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Tag Archives: San Francisco history

Operation Sea Spray: The Cold War Germ Test That Proves You Must Be Ready

Golden Gate Bridge with San Francisco skyline backdrop.

The Test They Said Was Harmless In the autumn of 1950 the U.S. Navy quietly parked ships in the San Francisco Bay and released a cloud of so called harmless microbes into the coastal air. The operation had a friendly code name that reads like the title of a travel brochure. Operation Sea Spray. The target was not an enemy military base. It was ordinary American neighborhoods. The goal was to see… Read more