The U.S. government may have used a densely-populated swath of low-income housing projects in St. Louis as its radioactive chemical testing ground through the 1950s and 1960s, according to a new study.

The research, undertaken by sociology professor Lisa Martino-Taylor, claims that the government sprayed African American sections of St. Louis with radioactive particles as part of its biological weapons program.

In 1994, the government admitted that it had in fact used St. Louis as a testing ground during the Cold War because it was architecturally similar to Soviet cities, but it said that the material sprayed was zinc cadmium sulfide, a fine powder that is not thought to be dangerous to ones health.

Between 1957 and 1958, the U.S. government sprayed much of the United States with this chemical compound as part of its biological test “Operation Large Area Coverage,” which sought to better understand how biological or chemical agents were dispersed in the air.

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