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Main description:
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.
PRODUCT DETAILS
Publisher: Oxford University Press (OUP Oxford)
Publication date: July, 2015
Pages: 320
Weight: 1106g
Availability: Not available (reason unspecified)
Subcategories: General Issues
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CUSTOMER REVIEWS
Ulf Schmidt deserves praise for writing such a comprehensive and clear book... this is an impressive work. This massive piece of research, though far from easy or pleasant reading, fills and important gap. Whether we agree with it or not, at least we know what has been going on. If you've ever wondered what really went on behind the barbed wire fences and guarded doors in labs like [Porton Down], Secret Science provides as thoroughly researched and comprehensive an account as you are likely to get. This monumental history of twentieth-century military medical ethics is a meticulous record of ambiguity. Drawing on unprecedented access to surviving records, Secret Science is an important and groundbreaking work by an author suited perfectly to tackling the topic. Schmidt is a specialist in the history of medical ethics and modern warfare-in 2004, he was an expert witness in the inquest that finally revealed the details of Ronald Maddison's death-and knows very well that a historian's priorities are to improve knowledge and understanding and not to dish out blame. compelling both as an enlightening account of shocking human experiments that have taken place over the last century and as an important contribution to literature on the history of medical ethics and the culture, networks and politics of military research in general. Schmidt's book is a welcome addition to the literature and represents a view of chemical warfare that is focused on the medical and political side rather than the military aspects of the weapons.