The U.S. Army’s mistaken shipment of live anthrax samples to government and commercial laboratories occurred at a military post in a desolate stretch of the Utah desert that has been testing chemical weapons since it opened in 1942.
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Test facilities like Dugway are intended to develop ways to defend against biochemical warfare, which some fear could be used by terrorists, said Barry M. Blechman, co-founder of the Stimson Center, a nonpartisan global security group in Washington.
He doesn’t know why they were sending anthrax and is perplexed at how they mistakenly sent live strains of anthrax.
“This is an accident that should never happen,” Blechman said. “You should have double-triple-positive controls over any live, lethal agent.”
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