Secret Science: A Century of Poison Warfare and Human Experiments

ISBN-13: 9780199299799 / Angielski / Twarda / 2015 / 320 str.

Dr Ulf Schmidt

Opis

There have long been allegations that many servicemen had been duped into taking part in trials with toxic agents at top-secret Allied research facilities. In Britain, a whole army of over 21,000 soldiers had participated in secret experiments between 1939 and 1989. Some remembered them as innocuous, others as harmful, and in isolated cases deadly. Ulf Schmidt offers a comprehensive history of chemical and biological weapons research by former Allied powers, providing a significant new interpretation of the cover-up of the death of a British serviceman in 1953. Employing new archival material and including many interviews with those involved, he charts the history of this "secret science" from its development during the First World War to the ongoing attempts by the international community to ban these weapons.

Recenzje

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.

O autorze

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.