The history of biological warfare
Friedrich Frischknecht
…."Soon after the war, the US military started open-air tests, exposing test animals, human volunteers and unsuspecting civilians to both pathogenic and non-pathogenic microbes (Cole, 1988; Regis, 1999). A release of bacteria from naval vessels off the coasts of Virginia and San Francisco infected many people, including about 800,000 people in the Bay area alone. Bacterial aerosols were released at more than 200 sites, including bus stations and airports. The most infamous test was the 1966 contamination of the New York metro system with Bacillus globigii— a non-infectious bacterium used to simulate the release of anthrax—to study the spread of the pathogen in a big city. But with the opposition to the Vietnam War growing and the realization that biological weapons could soon become the poor man's nuclear bomb, President Nixon decided to abandon offensive biological weapons research and signed the Biological and Toxin Weapons Convention (BTWC) in 1972, an improvement on the 1925 Geneva Protocol. Although the latter disallowed only the use of chemical or biological weapons, the BTWC also prohibits research on biological weapons. However, the BTWC does not include means for verification, and it is somewhat ironic that the US administration let the verification protocol fail in 2002, particularly in view of the Soviet bioweapons project, which not only was a clear breach of the BTWC, but also remained undetected for years."….
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1326439/