Secret Science - A Century of Poison Warfare and Human Experiments

Ulf Schmidt

ISBN 10: 019929979X / ISBN 13: 9780199299799

Verlag: Oxford University Press, 2015

Beschreibung

Some books promise hidden knowledge. Others promise forgotten history. Secret Science quietly opens a filing cabinet marked "Probably Best If Nobody Sees This" and proceeds to spend more than six hundred meticulously researched pages explaining exactly why. It turns out that the twentieth century?s greatest technological achievements occasionally came with clipboards, secrecy forms, alarming quantities of chemical agents, and volunteers who may not have realised quite what they had volunteered for. Historian Ulf Schmidt examines a century of chemical and biological warfare research across Britain, the United States and Canada, tracing the uneasy relationship between military necessity, scientific ambition and human experimentation. Rather than descending into sensationalism, the book patiently assembles documentary evidence, official records and personal testimony to explore how governments justified secret programmes, how scientists balanced ethics against national security, and how ordinary servicemen often found themselves becoming rather more involved in military research than they had expected.  What makes this such compelling reading is that Schmidt refuses to paint history in simple black and white. Heroes are flawed, villains are bureaucratic, and many decisions emerge from a fog of fear, politics and genuine belief that extraordinary dangers required extraordinary measures. It is a history where filing systems become almost as fascinating as laboratories, and where the phrase "classified information" gradually starts sounding far more sinister than "chemical weapon." The irony, of course, is delicious. Governments spent fortunes ensuring nobody would ever know what was happening, only for future historians to patiently reconstruct the entire story from archives, declassified papers and thousands upon thousands of pages that eventually escaped the vault. If secrecy had a loyalty card, history has clearly found the loophole. Expect discussions of Porton Down, Cold War anxieties, poison gases, biological research, ethics committees, military planning and the complicated question of informed consent. This is not a conspiracy book attempting to connect every dot with red string and thumbtacks. Instead, it demonstrates that the real story?carefully evidenced and meticulously sourced?is often stranger, more uncomfortable and considerably more believable than the fictional versions.  Schmidt writes with the confidence of someone who knows that the documents are dramatic enough without unnecessary embellishment. His measured tone somehow makes the revelations even more unsettling. There are no theatrical flourishes required when the historical record is already capable of making readers quietly put the kettle on while reconsidering humanity?s definition of "acceptable risk." As a volume from Oxford University Press, this is unapologetically substantial. It is the sort of book that arrives with footnotes, bibliography and index all prepared for active service. At over six hundred pages, it possesses enough intellectual ammunition to satisfy historians, military enthusiasts, ethicists and anyone who has ever looked at a declassified government report and wondered what the earlier versions must have omitted. This 2026 Crappy Old Books copy is in As New condition, meaning the only experiments it has participated in involve testing whether a bookshelf can support yet another remarkably heavy hardback. No suspicious stains, no classified annotations in invisible ink, and no mysterious government official has attempted to reclaim it?at least not yet. If you?ve ever suspected that history keeps its most fascinating chapters in locked cabinets, this remarkable study arrives holding a very persuasive set of keys.

Bestandsnummer des Verkäufers 7288

Bibliografische Details

• Titel: Secret Science - A Century of Poison Warfare and Human Experiments
• Verlag: Oxford University Press
• Erscheinungsjahr: 2015
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN-10: 019929979X
• ISBN-13: 9780199299799
• Einband: Hardback
• Zustand: As New

Über diesen Titel

Inhaltsangabe

From the early 1990s, allegations that servicemen had been duped into taking part in trials with toxic agents at top-secret Allied research facilities throughout the twentieth century featured with ever greater frequency in the media. In Britain, a whole army of over 21,000 soldiers had participated in secret experiments between 1939 and 1989. Some remembered their stay as harmless, but there were many for whom the experience had been all but pleasant, sometimes harmful, and in isolated cases deadly.

Secret Science traces, for the first time, the history of chemical and biological weapons research by the former Allied powers, particularly in Britain, the United States, and Canada. It charts the ethical trajectory and culture of military science, from its initial development in response to Germany's first use of chemical weapons in the First World War to the ongoing attempts by the international community to ban these types of weapons once and for all.

It asks whether Allied and especially British warfare trials were ethical, safe, and justified within the prevailing conditions and values of the time. By doing so, it helps to explain the complex dynamics in top-secret Allied research establishments: the desire and ability of the chemical and biological warfare corps, largely comprised of military officials, scientists, and expert civil servants, to construct and identify a never-ending stream of national security threats which served as flexible justification strategies for the allocation of enormous resources to conducting experimental research with some of the most deadly agents known to man.

Secret Science offers a nuanced, non-judgemental analysis of the contributions made by servicemen, scientists, and civil servants to military research in Britain and elsewhere, not as passive, helpless victims 'without voices', or as laboratory and desk perpetrators 'without a conscience', but as history's actors and agents of their own destiny. As such it also makes an important contribution to the burgeoning literature on the history and culture of memory.

Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Ulf Schmidt, Professor of Modern History, University of Kent

Ulf Schmidt is Professor of Modern History at the University of Kent, and a Fellow of the Royal Historical Society. He was previously Wellcome Trust Post-Doctoral Research Fellow, Senior Associate Member of St Antony's College, Oxford, and Research Associate at the Wellcome Unit for the History of Medicine at the University of Oxford.

His research interests are in the area of the history of modern medical ethics, warfare and policy in twentieth-century Europe and the United States. He has published widely on the history of Nazi Germany, the history of human experimentation, the Nuremberg Doctors' Trial and the Nuremberg Code, the history of eugenics and euthanasia, and the history of medical film and propaganda.