The unfought chemical war
- Pennsylvania State Univ., University Park (United States)
In December 1943, in the middle of the scorching northern Australia summer, a young Australian commando, Tom Mitchell, sweated in his respirator and gas-protective clothing as he got ready to take part in a mustard-gas experiment. He grimly watched six US aircraft, B-24 Liberators, drop bombs filled with mustard gas on Brook Island, near Innisfail in the state of Queensland. Ten minutes later, Mitchell was rushing around the island to tend sampling equipment. But a few hours later, he and another Australian soldier were ordered back onto the island - this time, stripped of their respirators and protective clothing. They were forced to camp on the island from dusk to dawn in ordinary clothing without any safety equipment. Mitchell now suffers from lung and heart disease. Last year, nearly 47 years after he was burned, Mitchell settled with the Australian government for $25,000 (Australian). Publicity over his lawsuit, filed in 1981, along with revelations made in a documentary film broadcast in Australia in 1989, has prompted thousands of other Australian survivors of chemical-warfare tests to ask the Australian Department of Veterans Affairs for disability benefits. Veterans of chemical-warfare tests are also breaking their silence in the United States and Canada, stepping forward to seek compensation for their injuries. The impetus behind the US revelations came from a campaign begun in 1989 by Cong. Porter Goss, a Florida Republican, to win benefits for four participants in US Navy mustard-gas tests. During a flurry of publicity in mid-June 1991, the Department of Veterans Affairs announced that it was relaxing its rules to make it easier for World War 2 mustard-gas victims to collect benefits. In Canada, an information hot line run by the Department of National Defense in 1988 and a 1989 book by John Bryden, Deadly Allies: Canada's Secret War 1937-1947, brought the tests to national attention.
- OSTI ID:
- 7009382
- Journal Information:
- Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists; (United States), Vol. 47:10; ISSN 0096-5243
- Country of Publication:
- United States
- Language:
- English
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29 ENERGY PLANNING
POLICY AND ECONOMY
CHEMICAL WARFARE AGENTS
BIOLOGICAL EFFECTS
FIELD TESTS
PROTECTIVE CLOTHING
RESPIRATORS
AUSTRALIA
CANADA
EXPOSURE CHAMBERS
HYDROCYANIC ACID
MILITARY PERSONNEL
ORGANIC CHLORINE COMPOUNDS
ORGANIC SULFUR COMPOUNDS
PHOSGENE
SOCIAL IMPACT
USA
ANIMALS
AUSTRALASIA
CARBONIC ACID DERIVATIVES
CLOTHING
CYANIDES
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HYDROGEN COMPOUNDS
INORGANIC ACIDS
MAMMALS
MAN
NORTH AMERICA
ORGANIC COMPOUNDS
ORGANIC HALOGEN COMPOUNDS
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PRIMATES
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450600* - Military Technology
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& National Defense- Chemical & Biological- (1990)
290202 - Energy Planning & Policy- Sociology- (1992-)