I sincerely hope there was some rationale to this decision that I do not know or understand. Otherwise it would be very hard for me to have any faith left in our judicial system.
I imagine the rationale went like this:
We have intelligence that the soviets are developing weapons with deadly bacteria X with delivery mechanisms {Y, Z, ...}. We believe they can deliver an attack on this set of cities and we have this set of probabilities of stopping it. We've conducted experiments on animals and understand how X would affect an organism similar to a human. Now we need to figure out how it would spread through a city to prepare for the scenario where an actual attack took place. We need to test our metropolitan areas for spread by an airborne bacterium. Let's pick the most harmless bacteria we can find not native to an area and see how it spreads.
The framing in the article is incredibly biased. By no definition of the word is it accurate to call humans the subjects of the experiment.
If the risk of a bacterial attack was real, then it would be negligent not to prepare for such an attack, as it could mean the loss of tens of millions of lives across all metropolitan areas. The "subjects" of this test were not the humans, but the interaction of a bacteria and the structure of the city - to see how a similar but harmful organism would spread through a metropolitan area. These tests were not testing how these bacteria affect humans (it was known that they don't, and for the extraudinarily vast majority of cases, they didn't). As a matter of fact, the bacterial strains were chosen specifically because they have little or no immunity to antibiotics [1] and posed no known threats to humans.
1. http://www.nytimes.com/1981/04/15/us/judge-s-decision-expect...
but you probably don't want to take his site in this argument and only gave us his official (and sourced) stance.
How can you find out an agent causes death one in a million times without testing it on (roughly) a million people?
I think that there are valid reasons to be concerned or upset about this test, but that they chose an insufficiently harmless agent is not one of them.
[0]: http://www.bayareacensus.ca.gov/counties/SanFranciscoCounty5...
They probably argued that the test was more like surveying defenses than an experiment. i.e. "we need to try it because we need to know if we should be concerned about the Soviets doing it with seriously harmful bacteria."
Additionally, when you do anything involving a group that large there's bound to be an few outliers. Winning the lottery, getting bitten by a shark and dying from complications caused by normally harmless bacteria are all incredibly uncommon but they still happen.
If the impetus for the experiment was to test some potential attack vector as the grandparent post suggests, would you rather they didn't risk some catastrophic attack? It's the notion of "the greater good" and all that.
In writing this, I seem to have discovered my own answer. This is largely similar to the NSA going beserk as it has done because, "What if?". So do you want to risk & sacrifice for ostensibly better security?
They shouldn't have done it at all. But even if in some twisted world they needed to, they could have warned everyone and come up with ways to protect hospitals.
In the railway scenario, you know you'll save 5. In this case, they were just experimenting to see if a certain attack was possible. Avoiding the experiment would not have resulted in any deaths.
>They probably argued
I'm risking sounding pedantic, but it wearies me to read sweeping platitudes like this -- no faith? You'd not sue your doctor if he cut the wrong leg off? I'm not even sure what "faith" means in this sense -- trust without evidence? You shouldn't have had "faith" in the first place, if that's the case.
I was alarmed that this concept (sovereign immunity) could even exist. I thought, at first, that only in monarchies this could be a thing.
Sovereign immunity serves important purposes: 1) keeping courts from getting tangled up in political matters; 2) keeping the actions of individual officers from leading to claims against the public treasury.
Note that just because the sovereign is immune (the government itself) does not mean that individual officers of the government cannot be sued. That's why you see all these lawsuits styled Somebody v. Secretary of State.
It was never okay, but people didn't think much about 'radical' ideas such as 'informed, enthusiastic consent' back then.