I didn't know Nazis did human experiments at Hiroshima.
Oh I thought you were intrigued to discuss this. I guess I was wrong.
I was talking about human experimentation, not war.
Torture, mutilation, rape, and in general, violence towards noncombatants, are usually used as a weapon in war. That is a completely separate topic.
Some of the experiments Nazis did, did have at least a partial scientific purpose. You can argue whether the experiments were done as a weapon of war, or how (un)important the scientific aspect was to those doing the experiments. I am not interested in that discussion, because after three quarters of a century later, it is difficult to see what insight or value that kind of discussion would yield: we do not know their thoughts.
Some of those experiments established the envelope of human survivability/statistical lethal limits; the basis of
LCt50.
What intrigues me, is how one should approach those results. On one hand, they were obtained by unforgivable horrible experiments on innocents. On other hand, the results did advance human science, especially the understanding of what humans could and could not endure. On the gripping hand, those results could not be obtained by any other way but lethal experimentation. Would the results be more acceptable if they had experimented on criminals sentenced to death? Volunteers to such do not exist.
Many people have big problems to relate at all to those results. Their contribution to human science is often minimized, probably because the idea of having important results due to what essentially was torturing innocents to death, is so abhorrent. That in my opinion is a healthy response -- but it does not change the facts. The few things I know about lethality in humans (like human-animal LD
50 coefficients; i.e. how to map lethality in mice to lethality in humans), all seem to be partially based on those results. Is the correct response to hide those roots? Does that not insult the memory of those innocents that were murdered? Is that not intellectual dishonesty, not acknowledging that to get to where we are now, quite a few innocents have been killed?
Insurance companies, and even governments do the same kind of calculations every day. Pollution limits are typically not those that ensure no deaths; they are based on
acceptable risk. How is that "acceptable risk" different from killing innocents in order to obtain valid results? (If we omit unnecessary torture and degradation, that is.)
All this ties in to the original topic, because of the key arguments why some believe US astronauts did not land on the moon; that the landings were faked. In essence, the arguments boil down to
"they would not have risked the lifes of the astronauts", or
"the astronauts would not have survived". (Anyone who thinks they didn't have the technology (delta-V, to be specific) to do it, only needs to check: they really did.) My belief and understanding is that they very well did risk it, knowingly, and the top politicians even had a hidden backup plan of faking it if the Apollo program failed.
Which, if you think about it, is rather more cold than just faking it.
How much "data" was obtained at Hiroshima?
I didn't know Nazis did human experiments at Hiroshima.
Does it matter whether it was the Nazis or the Americans? In the aftermath of the Hiroshima bombing the survivors were treated abysmally, trying to extract information about the effects of radiation on human bodies.
I didn't know that!
I do think it is a bit different, because the bombs were dropped for war reasons, not to get those results.
(Some do believe that most Nazi experiments were just a cover to enjoy torturing innocents to death; I do not agree. I think that the scientists involved really were looking for data, and that the torture and denigration and abysmal treatment was "incidental" -- a result of having dehumanised and demonised the victims at the ideological level. The post-war history of the Paperclip scientists seems to support that view. I know this opinion is offensive to some, but in my opinion, the Nazis were evil because of their ideology; not the other way around. It is the ideology that gets people to do evil things, not evil people who twist "a good ideology like socialism" into evil purposes.)
However, I do agree that discussion regarding the knowledge of the effects of radiation on humans as found from the Hiroshima and Nagasaki victims is also intriguing. Were they treated badly intentionally, or just because they were in a hurry (as they knew the information obtained could possibly save other lives)? Especially when you have lots of casualties, correctly triaging the patients -- no matter how cruel or unjust -- is key in ensuring maximum survival rate. Or was it because dehumanising the victims is the typical way a normal human being psychologically handles such horrible situations? I'd like to know, but it is kind of a different discussion.
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