The Dugway Proving Ground is a vast sprawl of 3,243 square kilometres in Utah’s Great Salt Lake Desert, south-west of Salt Lake City. Despite the scenic landscape, you do not want to go hiking there: the area has been a military testing ground for chemical and biological weapons since 1942. In 1969 the US renounced first-strike use, but chemical and biological agents are still tested at Dugway to research methods of detection and neutralisation.
Much of what happens within Dugway’s boundaries is so secret that the site has earned quasi-Area 51 status among UFOlogists. But in 2014, following a decade of to-and-fro with government officials, visual artist David Maisel managed to secure access to the Proving Ground and take aerial and on-the-ground photographs. “I did not have to wear any hazmat suit while visiting the site,” Maisel says. On the other hand, he adds, “every site I worked at was vetted. I always had one or more representatives from Dugway with me, even [when taking aerial photos] in the air.”
Satellite images on services such as Google Earth reveals how Dugway’s terrain is dotted with mandala-like circles. Those are, essentially, colossal targets for toxic ordnance, either dropped from the sky or detonated in various ways on the ground. “There’s a number of grids inscribed on the desert floor, where weapons are detonated,” Maisel says. “The desert becomes a measuring device for toxicity: there are, at various points [within those grids], devices measuring toxicity.” These include lidar devices, which use laser light combined with an optic sensor to scan their surroundings. According to a research paper published in 2018 by SPIE, the international society for optics and photonics, lidar technology was used at Dugway to detect chlorine concentrations in the air during a series of experiments in 2015 and 2016. Maisel himself says he attended an event where Dugway personnel met civilian vendors touting lidar gear.
During his time at Dugway, what Maisel found most striking among the outdoor constructions was not the testing arenas, but a droll, staircase-shaped building whose apparent function was far from obvious. “I found it an enigmatic, puzzling structure,” he says. On inquiring about its purpose, he discovered that “[the building’s] shadow is used as a marker, meant to be seen from the air during flight tests, on the desert’s floor”.
Maisel was even introduced to what goes on inside Dugway. The facility’s latest showpiece is called WSLAT (Whole System Live Agent Test Chamber), a sealed glovebox lab, completed in 2015, dedicated to testing techniques to detect weaponised biological agents such as anthrax.
His whole experience of Dugway left Maisel with a pronounced sense of disquietude. He knows that facilities like Dugway are designed and run to minimise risks arising from human error. “These labs are built as super high-quality filter systems, so that not even a molecule could escape,” he says. But he also knew Dugway’s track record is far from immaculate: in 1968, in what would go down in history as the “Dugway sheep incident”, 6,249 sheep died after being poisoned by chemicals tested at the site; in 2015, the news broke that Dugway had erroneously sent live anthrax – instead of inert specimens – to labs across the country.
“Dugway is permitted to store and test live level 3 agents, for which there’s a vaccine or a cure,” Maisel says. “But there are actually labs in the US [at least 13] which handle level 4 agents, for which there is no cure at all.”
Gian Volpicelli is WIRED's politics editor. He tweets from @Gmvolpi
This article was originally published by WIRED UK
