Max 1
And I feel this indicates exactly the national defence 'at any cost' ethos you mention. Of interest - note one test location considered.
US 'planned to test nerve gas on diggers'
The plan, which is disclosed for the first time on tomorrow’s
SUNDAY program on Nine, called for 200 mainly Australian combat troops to be aerially bombed and sprayed with the chemical weapons — with all but a handful of the soldiers to be kept in the dark about the "full details" of the tests.
A former senior official with then Prime Minister Harold Holt, Mr Peter Bailey, tells the program that as far as he knows the tests never went ahead but the planning was very advanced.
He admitted the whole operation was to be kept secret because use of such weapons was almost certainly illegal under international law at the time.
"The idea that we could actually… that the Australians could countenance such an activity is …unacceptable," University of NSW toxicologist Professor Chris Winder said.
He says even a fraction of a drop of either chemical on exposed skin could have been fatal and Cold War fears that communist Chinese or Russian attackers might have used such weapons in a third world war "doesn’t justify it now and I don’t think it justified it then".
The files show that in July 1962 the then-US defence secretary Robert McNamara wrote in secret to the Australian Defence Department suggesting joint testing of chemical weapons "on a classified basis without a public release by either country".
In early 1963 a survey team of Australian and US scientists reviewed sites in Australia for chemical warfare tests, suggesting the remote Iron Range rainforest near
Lockhart River in far north Queensland as one such location.
The request caused consternation in Canberra, with senior Defence bureaucrats clearly opposed to the use of nerve gas, but, as former senior Prime Ministerial policy advisor Peter Bailey recalls: "I heard that many times in Cabinet meetings that
if they weren’t pretty good and pretty faithful to the Americans we would be dumped.
Peuce
My new firend I am extremely concerned to note your apology and exit after Dick Smith mentioned the word 'defamation' about your quite innocent 'tricky' in regard to his debating style
Is this forum to be a place of good debate or some fear of retribution for open comment? Am I missing something? Should I not communicate with Mr Smith on here at all? This is muchly of concern to my research efforts.