British Toxin Drop
Nation Involved: United Kingdom
Time Period: 1953 to 1964
During The Cold War, several nations were in a weird place. Everyone was arming themselves in preparation for potential war to break out. Others were testing major chemical weapons, such as the United Kingdom. However, they weren’t the Soviets, right? They’d never test stuff in prisoners. Oh no, they just tested it on a few cities. The story goes that the Brits decided to drop several thousands of kilos of an unknown, possibly toxic chemical out of a military aircraft.
Officially, they dropped exactly 4,600 kilos or just over 10,000lbs of the chemical zinc cadmium sulfide. While we know of it as a carcinogen today, they could not know this in the 1950s or 1960s. Yet they did know of its toxic nature. It was dropped on the cities Wiltshire, Bedfordshire, and Norfolk. Yet a lot was also dropped in the English Channel and North Sea. Meaning it would not just affect those cities but the entire country and possibly surrounding areas. Government experiments like this are insane!