US Army Dugway proving ground: Basin for bio-testing.

• Author: Erickson, Steve
• Position: Biodevastation 7

Dugway is located about 75 miles west of Salt Lake City. It is a restricted military reservation that encompasses 3,200 square kilometers, some 800,000 acres or about the size of Rhode Island, in the Utah portion of the Great Basin. The Great Basin is a unique geographic region that stretches from the Wasatch Front east of Salt Lake City to the Sierra Nevada Mountains on the west, from southern Idaho and Nevada on the north to the Colorado River Basin and the Mohave Desert on the south. It is characterized throughout by 9-12,000 foot mountain ranges running north and south, with broad high desert valleys in between. There is very little rainfall, and all rivers and streams flow into inland lakes--no water escapes the Basin, hence its name. It's like the bottom of the sink--some might say a toilet bowl. It's a harsh environment, very sparsely populated, starkly beautiful with vast vistas--some might say desolate and useless. For these reasons, the Basin has long attracted a wide variety of hazardous industries and military activities and testing, including testing weapons of mass destruction.

In Utah and Nevada, we got the lower-tech, nasty back-end of that sort of R & D: nuclear testing at the Nevada Test Site, biological and chemical testing at Dugway. In fact, Dugway is surrounded by two chemical weapons incinerators (one mountain range to the east), a radioactive waste dump, an Air Force bombing range, a hazardous waste landfill, and a hazardous waste incinerator to the north. The airspace above and all around Dugway is the Utah test and training range, home to supersonic and electronic warfare training. At the doorstep of Dugway, on the tiny Goshute Indian Reservation, a temporary storage facility for the nation's high level spent nuclear fuel rods is planned.

Dugway pre-dates all of that, established in 1942 to host World War II training and weapons development. A German village at Dugway was used to determine how best to use incendiary bombs to fire bomb Dresden and other German cities. Japan Village was used to perfect flame throwers to combat Japanese soldiers hunkered in Pacific caves. After the war, the mission evolved into the testing of chemical, biological and radiological weapons, as Dugway emerged as the center for open air testing for the Army's Test and Evaluation Command (TECOM). Throughout the 1950s and 60s and into the mid-70s, Dugway conducted over 1,000 open air chemical weapons tests with GB, VX and mustard agents...