In September 1950, a Navy minesweeper anchored near the Golden Gate Bridge spent one week spraying clouds of bacteria over San Francisco. The military wanted to know what would happen if an enemy launched a biological attack on an American city. So, they launched one themselves. Nearly all 800,000 residents inhaled the microbes. Nobody was warned. Nobody consented. Two weeks later, eleven patients showed up at Stanford Hospital with a mysterious infection the doctors had never encountered. One of them, a 75-year-old retired pipe fitter named Edward Nevin, died when the bacteria spread to his heart.

The secret held for twenty-six years. When Edward Nevin’s grandson finally learned how his grandfather died, he sued the federal government. The trial featured shouting matches and a general who challenged the family’s lawyer to a fistfight. The court ruled that the military was legally entitled to spray American citizens with bacteria without telling them. Operation Sea-Spray was just one of 239 secret biological warfare tests conducted on American cities between 1949 and 1969. This episode traces the documented horror from the fog-shrouded bay to the federal courthouse and asks what else might have drifted on winds we never questioned.

Now, let’s listen in as Nathaniel Sheppard narrates this tale on my behalf, shall we?

-Daniel P. Douglas

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