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French Soldiers Used as 'Nuclear Guinea Pigs'
PARIS - France used soldiers as guinea pigs in nuclear tests in the 1960s, deliberately exposing them to radiation from atomic blasts to test the effects, according to a report revealed on Tuesday.
Explosion of a French nuclear bomb in the Sahara on 13 February 1960. France used soldiers as guinea pigs in nuclear tests in the 1960s, deliberately exposing them to radiation from atomic blasts to test the effects, according to a new report. The secret military report, obtained by AFP, said that between 1960 and 1966 France sent troops onto Algerian desert test sites "to study the physiological and psychological effects caused on humans by an atomic weapon."
One operation in 1961 involved military personnel advancing on foot and in trucks to within a few hundred metres (yards) of the epicentre of a nuclear blast less than an hour after detonation, according to the report.
The conscripts were given 45 minutes to dig foxholes in the contaminated desert earth, protected only by the military-issue boots, capes, gloves and simple face masks.
"It appeared from the results that at 800 metres from point zero and outside the fall-out zone, the combatant was physically able to continue fighting," the report said.
The tests aimed to help the military develop "physical preparation and morale training for the modern combatant" and teach soldiers how to protect themselves after a nuclear blast, it said.
France has allocated 10 million euros ($13.6 million) to compensate victims of nuclear tests in the Sahara and in Polynesia, but bitter political and medical fallout still lingers 50 years after the tests.
According to campaigners, children are still born with deformities in the irradiated Algerian desert, while in France elderly army veterans complain of multiple unexplained cancers.
AVEN, an association representing the troops exposed to the 210 tests carried out by France in Algeria and French Polynesia between 1960 and 1996, says it has gathered 4,500 testimonies from victims and their spouses.
"Immediately after the explosion, they said to us 'go and look at the result'," said one veteran, August Ribet, 74, who suffers from throat cancer.
"They gave us nice suits in white fabric which were no use at all, and a gas mask," he said, speaking to AFP recently. Ribet hopes one day that the courts will recognise him as a victim of the tests.
Defence Minister Herve Morin told AFP he would ensure "transparency" concerning the levels of radiation in all of France's nuclear tests.
The report by unnamed military officials dates back to 1998. Morin said that in 2007 the defence ministry made a summary of the findings of what he described as "tactical experiments" in Algeria.
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23 Comments so far
Show AllNuclear tests will continue until morale improves.
War, from its origins, is the murders of the sons by the fathers; as in: so few fathers murdering so many sons.
between 1946 and 1958 on the bikini atoll guinea pigs (as in indigenous people) were used by the americans testing nuclear explosions...............
Not only ingenous people were used as guinea pigs. Also US G.I were.
Read about Plumbbob 'Smoky’.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Plumbbob
"troop exercises conducted near the ground near shot "Smoky" exposed over three thousand servicemen to relatively high levels of radiation. A survey of these servicemen in 1980 found significantly elevated rates of leukemia:"
Atomic weaponry was a dreadful human achievement, and continues to reverberate to this day.
No government has a monopoly on cruelty and depraived indifference.
One day I fear that nuclear weapons will be used. Is there any way to contain the genie in the bottle? People who do not value human life will not be afraid to use them if they think it will further their goals. Yes, maybe someday the better nature of human beings will awaken and we will for once think of the future generations not yet born and not just think of ourselves. But that too may just be wishfil thinking on my part and hoping for the best in mankind.
And the Brits did the same to the Australian Aborigines in the Gibson desert in the 1950's
As said above, depraved indifference knows no bounds nor borders.
Another good reason not to become a soldier. Those above you don't mind killing you.
"When you're the fighter
you're the politician's tool.
When you're the fighter
you're everybody's fool."
Bruce Cockburn
Agreed, nuclear power should have never been developed and the use as weapons never considered, but here we have the conundrum of 'if we did not do it, somebody else would have'.
And using nuclear power for energy needs is nothing less than fucking our children and grand children and their legatees just because people just don't have any consideration about anything long-term harmful and dangerous.
And yet, o our sellout president, who I did NOT vote for, is proposing $8,300,000,000.00 for 2 new nuclear generating power plants, the first new ones to be built, if they are built, in 30 years or more.
Anyone had enough of 'clean coal and the power of the atom' sources of energy?
If the public was allowed to see the films made in Hiroshima after the bomb was dropped, them I don't think that we would want anything nuclear to EVER appear again.
'White Light, Black Rain' is one.
All these films you speak of are in the public domain. Search youtube, the DoE film archive vault and many independent DVDs that are available for purchase online.
There is very little that is secret about the early US nuclear test program. I wish I could say the same for Roosevelt's diaries that would prove, beyond reasonable doubt, that the US with full deliberation provoked Japan to attack Pearl Harbor and hence bring the US into WWII.
Should this bombshell ever become public and overthrow the current mythology that most Americans believe, there might be a re-evaluation of 9/11, the invasion of Iraq and American war-mongering in general.
I'm afraid I pooh-poohed this idea until just recently, when I read Human Smoke: The Beginnings of World War II, the End of Civilization by Nicholson Baker.
Baker summarizes a series of news clippings from the period leading up to war, taking the language out of journalistic jingo-ese, selecting to his pattern, but otherwise supplying no commentary through most of the book.
I have come to view the whole matter of false fire events differently, including 9/11. Having the US government orchestrate 9/11 would have been ridiculously difficult to cover. On the other hand, simply outsourcing it and mislaying a handful of security units at a critical moment would be as easy as, oh, ordering the admiral to keep the Pacific Fleet anchored in a row at Pearl and making repeated bring-it-on-style threats.
It seems, as one counts back, that false fire events at the start of a war are at least more common than not, if not universal to American invasions.
Certainly 9/11 qualifies as false fire for Afghanistan, Iraq, Pakistan, and the half-dozen or so countries that the US has been tossing missiles into yelling "Terrorists!", and does so whatever level of precise awareness any individual US decider did or did not have.
Gulf I followed a comment by a US Secretary of State to Saddam Hussein that the US had no interest in whether he invaded Kuwait or not.
Drugs sufficed for most of Reagan's adventures in Latin America, though the Sandinistas were clever enough to sidestep at least some of his overtures by releasing captured American spies and so forth.
Then we have the Gulf of Tonkin near-incident, the sinking of the Lusitania with the mysteriously appearing letter from Kaiser Bill to Mexico and the resignation of WWilson's Secretary of State.
There were quite a few adventures in between, of course, but I guess if the population largely does not know about something or it's over by the time we finish breakfast, like Grenada, there's little to do more than lie about it.
No, I'm convinced. Al Qaeda may well have blown the Towers, and they may well have thought they were doing the worst thing they could possibly have imagined to the US government and ruling elites. The Shrub All-Stars may not have known it was coming that day, that week, that month, or that year, but the plan was not to prevent it but to provoke it and take advantage.
Not only were all the tools to take advantage of American hysteria all in place and all deployed, they were more or less the only things the government managed to operate competently for the entire 8 years.
...
(There are still secrets, though. The statute of limitations is not up on a lot of those events, so they will have to wait at couple generations to slip out of living memory before names and dates come out.)
A little poem:
Working on a file at half past three, to my desk came Mr. D.
He told me with eyes of woe, ”I clocked you out, c’mon let’s go.”
We walked through the city square, rubble laying everywhere.
I enquired about my file, just to make him smile.
I guess I don't have a good work attitude.
Before I was born, my planet built and tested several mass human extermination plans. The Russian one has been active and on alert for my entire life. My taxes pay for the American one (er, if I ever pay taxes, or if the spooky IRS agent attaches my salary or bank account).
I had a friend, now diseased, who as a young marine was exposed to three or four nuclear blasts. His account of the experiments was a bit less crazy than the French tests - at that point the issue was how close prepared trenches could get. Any such testing is much the same as the French in essence. I'm not aware of our government making even the slightest effort to right the wrong done those young men.
Now we are all test subjects with more and more of our depleted uranium blowing all over the planet.
Good comments here about worrying about and planning for generations to come.
Obviously for the powerful who now make our decisions for us and just pretend the rest of us have a say through the electoral charade, present profits come before future concerns. Nay, not 'before', but virtually WITHOUT future concerns at all.
Ironically, this includes the directives of 'Mr. HOPE', Obama, concerning nuclear energy, mountain-top removal, Afghanistan, indefinite detention, healthcare and more.
Here's an idea for those of you reading here who actually DO believe we should make all our decisions thinking of the effects on those yet to come. Isn't it time you put your own future into building a coherent new political force that openly DECLARES that positions and policies that affect us all should be based upon the native American concept of responsibility to the earth and its people "to the seventh generation"?
If that kind of thinking and wise planning and Stewardship is what you feel we need, then help build the Green Party of the United States whose goal is to build programs and educate based upon such broad principles of responsive, responsible, sustainable self governance.
The corporately-funded and controlled major parties are way far removed from such thinking and vision and can only lead us further down wrong paths and to dead ends. They simply do not possess nor collect the insights, heart, motivations, and visions necessary for a sustainable future. Fighting corporate party leadership internally to try to change that is much more heat than light, and keeps us from organizing resistance to ever-more draconian top-down diktats. It should also be clear by now that with such in-fighting, far more often than not, the darkness wins.
The corporate parties waste our precious time and fill us with false hopes that only serve the interests of those already in charge, who care not a whit about the rest of us or about future generations. Fully a year or more went by with a phony 'debate' about health insurance that only leads to enriching the death-dealing corporate insurers. Smoke and mirrors. That should be the game-changer for those who are watching.
We need to start anew. We need to begin from a core set of precepts which guide and mold discussion, deliberation and decisions about OUR perceived needs and goals. THAT is democracy at work. We need a party that joins our energies and actions together and that does not use merely the adjective of democracy, but believes in and builds firmly on the concept. We need together to put our energies behind such a vision. Sustainable, caring visions and policy can start with the Green Party. So can rescuing and improving our Bill of Rights.
We need to go beyond talk. We can all bring our knowledge, passion and skills and take a seat at the Green table. Let's work together for a future we want and need, and grow the movement required to make it happen. We cannot put this effort off any longer in hopes that others will do it for us.
The United States subjected civilians as well as military personnel to the effects of the above ground tests at the Nevada bombing range in the'50s. I used to get up early and watch for the glow of light on the horizon that signaled a successful blast.
Downwind residents in Utah were never warned of effects.
But I could be wrong !
... then there was the Tuskegee syphilis experiment.
WikiPedia says:
"The Tuskegee syphilis experiment (also known as the Tuskegee syphilis study or Public Health Service syphilis study) was a clinical study conducted between 1932 and 1972 in Tuskegee, Alabama, by the U.S. Public Health Service. Investigators recruited 399 impoverished African-American sharecroppers with syphilis for research related to the natural progression of the untreated disease, in hopes of justifying treatment programs for blacks.
"The 40-year study was controversial for reasons related to ethical standards, primarily because researchers failed to treat patients appropriately after the 1940s validation of penicillin as an effective cure for the disease. Revelation of study failures led to major changes in U.S. law and regulation on the protection of participants in clinical studies. Now studies require informed consent, communication of diagnosis, and accurate reporting of test results."
You are correct. Anyone who has any questions about US's share of nuclear testing can visit the world famous Atomic museum in Las Vegas. There you can see first hand exactly what the US has done especially in the SW region of the states. However, this situation is not about pointing fingers. It is about taking responsibility as citizens to be educated, and for our governments to promote sustainable solutions. Almost every military to the world has participated in nuclear tests it is important to be transparent.
I found that this story provided additional context bit.ly/dgS6mR
Also,
soldiers in Gulf I were directed to not put on gas masks when a storehouse of chemical weapons was blown up. And of course, dust from the DU ammo blew all over.
So,
as of a few years ago the supposedly nearly casualty free war (oops, forgot the other side again) has close to a 40% disability rate, despite ongoing cynical denial of government responsibility.
Let's face it. After soldiers enter a combat zone, much of the motive for government to keep them alive and healthy disappears: neither they nor their families can sue.
Apparently where there's no feeling there's no sense.
This is a really nice post, thank you a lot.
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