Project Clear Vision
Project Clear Vision was a covert examination of Soviet-made biological bomblets conducted by the Battelle Memorial Institute under contract with the CIA. The legality of this project under the Biological Weapons Convention (BWC) of 1972 is disputed.
01History
The operation
Project Clear Vision was conducted between 1997 and 2000, during the Clinton Administration. The project's stated goal was to assess the efficacy of bio-agent dissemination from bomblets. The program received criticism due to suspicions that its findings could possibly be used in a covert US bioweapons program.
Reportage
The secret project was disclosed in a September 2001 article in The New York Times. Reporters Judith Miller, Stephen Engelberg and William J. Broad collaborated to write the article. Shortly after the article appeared, the authors published a book that further elaborated the story. The 2001 book, Germs: Biological Weapons and America's Secret War, and the article are the only publicly available sources concerning Project Clear Vision and its sister projects, Bacchus and Jefferson.
02Legality
As signatory to the BWC, the United States is committed to refrain from development of bioweapons. Moreover, the US did not disclose the secret project in its annual confidence-building measure (CBM) declarations. The US maintains that the program was fully consistent with the BWC because the project was defensive in nature.
Sources and credits
This article is adapted from the Wikipedia article “Project Clear Vision”, written by its contributors and licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0. Fathomly has changed the layout, removed citation markers, navigation and maintenance notices, and adjusted punctuation. This adapted version is shared under the same license. For references, see the original article.
Fathomly is not affiliated with or endorsed by the Wikimedia Foundation. Spotted a problem? Tell us.