic Chemical Agent on Unsuspecting Americans in Secret Bioweapons Experiment

Military "never followed up on the long-term health of the residents exposed to the testing during Operation LAC," Missouri House resolution reveals.

A U.S. Air Force Fairchild C-119B-10-FA Flying Boxcar (s/n 49-102) of the 314th Troop Carrier Group in 1952.

In the 1950s and 1960s, Stanford University and the U.S. Army Chemical Corps conducted aerial dispersion tests using military transport aircraft that exposed unsuspecting Americans to fluorescent zinc cadmium sulfide (ZnCdS) particles, as part of the U.S. Biological Warfare Program, under the codename ‘Large Area Coverage’ (LAC).

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ZnCdS is a sintered chemical formed by heating a mixture of 80% zinc sulfide (ZnS) and 20% cadmium sulfide (CdS).

Commenting on Operation LAC, bioterrorism expert Leonard A. Cole—a Rutgers University professor of political science and emergency medicine, and pioneer in developing the field of terror medicine—said the military was “literally using the country as an experimental laboratory.”

The operation raises troubling questions: Could similar covert operations still be targeting unsuspecting U.S. citizens with experimental agents under the guise of national security or public safety?

Missouri Resolution Reveals Army’s Secret Chemical Spraying on Uninformed Communities, Including Vulnerable Children

LAC experiments “exposed large portions of the United States” to “flurries” of the synthesized chemical, according to a Missouri House of Representatives resolution.

Screenshot from House.MO.gov taken October 30, 2024

It is unclear when the resolution was first introduced, but the document indicates the Chief Clerk at the time was Dana Rademan Miller, who took up the position in 2018.

The resolution revealed that “previously classified documents” confirmed the United States Army “sprayed chemical agents over thousands of unwitting residents of some 33 urban and rural areas, including St. Louis.”

These populations—some of which were comprised mostly of “children under the age of twelve”—were “deliberately exposed without their knowledge.”

Local politicians were “not notified about the content of the testing.”

Residents in communities where ZnCdS was spread from land-based blowers mounted on low-income housing buildings were deceptively told that the machines were “part of a test for smoke screens that could guard against aerial observation by the Russians.”

Some individuals exposed to ZnCdS suffered an “unusually high number of stillbirths and birth defects.”

“Exposure to zinc cadmium sulfide has been linked to devastating side effects, such as lung cancer, prostate cancer, death, developmental defects in children, liver damage, kidney damage, calcium deficiency, osteoporosis, osteomalacia, anemia, loss of sense of smell, reduced sperm count, discoloration of teeth, pulmonary edema, chemical pneumonitis, respiratory failure, emphysema, dyspnea, bronchitis, chronic rhinitis, and decreased birth weights,” the Missouri resolution emphasized.

Operation LAC tests also included the dispersion of biological agents that were later “shown to be potentially pathogenic in people with weakened immune systems.”

Not only did the Army “never [follow] up on the long-term health of the residents exposed to the testing during Operation LAC,” but in 1972, the government “destroyed” the housing buildings involved in the tests, effectively eliminating key evidence of the exposure and any physical traces that could have been studied for residual contamination or health impact analysis.

National Report Uncovers Toxic ZnCdS Testing in 30+ U.S. and Canadian Cities, Revealing Health Risks, Respiratory Tumors, and Public Outrage

The tests occurred in Minneapolis, MN; Corpus Christi, TX; Fort Wayne, IN; St. Louis, MO; and 29 other urban and rural locations in the United States and Canada, according to the 1997 National Research Council (US) Subcommittee on Zinc Cadmium Sulfide.

Screenshot from NCBI.NLM.NIH.gov taken October 30, 2024

Operation LAC was the “largest test program ever undertaken by the Army’s Chemical Corps,” according to the Subcommittee, as the test area “covered the United States from the Rockies to the Atlantic, from Canada to the Gulf of Mexico.”

The ZnCdS tests were conducted to determine how bioweapon agents disperse in various environments and to determine how much of an agent would be needed to effectively attack a target city or area.

Despite both zinc and cadmium being toxic, ZnCdS particles were said not to be biological weapons themselves, but “simulants” of bioweapons.

The compound was allegedly selected as a simulant because it was cheap and fluoresces under ultraviolet (UV) light and therefore can be easily detected.

Its particle diameter (2-3 µm), mass, and behavior in air were also said to be similar to those of bioweapons agents, and it is relatively stable in the atmosphere.

Authorities were said to have “thought” ZnCdS was nontoxic to humans, animals, and plants—despite the fact that “no studies on the carcinogenicity of ZnCdS have been conducted” and “little information on the toxicity of ZnCdS was available in the scientific literature or in Army files,” according to the Subcommittee.

After learning of the dispersion tests in the early 1990s, government officials and citizens in cities where the tests occurred raised concerns about the “thousands of people who might unknowingly have been exposed” to ZnCdS.

After the tests became public, people living in those areas “attributed various illnesses, including cancer and reproductive difficulties, to exposure to the chemical” (example).

The Subcommittee revealed that in animal studies, “all cadmium compounds examined have been found to produce respiratory tract tumors after chronic exposures.”

Inhaled cadmium was also shown to “cause lung cancer” in both occupational studies and laboratory studies of animals.

At nearly half of the test sites, the maximal concentrations of airborne cadmium (in the form of ZnCdS) were “above the estimated urban average daily airborne cadmium,” wich means that exposure levels in these areas could exceed typical environmental cadmium levels, raising potential health concerns for local populations due to cadmium’s toxicity and its long-term accumulation risks in the human body.

The Subcommittee therefore concluded that the respiratory tract “was potentially at risk from exposure to particles of ZnCdS because the particles of ZnCdS were respirable and would be expected to deposit deep in the lungs.”

The group also confirmed it is unknown whether ZnCdS can break down in the lungs and get into the blood, which could make it more dangerous.

“[I]information is not available on whether ZnCdS might break down in the respiratory tract into more-soluble components, which could be absorbed into the blood,” they wrote.

Although “[p]eople were outraged at being exposed to chemicals by the government without their knowledge or consent” the Subcommittee “did not address ethical and other social issues about the Army's dispersion tests.”

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