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Comment by thewildginger | Hacker News Reader

Yup. Definitely didn't know that. Americans sure don't get told this about the cold war. It is also omitted that mass testing of these bio weapons was done on black communities, hence the distrust of both doctors and the government. That part I learned about from the Tuskegee study, this is also really bad.

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It's awful, but you also have to put yourself in the time period. I don't think this justifies it, but remember that in the 1950s the US defense and intelligence community believed that WWIII was going to happen eventually. They believed they faced the high probability of a full scale global thermonuclear war in their lifetimes.

It's easier to justify this kind of madness when "most of these people are going to die when the nukes hit anyway." There really were a lot of people thinking that way. "These people are already dead."

To get a sense of the mindset here's a good profile of Herman Kahn whose research helped name a death metal band (Megadeth):

https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2005/06/27/fat-man

"How many megadeaths (millions of deaths) will we absorb vs. the Soviets?" etc. A lot of this hideous research was to try to characterize the effects of a thermonuclear war and its aftermath to answer questions like that. The Soviets were doing similar things.

This I'm sure contributed to an environment where unethical research was tolerated and rationalized for other reasons too.

> believed that WWIII was going to happen eventually.

The 'bomber gap' and the 'missile gap' were fictions, with U-2 photo-intelligence showing the Soviets didn't have the capability to carry off a massive attack.

US politicians decided it was better to keep knowledge of the U-2 away from the US public - even though the Soviets knew about the U-2 starting on the first flight. The US even lied about the Powers U-2 crash in 1960, calling it a high-altitude research flight, with the possibility of an incapacitated pilot.

So I don't think it's right to say simply they believed the possibility, as that belief was deliberately inculcated by people who wanted a war, wanted increased war funding (the "military-industrial complex"), and/or wanted to leverage public fears for personal and political power.

People thought that if we didn't see the USSR's stuff it must mean they are even more advanced than we thought and must be imminently preparing first strike! Evidence of Soviet military power was evidence of Soviet military power, and lack of evidence was evidence of even more Soviet military power! People really non-ironically thought this.

It seems completely unhinged today, but this was right after the world had just been rocked by two successive bloodbath world wars. It wasn't that crazy in the 1950s and 1960s to think WWIII would be up in short order.

Another major factor was how much secrecy there was on both sides. Secrecy breeds conspiracy theories and paranoia. The Soviets were also preparing for a first strike from us and probably were following similar lines of reasoning.

Again, I think you're being too kind.

I think Curtis LeMay - one of those in your category - was unhinged already. I think he wanted a war. This is the guy quoted as "Well, maybe if we do this overflight right, we can get World War III started". He wanted to bomb and invade Cuba, and do even more bombing of North Vietnam, and he wanted the US to get rid of its "phobia" about using nuclear weapons.

That's someone who wants war, and will manufacture an interpretation that justifies having that war. That's far different than simply drawing that conclusion from negative data.

Again, yes, I agree with your "it wasn't that crazy" part. My point is that many of the people who believe that were deliberately lied to, to encourage spreading that belief. While connected with secrecy, as you say, it was a deliberate conspiracy carried out in part to support what Eisenhower termed the "military-industrial complex."

That’s one of the bleakest parts in US medical history. Just completely in opposition to the Hippocratic oath. They stood by and watched as so many Black patients died. And all of it was preventable with cheap penicillin.

Another thing that many are surprised by is how fashionable eugenics and forced sterilization were at one point in the US.

“I cannot read this sign, by what right have I children?” https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Eugenics_supporters_hol...

This seems extreme, but regular families are largely based on eugenic principles.

The experiment primarily focused on by the article was carried out on the general population of San Francisco in 1950. At the time San Francisco was 83% non-hispanic White alone. [1] The point of the Tuskegee experiment was to see if untreated syphilis affected blacks differently than whites, as was believed at the time. It was, in part, motivated by a previous experiment in Norway which had withheld treatment for white's suffering from syphilis, which formed the foundation of the modern understanding of syphilis. [2]

If it's unclear, I'm not defending or supporting any of this insanity, but emphasizing that the motivations were in no way racist. In general, if you want to learn more about the selection process for the various sociopathic experiments "we've" carried out through the years, the Wiki on MKUltra provides quite a lot of insight. [3]

[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographics_of_San_Francisco

[2] - https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/28004553/

[3] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MKUltra#Experiments_on_America...

Out of respect I wanted to reply and say thank you for the links, and justification for another view. While I would say deliberate prejudice very possibly wasn't in the decision making process, a risk assessment was made. One where the risk of gassing black communities in places like St. Louis was the "safer option" because black people were second class citizens. They had no means to challenge it. If they found out, who would believe them? Who would care? For this reason institutional racism was reinforced by the military and to say " well it wasn't to be mean, they had to gas someone unfortunately" doesn't really make the decisions behind it not a decision based on race to hurt those who couldn't stand up for themselves because of their race , and therefore racism. Were other cities that were mostly white gassed to test biological warfare distribution methods? Yes. Did it impact them negatively too? Yes. Did it affect them the same way? No. the white community had a chance to expose it? Yes. Did they have an opportunity to try? Yes. They tried, and it failed. But what of the mostly African-american counterparts? At the time, none of that. Looks.pretty racist from here.

St. Louis was chosen (alongside a number of other cities) because its climate/weather conditions were as close as the military could get to the USSR, with the goal of seeing how a biological weapons attack on Russia would play out. Here [1] are some images of Moscow from the 1950s. And this [2] is an image of the Pruitt-Igoe area (majority black housing project) that was sprayed in St. Louis. Those projects bear far more than a passing resemblance to the areas where we would have targeted.

I think really the point can be most boiled down that even if everybody was all the same race, those sprayings still would've happened. And, in fact, it did happen in many areas that were mostly white. The case in San Francisco was even worse. Instead of spraying people with chemicals, believed to be safe, they were spraying them with live bacteria - which near immediately caused numerous health effects. So by focusing on race, you ultimately end up ignoring the real underlying issue.

[1] - https://www.vintag.es/2017/03/46-rare-color-photos-document-...

[2] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pruitt%E2%80%93Igoe#/media/Fil...

> ... were in no way racist.

Apart from the whole "purposely only testing people having a specific skin colour" thing.

Gee, that doesn't sound racist at all. :p

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