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Comment by elfexec | Hacker News Reader

Not just let them deal with the fallout. These islanders were intentionally used as human guinea pigs for radiation experimentation like other pacific island peoples - including the japanese civilians in hiroshima and nagasaki. Some of these islanders were intentionally relocated to nuclear testing sites in order to poison them with radiation and see the effects.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_4.1

Search Nuclear Savage or "John the Savage" and there are declassified videos of these islanders being tested for radiation.

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They did a lot of bad things, but having just read the article you linked, the evidence that exposure was intentional seems pretty weak.

Then I guess it was a "happy accident" and the US got lucky that the Marshallese got exposed to radiation and we had the chance to conduct experiments on them without their informed consent.

It would be like someone wanting to test the effects of electrocution and placing a live wire on the street. Someone "accidentally" steps on it and you can conduct your experiments on the victim. But it wasn't intentional since you didn't tell the victim to go step on the live wire.

I guess it depends on what you mean by "intentional". Did they douse Marshallese directly? Did they blow up the nukes hoping some of the radiation landed on some unsuspecting Marshallese so that they can see the effects and conduct experiments? To me both are intentional, though some could argue only the former is intentional.

Assuming it's true the US Did nuke fallout experiments on people 7 years after the end of a war, you need to keep in mind, that's what happens after a war. People who are put into combat situtuations look at human life as a numbers game; the experiment on them would have been justified along those lines. Kill some marginal population in horrific ways in a worthwile experiment to save more lives in the future; to a soldier this makes perfect sense.

The problem with war is not the war itself, it's the weapons, including people, you leave laying around after. Once you get the bad lines of thinking started they perpetuate.

You'd do very well for yourself to remember that while you're re-writing the history of WW2. It's one heck of a spin to call the nuking of Hiroshima and Nagasaki "an experiment"; there was a war going on. The Americans knew exactly what was going to happen from the nuke; kill lots of Japs and hope they surrender and given the belligerance of both sides, I'd say they were probably right.

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