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Inside Britain's secret weapons research facility

By Dr Michael Mosley
BBC
4 hours ago

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Magazine

As Porton Down marks its 100th anniversary, what really

goes on inside Britain's most secretive and controversial
military research base?
Porton Down - also known as the Defence Science and Technology
Laboratory - is where much of our top-secret military research is
concentrated. It has a budget of 500m a year and employs more
than 3,000 scientists. It is the most controversial, most
misunderstood and, some say, most-feared scientific institution in
Britain. Though many will have heard of Porton Down, few will
have much idea about what goes on inside.
So I was delighted when I was invited to go behind the fence,
make a documentary about the research that goes on there.

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Set in more than 7,000 acres of English countryside, Porton Down was created 100 years ago in

response to the German gas attacks of World War One. The first of these attacks against British troops
involved the use of chlorine. Thousands of soldiers, who had no idea what they were facing, suffered
severe chemical burns or died in agony. Chlorine was soon joined by mustard gas and phosgene.

Find out more

Inside Porton Down: Britain's Secret Weapons Research Facility is on BBC Four on Tuesday
28 June 2016 at 21:00 BST - catch up on BBC iPlayer
Lord Kitchener, Britain's secretary of state for war, demanded an immediate response. This led to the
setting up of Porton Down. Scientists based there swiftly developed gas masks and began testing ways
to launch similar gas attacks against the Germans. The result of this tit-for-tat was the death and injury
of hundreds of thousands of soldiers and civilians. It is one reason why WW1 is sometimes called "the
chemist's war".
Horrified by what had been unleashed, the major world powers signed the Geneva Protocol in 1925,
banning use of chemical weapons - but, oddly, not their development
In the 1950s, during the Cold War, Porton Down scientists developed two novel chemical agents, the
first of which is still sometimes used against humans. It's called CS gas (after the initials of men who
discovered it), but it's better known as tear gas.
Tear gas is non-lethal. It's used for crowd control in other parts of the world, but in the UK the only
people who are ever deliberately exposed to it are British troops, as part of their training. I was curious
to see what it was like.
So, wearing a respirator I was led into a small airtight room filled with swirling clouds of gas. I took off
my mask and tried to talk. The first breath was fine. The next was like inhaling fire. I immediately
began to cough and gag and my only thought was to escape. I fled outside, lent against the fence and
tried not to throw up

CS gas is not particularly dangerous, but another chemical agent which was also developed at Porton
Down during the 1950s certainly is. It's a nerve agent called Venomous Agent X or VX. Like other nerve
agents, such as sarin (first developed by the Germans in the 1930s) even brief exposure rapidly leads to
convulsions, paralysis and death.
We were the first television crew to be allowed into one of Porton Down's most secure laboratories,
where I watched a chemist carefully make up a bath of VX. The reason chemical agents such as VX and
mustard gas are still manufactured on site is to test that equipment issued to troops is proof against
attack. And that is because these chemical agents are still being used, particularly in the Middle East.
In March 1988 at least 5,000 Kurds, men, women and children died at Halahbja after being attacked by
Saddam Hussein's forces with sarin and mustard gas. More recently there is evidence (collected by
Porton Down scientists) that sarin was used against civilians in Syria.
Porton Down's mission is, these days, purely defensive. They are there to develop better ways to
protect British troops and civilians against attack. Some of what they are doing feels distinctly sci-fi.

They are, for example, working with Birmingham University on a device that can detect tiny fluctuations
in gravity. The hope is that this will, in the future, enable them to see through walls and deep
underground.
Other research likely to have a more immediate impact is the use of "synthetic biology" to create body
armour which would be more lightweight, flexible but which would still stop bullets. The idea behind
synthetic biology is that by studying how animals create protective shells we will be able to grow
ceramic body armour from first principles.
One of the most chilling bits of research I saw, however, was their work studying potential biological
threats. There is, for example, concern that a terrorist group might decide to attack us using a "dirty
bomb" containing something like the ebola virus, which has a mortality rate of up to 90%.
An experiment I watched in a Category IV laboratory (the highest level of security) suggests that ebola
does indeed have the potential to be used as a weapon, although fortunately there are currently
significant technical and practical barriers to its use.
I am also cheered by the thought that looking forwards and successfully responding to new threats is
what the scientists of Porton Down have been doing for the last 100 years.

A century at Porton Down

1916: A facility at the 3000-acre site is established

1920: Research starts on whole-body protection against mustard gas
1930: Porton Down scientists conduct tests on the London Underground to assess vulnerabilities to
chemical or biological attack
1940: Site expands and biological warfare research starts
1946: scientists conduct research into war gases and nerve agents with the help of volunteer
military personnel
1989: Nerve agent trials cease
1997: Chemical Weapons Convention comes into force, requiring all members to dispose of chemical
weapons and their production facilities

1999: Wiltshire Police begin a four-year investigation into the human experiments at Porton Down
nearly 50 years earlier
2008: MoD awards 3m compensation to 360 veterans of the tests without admission of liability
2013: Dstl scientists test samples from Syria for Sarin

Source: Dstl, BBC

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More on this story

Sierra Leone medics given Ebola test kit by Porton Down scientists
23 May 2016

What do UK's military scientists do on the frontline?

4 January 2013

Decision on future of Porton Down jobs is delayed by a year

24 August 2012

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