Taking up where World War II left off

May 31, 1995
Issue 

Taking up where World War II left off

The Secrets of Porton Down
The Cutting Edge, SBS TV
Tuesday, June 6 8.30pm (8pm SA)
Reviewed by Sean Moysey

World War II produced some horrible weapons: napalm, nuclear bombs, guided rockets, fire bombing.

In many ways Britain and the USA documented and continued Nazi research into mass killing after the war, combining it with their own. British war scientists accumulated data on how concentration camps worked, how people were killed in large numbers, what chemicals were used. Nerve gas, developed by the Nazis in 1943, was taken and improved upon by British and US governments. They tested chemical weapons by maiming, and sometimes killing, volunteers from the armed services.

The devastating chemical attacks on Kurds in Iraq by Saddam Hussein in 1988 is testimony to research and development by places like Porton Down, a weapons research facility in England.

This documentary will make you physically uncomfortable, but it also makes the perpetrators of some of the crimes squirm on camera as they try to explain away brutal experimentation on humans.

Secrecy is the key to how government and military agencies are able to continue development of weapons most people abhor. The documentary shows an increase in cooperation between the US and Britain in the development of nerve gas up until 1963. Access to information after 1963, under the 30 year Official Secrets Act (Britain), is restricted from the community.

Survivors of experiments at Porton Down and other chemical testing facilities are interviewed in the documentary and chorus the need for other human "guinea pigs", past and present, to speak up and expose this gross industry in death.

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