PROJECT 112
DoD test series 1962-73. SHAD at sea. Crews told it was training. Fact sheets decades later.
112°53'00 W
1. Public Record
1962 to about 1973. Department of Defense, Project 112. Planned chemical and biological test series, at home and abroad, some of them at sea under the name Shipboard Hazard and Defense, SHAD. Crews on American ships are told they are in training. They are in a cloud. Agents and simulants. Deseret Test Center paper. Names that later need a veterans' office to decode.
The program is not a rumour. It is a budget line that hid inside exercises. In the 2000s DoD and VA begin to brief survivors and publish fact sheets: which ship, which year, which material. Some men were in more than one trial and did not know either time. Congressional hearings follow the fact sheets, not the other way around. Classified annexes remain. The public list is long enough to end the argument about whether it happened.
This page is the existence of the series and the late disclosure. It is not a recipe.
2. Date of Incident
Authorization and tests 1962-73. Public fact sheets and hearings from 2002 on.
3. Location
Deseret Test Center and ships at sea, plus overseas sites. Approximate 40°10 N 112°53 W.
4. Official Narrative
DoD now acknowledges the tests and names many of the trials. Official narrative is cold-war preparedness and a late apology to crews. VA handles the health argument case by case.
5. Witness Layer
Ship crews. Deseret staff. VA claims officers. Members of Congress who forced the sheets into the open.
6. Recovery Logistics
Declassified trial names. Ship lists. Still-redacted annexes. Medical files in VA paper.
7. Assessment
A test-series file. Keep SHAD inside 112 so the sea trials are not an orphan caption. Keep the late fact sheets. Men who were not asked are the point. Do not write every later illness as a finished causal chain. Do not write the program as a myth that veterans invented in the 1990s. The budget was older than their claims.
8. Materials & Remains
DoD fact sheets. Hearing record. Deseret paper as released.
9. Key Personnel
Deseret Test Center : The desk.
SHAD crews : The ships.
VA / Congress : The late light.
10. Aftermath
A recognition program that still argues over lists. 112 is now a word veterans use without having to spell the agents.
11. Current Archive Status
Status: Project 112, 1962-73. SHAD at sea. Fact sheets 2000s. Annexes remain.
Confidence: High that DoD ran the series and later named many trials. High that some crews were uninformed. Low that every site is on the public sheet. Low that health outcomes are settled file by file.
Filing note
A cold-war line item, ships that thought they were drilling, a desert centre that kept the names, thirty years, a fact sheet with a ship number on it, men who learned the caption after their discharge papers had already yellowed.
They are in a cloud. Training was the word on the order. The cloud was the test.