Not far outside the historic British city
of Salisbury lies one of the most famous landscapes in the world. Wiltshire is where the great painter John
Constable did his best work, a pastoral patchwork of fields that is the very essence of England. But while it may look picturesque, this landscape
hides a dark secret. Fenced off from the rest of the world, a 30km
sq research station sits beside a village. It’s guarded by soldiers, the work happening
inside its anonymous walls more than top secret. It’s name is Porton Down, and it’s the
United Kingdom’s secret nerve gas lab. Established during the chaos of the First
World War, Porton Down was at the very center of British chemical and bioweapons research. It was here that mustard gas was tested, that
anthrax bombs were produced, and that the deadliest nerve agent known to man was synthesized. It was also here that the government conducted
secret trials, exposing unsuspecting volunteers to sarin, and then hushing up the tragic results. Shrouded in secrecy, tainted with scandal,
this is Porton Down - the most dangerous building in Britain. Gassed
On the evening of April 22, 1915, the German military changed the course of warfare. The previous couple of days had seen strange
activity along the frontlines at Ypres, as German soldiers lined up metal cannisters
along a 4km stretch of battlefield. Finally, on that fateful day, the signal went
out. The Germans opened the cannisters. Slowly, a wall of yellow mist began to roll
towards the Allied trenches. Whoever it touched felt their throat burning,
their eyes stinging, their lungs failing. Although no-one in the trenches that day knew
it, they’d just been caught up in the first major gas attack in modern history. The yellow mist was chlorine, and it was deadly. The Ypres attack killed 1,100 Allied soldiers,
and injured 7,000 more. For the Allies, the discovery of this new
German superweapon was a little like getting into a boxing ring with an opponent, only
to discover they have magic fists that can melt flesh. In London, the British government immediately
authorized research into poison gas, desperate to catch up with the German war machine. That September, 1915, a site was selected. Situated just outside the historic city of
Sailsbury, near the village of Porton, it was initially known as the Porton Camp Experimental
Research Station. Before long, though, it would acquire its
more famous name: Porton Down. The establishment of Porton Down didn’t
come a moment too soon. Just before Christmas that year, the Germans
added Phosgene gas to their arsenal. Although their initial attempts to deploy
it were less successful, it would turn out to be even deadlier than chlorine. The following March, 1916, Porton Down officially
began operation, testing nearly 200 compounds for use as weapons. But while the nature of the experiments was
deadly serious, the reality of them sometimes tipped into the ridiculous. In 1916, not many people knew what they were
doing with chemical weapons. Not even scientists. So, Porton Down’s experts initially had
a habit of making what we’d call absurd mistakes. Mistakes like unleashing a load of poison
gas in a field and only realizing afterwards that the wind was blowing it in the direction
of nearby villages. Even when things were intentional, they were
still bizarre. In one experiment, scientists wanted to see
if a man could outrun arsenic gas. So they hired an amatuer sprinter, sprayed
a whole load of arsenic at him and told him to run. You’ll be glad to know the answer was “yes,
a sufficiently terrified man can indeed outrun a chemical weapon.” By July, 1917, the situation in Europe was
getting critical. The Germans had begun using mustard gas on
the battlefield, which was far less-deadly than chlorine or Phosgene, but which was much,
much better at blinding and injuring people. So the Allies decided to fight fire with fire. In June, 1918, British mustard gas was used
for the first time against the Central Powers. Over the next few months, thousands of German
troops were injured by chemical weapons. Among their number was Adolf Hitler. In October the future fuhrer was blinded by
mustard gas developed at Porton Down and evacuated to a military hospital. Spoiler alert: he sadly recovered. When WWI finally ended that November, chemical
weapons had killed nearly 100,000 people, and injured over 1.3 million. Although everyone agreed the weapons were
immoral, there was no arguing with figures like that. Which may be why, in 1920, the British government
passed a bill to keep Porton Down operational. It was lucky they did so. In just a few short years, scientists were
going to make a discovery that would take chemical warfare into an even darker era. A Taboo Family
In 1936, an obscure German scientist named Gerhard Schrader very nearly caused a catastrophic
industrial accident. Schrader was working on a new class of pesticide
for IG Farben when he accidentally spilled a couple of drops. In no time at all, Schraders eyes were watering,
his skin was slick with sweat, and he was having trouble breathing. Freakier still, his pupils had contracted
until they were just tiny dots, making the brightly lit lab seem as dark as it would
at nighttime. Schrader didn’t know it, but he’d just
simultaneously discovered and poisoned himself with history’s first nerve agent. As chemicals go, nerve agents are almost uniquely
terrifying. Our muscles contract when acetylcholine is
released. Usually, they relax again when the enzyme
acetylcholinesterase destroys all that contraction-loving acetylcholine. But nerve agents inactivate the enzyme, sending
the body into spasms and causing suffocation. Fittingly for such a creepy chemical, Schrader’s
colleagues gave it the name tabu, after the German word for taboo. Y’know, as in “that thing is taboo, don’t
make more of it.” Unfortunately, Germany in 1936 was all about
being as taboo as possible. When the Nazis found out about tabu, they
quickly realized it could make an excellent weapon. As WWII lumbered closer, scientists in Berlin
began experimenting with Schrader’s findings, trying to make an even more-deadly breakthrough. In 1943, they succeeded. If you’ve never heard of sarin, just know
it’s the sort of stuff that gives other chemical weapons nightmares, a nerve agent
so potent it can kill you gruesomely in a mere 15 minutes. When the Japanese doomsday cult Aum Shinrikyo
released a low-grade cloud of it on the Tokyo subway in 1995, they managed to kill 13 people
and injure over 6,000. The stuff the Nazis were producing? It was infinitely purer. To use a crude analogy, the stuff Aum synthesized
was the watered-down beer of nerve agents. The stuff the Nazis were producing was the
100% pure methanol. Not that anyone knew about it. Over at Porton Down, British scientists were
still producing mustard gas, unaware that the Germans were working on the chemical weapon
equivalent of the Manhattan Project. Even when a Nazi scientist was captured in
the North Africa campaign in 1943 and told his interrogators all about sarin, no-one
believed him. A special report sent to Porton Down was dismissed
as Nazi propaganda. It was a dismissal that could’ve ended in
catastrophe. By now, the Nazis had built a factory at Dyhernfurth
in occupied Poland that was producing thousands of tons of tabu and sarin. At the battle of Stalingrad that winter, Hitler
nearly authorized its use. His generals even wanted to drop it over Britain. Yet, for whatever reason, Hitler could never
bring himself to use his nerve agents. It could be that he remembered all too clearly
being gassed himself. It could be that German intelligence had mistakenly
reported Porton Down was developing its own nerve agents to use in retailliation. So Hitler never flicked that particular doomsday
switch. But while there was no sarin at Porton Down
in 1943, that would very soon change. Cut ahead to April, 1945. The Third Reich is in ruins, the German countryside
in flames. Just as Berlin is on the cusp of falling,
a group of British soldiers stumble across a huge stockpile of sarin. Barely two weeks later, Porton Down authorized
the first trials of the mysterious Nazi gas. 56 volunteers were exposed to extremely low
concentrations. The results were heart-stopping. Like Gerhard Schrader back in 1936, all test
subjects became badly sick. Their pupils contracted. Some lost their sight for as long as five
days. As one British official described it, the
Allies had been "caught with our pants down". Not long after, all other chemical weapons
work at Porton Down was downgraded. From now on, the facility’s number one priority
would be producing sarin. The Experiments
The end of WWII saw the Allies engage in a mad scramble for Nazi tech, often going to
hypocritical lengths. Famously, Operation Paperclip spirited hundreds
of Nazi rocket scientists to the US, shielding them from prosecution in exchange for boosting
America’s military might. What’s less well-known is that the scientists
weren’t just involved in rocket design. They were also involved in the development
of chemical weapons. Within months of the war’s official end,
the US, Great Britain, France, and the USSR all had active nerve gas programs. And, as each nation refined their own weapons,
they got more and more nervous about the other guys having them. Come 1950, the British government was convinced
the Soviets were stockpiling nerve gas. Terrified of what sarin might do to a civilian
population, they authorized Porton Down to start conducting intense human trials. Now, this should’ve been illegal. Back in 1947, most governments in the world
- including Britain’s - had signed up to the Nuremberg Code, a prohibition on conducting
experiments on humans created in the wake of Nazi and Japanese medical atrocities. But what was the British government to do? Sit on their backsides and wait for Soviet
sarin to be sprayed over London? So the scientists at Porton Down began recruiting
enlisted men to test their nerve agents on. Controversially, they didn’t tell them what
the tests were for. “It’s a mild experiment to find a cure
for the common cold,” was the standard refrain when anyone asked. Decades later, inquiries into the illegal
experiments at Porton Down would reveal that doctors in the early 1950s felt no need to
tell patients the truth. Felt that the nation’s common good outweighed
the rights of a single individual soldier. After all, they were being careful, weren’t
they? It’s not like anyone was going to die or
anything. Right? That same year, 1950, 113 volunteers were
exposed to higher concentrations of sarin to study the effects. Most came down with severe eye pain, headaches,
and fits of vomiting. Despite this, tests at even greater doses
were authorized. By the end of 1952, thousands of British soldiers
had been unwittingly exposed to the nerve agent, some at doses that tiptoed dangerously
close to the lethal threshold. In February, 1953, that threshold was nearly
crossed when one of Porton Down’s subjects experienced what was called a “serious adverse
reaction.” Yet the experiments continued, and the dosage
got higher. On April 27, scientists at the lab dropped
300mg of sarin onto the uniforms of six men. Among them was John Kelly, another ‘volunteer’
who didn’t know what he was volunteering for. But while most of Porton Down’s volunteers
merely got sick, Kelly suffered a reaction beyond anything the doctors had yet seen. Not long after being dosed with sarin, Kelly
collapsed. He slipped into a coma and very nearly died. Although he ultimately recovered, it was the
wake up call the institute needed. Orders came down from on high: stop this madness. Stop playing God. From now on, doses of sarin would be capped
at a mere 15mg, one twentieth of what Kelly had been exposed to. Unfortunately, this was the 1950s, when the
doctor always knew best. Seeing their new orders, the researchers nodded
their agreement… ...and reduced the doses to 200mg. Not long after, a 20-year old RAF engineer
named Ronald Maddison was offered fifteen shillings to take part in an experiment to
find a cure for the common cold. Needing the money to buy an engagement ring
for his girlfriend, he accepted. Death Comes to
Porton It was 10:00am on May 6, 1953 when Ronald
Maddison stepped into the Porton Down gas chamber. He was part of a small group of volunteers
that day, all of whom thought they were testing a mild drug. As the men sat in a small circle, their faces
hidden behind gas masks, the scientists went around them one by one, dropping 200mg of
sarin onto patches of their uniform. At 10:17, Maddison was given a dose on his
arm. It’s impossible to know what the young man
thought as he watched those insignificant drops land on the fabric. Was he thinking of his girlfriend, of the
ring he would soon buy? Or was he just thinking about how uncomfortable
the chamber was, how he couldn’t wait to get out into the sunshine again? There’s no way we’ll ever know. As time ticked away, the small group of volunteers
slowly began to feel the effects of the nerve agent. First came the dimming of their vision, as
their pupils contracted. Then came the sheen of sweat, lying slick
across their bodies. Outside the chamber, the scientists watched,
unconcerned. This was a smaller dose than the one that
had nearly killed John Kelly. What did they have to worry about? It turned out that the answer was “plenty.” At nearly quarter to eleven, Maddison began
to complain that he wasn’t feeling good, that he needed to be let out the chamber. As the scientists opened the door, he removed
his gas mask, mumbling that he couldn’t hear. He took a few steps towards a nearby bench…
...and then collapsed on the floor, his body convulsing. Just outside, 19-year old Alfred Thornhill
was one of the ambulance workers on call at Porton Down that day. When the alarm went up, he was first on the
scene. What he saw that day scarred him for the rest
of his life. In testimony decades later, Thornhill described
seeing Maddison on the floor, convulsing so hard it looked like he was being electrocuted. Four scientists were trying to hold him down,
but his body was twitching too hard. A thick, white substance was foaming from
the boy’s mouth, a substance Thornhill would describe as looking like “frogspawn”. It was 10:47 by the time Thornhill and the
ambulance crew got Maddison to the onbase hospital. The ward had already been evacuated of patients,
and now a gaggle of terrified doctors were waiting in white lab coats for the poisoned
airman. As Maddison was placed on the bed, Thornhill
saw them inject him with a huge syringe. One of the doctors lifted up Maddison’s
bare leg. According to Thornhill, the leg was turning
blue. Not all at once, but with the blueness creeping
upwards from his foot, like a liquid that was slowly engulfing his body. Moments later, a nurse shouted at him to leave. But Thornhill never forgot the sight of that
flowing color, moving - he said - like something from outer space. By the time the clock struck 11, Maddison
was a dead, ashen gray, his pulse undetectable. Although doctors continued to try pumping
adrenaline direct into his heart, it was useless. The sarin had done its work, the very thing
it had been designed by the Nazis to do At 13:30, Maddison was pronounced dead. In the aftermath, the facility went into full
ass-covering mode. Thornhill was made to sign a sheet of paper,
and told that if he ever breathed word of this to anyone, he would be thrown in prison
for the rest of his life. At the Ministry of Defense, a conspiracy was
enacted to record Maddison’s death as a generic accident, with no mention being made
of sarin. As for Porton Down itself… The incident finally shook the researchers
out of their complacency. The recommendation made after John Kelly’s
near-fatal accident of using lower concentrations was put into place. But the sarin trials didn’t stop. For the rest of the Cold War, until 1989,
volunteers were routinely exposed to nerve gas. By the end of the experiments, over 20,000
British servicemen had been poisoned. Even after Maddison’s death, many of them
still weren’t told what was happening to them. They thought they were helping to cure the
common cold. Bioweapons and Secret Trials
So far in this video, we’ve focused on Porton Down’s history with nerve agents. But it wasn’t just chemical research Britain’s
secret WMD lab was involved in. Even as German scientists were creating sarin
in the second world war, Porton Down was developing bioweapons to haunt your nightmares. The tests began in earnest in 1940. These were the days of the Battle of Britain,
when Luftwaffe planes streaked across the skies and invasion seemed imminent. With time possibly running out the British
scrambled for a weapon that could disrupt German society on a huge scale. To cause such big problems, they turned to
something very small: microbes. That year, Porton Down worked to create weaponized
versions of typhoid, cholera, and Botulinum that could be used to spread panic in a population. They also experimented with diseases - such
as foot and mouth - that could destroy German livestock. But the weapon they had the most success with
was one that could be used against humans or animals, with a huge mortality rate. Anthrax production started in earnest in Porton
Down in November, 1941. If you’ve never heard of anthrax, just be
aware that it’s one of the nastiest diseases in existence. The mortality rate when inhaled is over 80%. With a relatively small amount of the stuff,
you could wipe out an entire city. Not that the British were intending to do
this. Well, not exactly. Anthrax bombs were authorized only for use
in the event that the Nazis deployed a banned weapon against Britain first. Perhaps Hitler was more right than he realized
when he demurred from attacking London with sarin. Still, there was no doubting the lethality
of the stuff cooked up in Porton Down. In 1942, scientists decided to test the bioweapon
on the island of Gruinard off the coast of Scotland. A flock of sheep was tied up, and a single
anthrax bomb dropped. Within three days, the sheep were all dead. But the bomb was even more effective than
just as a killing machine. Gruinard was rendered so contaminated that
no-one was allowed to set foot there for over forty years - and even then only after all
the topsoil had been removed and the ground sterilized with formaldehyde. Were anthrax dropped on a German city, it
would become uninhabitable for generations. Thankfully that never happened. Just as the Nazis quailed from using sarin
against the Allies, so the Allies couldn’t bring themselves to deploy bioweapons against
the Axis. When WWII finally ended, the majority of Porton
Down’s anthrax was destroyed. Yet the bioweapons research didn’t stop. It just got morally murkier. Jump forward to the 1950s. Porton Down’s sarin trials are underway,
and the Cold War looms large in government planning. In response to reports of Soviet bioweapons,
the UK decided to authorize secret experiments to assess Britain’s vulnerability to germ
warfare. Starting in 1955, British planes began flying
the length of the country, ostensibly to monitor the weather, but in reality to clandestinely
dump zinc cadmium sulphide over civilian areas. The following year, 1956, bacteria were secretly
released on the London Underground, to see how far a bioweapons attack on the Tube might
spread. And, in 1961, ships off the southern coast
started spraying holiday resorts with bacteria designed to mimic anthrax. The British government insists all these trials
were perfectly safe. But there’s perfectly safe, and then there’s
perfectly safe but also totally creepy, and spraying anything that mimics anthrax over
unsuspecting civilians definitely falls into the latter category. Yet even this top level secrecy couldn’t
last forever. Before the 20th century was out, wheels would
be put into motion that would eventually expose all of Porton Down’s dirty secrets to the
entire world. Lifting the Lid
Although Porton Down gave up producing chemical and bioweapons in the 1950s, that didn’t
stop the lab from creating some pretty freaky stuff. In the 1950s, for example, scientists there
were responsible for creating VX, to date still the deadliest nerve agent in existence. Remember how 15mg was set as a safe dose for
sarin, well below the threshold for death? Well, just 10mg of VX is enough to kill a
person, and this isn’t just theoretical knowledge. In the 1990s, Aum Shinrikyo - those creepy
Japanese guys again - used VX to murder a dissident. Nearly twenty years later, in 2017, North
Korea used it to assassinate Kim Jong-Un’s half-brother in an international airport. Nerve agents aside, Porton Down also keeps
active cultures of ebola, smallpox, and the plague, all of which they test on animals. We actually found a report in the Telegraph
that described how at Porton Down “pigs were shot, rabbits blown up and guinea pigs
injected with a toxic nerve agent invented by the Nazis.” What a sentence. But how the heck do we know all this? How do we know what Porton Down is? For a large part of our knowledge, you can
thank Gordon Bell. A former serviceman, Bell was one of the soldiers
who “volunteered” for the lab’s sarin experiments, thinking he was doing something
harmless. In the late 1990s, he began complaining about
the treatment he’d received, until there was so much media interest that local police
launched an investigation. And just like that, the lid of secrecy was
blown clean off. Over the next few years, details leaked out
of Porton Down’s experimental history, of all the incredible, terrifying things that
happened there. It was during the investigation that the truth
of Ronald Maddison’s death came out. That the true number of all those who had
sarin tested on them came to light. By the time the final appeals wrapped in 2008,
the Ministry of Defense had been forced to admit gross negligence and to award 361 Porton
Down survivors a payout of £3m. Today, Porton Down’s name still carries
a frisson of controversy in Britain, a feeling that dark things were done there that maybe
should never have been contemplated. And yet, we’d be lying if we tried to paint
Porton Down as another Aralsk 7. Despite Maddison’s death, despite the unethical
nature of the sarin trials, Britain’s secret WMD lab has never reached the levels of negligence
and ass covering seen in the USSR. In 2018, all those years experimenting with
nerve agents even came in useful, when a suspected Russian attack in Salisbury using Novichok
poisoned 4 people and left one dead. In the aftermath, it was Porton Down scientists
who were able to advise on how to treat the victims. In the end, then, Porton Down is perhaps best
seen as a necessary evil. A place that not so long ago indulged in some
truly awful behavior, but which has now learned its lesson. At least, we hope that’s the case. Because, like it or not, Porton Down is still
home to all these substances. Anthrax, VX gas, weaponized ebola, and - of
course - sarin still sit on its shelves, alongside vials of smallpox and plague. Tiny little things, all capable of causing
gigantic disasters. Not so long ago, in 2007, a faulty pipe at
a facility for animal disease research caused an outbreak of foot and mouth disease in Surrey,
just 80km from Porton Down. While that was quickly contained, it still
caused a small-scale disaster. Now imagine that had been something else,
something that infected humans. Something like the nightmares created at Porton
Down. Porton Down may be the sort of facility its
necessary for a modern state to have. But it’s also a monument to our species’
darkest dreams - a reminder of all the times we’ve already tried to wipe one another
out, and all the times that are still to come.
