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Japan WWII poison gas agents still scarring people today
- formerkrogemp 4y agoPopulations living near past conflicts continue to pay the price of that conflict to this day. Mines from the world war, Vietnam, etc continue to harm people today.
- m463 4y agoI wonder what will happen to the SS Richard Montgomery, with 1400 tons of unexploded ordinance. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SS_Richard_Montgomery https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SS_Richard_Montgomery
- zx10rse 4y agoIt is always the common people that pay the price, there is great documentary about agent orange used in Vietnam war. It is hard to watch, be aware. The Vietnam War's Agent Orange legacy | Unreported World - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kMzJvwG2rsQ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kMzJvwG2rsQ
- baxtr 4y agoI clicked the link. I regret it. Don’t watch this if you want your Sunday to stay nice.
- hsn915 4y agoNear where I live, there's a kindergarten, and playground where my daughter would often play in. About a year or so ago, an undetonated missile was discovered. It was one of the many bombs dropped on residential areas during firebombing of Tokyo in WWII. The place where it was discovered is right in front of the kindergarten, and very close to the playground. Luckily it was safely extracted away. But kids have been running around that place for decades.
- garmanarnar 4y ago[flagged]
- Synaesthesia 4y agoNot to mention the birth defects and mutations due to the chemical warfare employed there.
- dane-pgp 4y agoFor what it's worth, the US is at least destroying its remaining stockpiles of chemical weapons, and is due to finish the process by September 2023. Let's hope the country doesn't get involved in a large scale conflict between now and then, which might cause a change of plans for those munitions. https://www.armscontrol.org/blog/2022-08-10/colorado-chemical-weapon-stockpile-site-target-meet-destruction-deadline https://www.armscontrol.org/blog/2022-08-10/colorado-chemica...
- sidewndr46 4y agoThe US is disposing of chemical weapons because they're enormously expensive and simply not that effective. Chemical weapons usage by Cuba in Angola didn't really turn the tide of the war. Also, the US has nuclear weapons plus a huge fleet of bombers with conventional weapons. Pretty easy to give up an expensive party-trick when you basically decapitate the military of most countries in just a few hours.
- buildbot 4y agoWe have Henry Kissinger to thank for that. Disgusting what we (America) did there.
- Waterluvian 4y agoBeing a foolish victim of a low-quality fraud by a second-rate charlatan like like Elizabeth Holmes is a telling and fitting capstone to his legacy.
- WalterBright 4y ago
- fatneckbeardz 4y agoone of the clearest examples of "privatize the profits, socialize the losses."
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- Godel_unicode 4y agoWhich profits are those? The article seems to indicate that the factory was operated by the Japanese army.
- gfaster 4y agoWell in that case it isn't strictly 'profit' but rather just benefit. In the same way that antisocial urban development isn't necessarily profitable per se, it just allows the people doing it to reap all the benefits while pushing the burden onto society as a whole.
- philjohn 4y agoWhy do countries invade others? It's often portrayed as being for the greater good of the attacker, restoring their territorial integrity. But let's be honest, you don't spend billions if you're not getting anything in return other than pissed off invadees - it's for profit.
- bawolff 4y agoI mean, they are pretty honest about. Land is how countries make money. Its not a secret.
- zopa 4y agoIn the 1700s, maybe; today profit comes from fragile human and physical capital that don't like having bombs dropped on them. Let's look at some numbers. Ukraine, a largely agriculture country, is one of the strongest possible cases for your thesis. So consider net Ukrainian raw materials exports: <https://wits.worldbank.org/CountryProfile/en/Country/UKR/Year/2019/TradeFlow/EXPIMP/Partner/WLD/Product/All-Groups https://wits.worldbank.org/CountryProfile/en/Country/UKR/Yea...> Around $18 billion in 2019. To gain partial control of that revenue stream, Russia has largely smashed up the military it spends $50-$60 billion a year on. It's not a good trade. You might protest that land also has factories and such on it, and that's true, but today many of those factories look like this: <https://gdb.rferl.org/07520000-0aff-0242-a90c-08da3a5a2c06_w2395_n_st_d2.jpeg https://gdb.rferl.org/07520000-0aff-0242-a90c-08da3a5a2c06_w...> Launching wars of aggression is a bad idea because killing people and taking things that don't belong to you is wrong. But if that fails to persuade, recall that it's also a financial catastrophe, for both sides. (Edit: formatting)
- PradeetPatel 4y agoMy heart goes out to the Aotsuka family. Thankfully, research, development and deployment of chemical/biological weapons are heavily restricted and regulated in most developed nations. If do we not learn from the past we're doomed to repeat it. Only through education and awareness can we prevent this type of tragedy from occurring again.
- galangalalgol 4y agoThe article mentions almost offhandedly that the substance was buried no longer ago than 1993. Surely that must have been illegal? Is anyone investigating that?
- birdyrooster 4y agoThis is absolutely devastating to read and truly reminds me not to be a war monger.
- jcmeyrignac 4y agoMy grand-father was gassed in Verdun (WW I). All his children had pulmonary problems. Some of his grand-children also have similar problems.
- Eisenstein 4y agoI was doubtful of your implication of a causal relationship between poison gassing of a father and problems passed down genetically. However upon some research I came upon this study, which definitely supports such a relationship: * https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2917398/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2917398/
- SpikeDad 4y agoThis study is a joke. 20 years after exposure. Self reporting exposure. Done by a country with a huge reason to find positive results so bias is a strong possibility. No mechanism for how exposure could result in genetic modification specific to pulmonary issues.
- Eisenstein 4y ago> 20 years after exposure. Why is this a problem? They have medical records in Iran. It is a developed country. > Done by a country with a huge reason to find positive results What reason? This study was done long after the Iran Iraq war. > No mechanism for how exposure could result in genetic modification specific to pulmonary issues. Does every study have to explain a mechanism for cause?
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- linschn 4y agoHow hold are you? Even if he had you in his forties, you would be more than eighty now. I don't know much about epigenetics, but I would be highly surprised if this had anything to do with that.
- valenceelectron 4y agoRandom information: the article shows an image from Okunoshima Island. Today, this is also called Rabbit Island. It is chock full of rabbits of all colors. There is also at least one hotel on the island and a little museum that tells the dark past of this island. Rumor has it, the rabbits were used as test subjects for the chemical weapons and were freed after the war, multiplying uncontrolled. Everywhere you look, there is a group of fluffy rabbits. I’ve been there for a day and it was a nice experience. The museum lacked English explanations for most of its exhibits though. But this was some years ago, may have changed.
- sva_ 4y agoThe article mentions this as well: > The tiny island in the Seto Inland Sea off Takehara, Hiroshima Prefecture, is a popular tourist destination known for being the home of hundreds of bunnies, but it was once a "poison gas island" where the Imperial Japanese Army secretly manufactured chemical weapons from around 1930 to the end of the war.
- amelius 4y agoReminds me of: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gruinard_Island https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gruinard_Island > The island was dangerous for all mammals after experiments with the anthrax bacterium in 1942, until it was decontaminated in the late 20th century.
- Spooky23 4y ago
- dpe82 4y agoPlease don't spread conspiracy theories. https://www.washingtonpost.com/health/no-lyme-diease-is-not-an-escaped-military-bioweapon-despite-what-conspiracy-theorists-say/2019/08/09/5bbd85fa-afe4-11e9-8e77-03b30bc29f64_story.html https://www.washingtonpost.com/health/no-lyme-diease-is-not-...
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- makeitdouble 4y agoWith no horse in the race, it seems the WaPo article is trying to prove a negative (that the military had no involvement in spreading a disease) by asserting that it wouldn’t be the first to spread the disease, and had neither a motive nor enough knowledge to do it intentionally. As for most negative proofs, that still leaves plenty of rooms for any other combination of event where some of the above are not true (e.g the military accidentally participating in the spread of an existing disease for instance) That feels like a lost battle to me.
- acdha 4y agoThis is how conspiracy theories work by continually shifting to whatever has not yet been debunked — the opposite of the scientific process described in the papers referenced by that article. The theory originally was that this was an escaped bioweapon. Proof going back to the previous century shows that’s not the case; as does basic consideration of the low hypothetical value of a weapon which is slow, not very lethal, and easily managed by basic military hygiene practices; and now we’re left with, what, the claim that the military might have caused slightly faster spread of the same pathogen which was already spreading in the wild? That’s like saying that COVID must be an escaped bioweapon because some PLA soldiers coughed on civilians, and it’s a weak enough formulation that nobody leads with that rather than the dramatic sounding false claim.
- godmode2019 4y agoAgent orange has had the same affect, at least in my country Ref: https://www.smh.com.au/world/agent-orange-caused-damage-to-dna-study-20060728-gdo26x.html https://www.smh.com.au/world/agent-orange-caused-damage-to-d...
- barbariangrunge 4y agoI'm still amazed that chemical weapons weren't used in a widespread way during world war 2 (compared to, say, world war 1). Several of the nations involved in that war were fighting a war of extermination against somebody, and almost every other war crime you can imagine was commonplace. World War 1 must have really scarred everybody.
- bdcravens 4y agoHitler famously refused to use the sarin gas his scientists developed based on an experience he had in WWI. https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/retropolis/wp/2017/04/11/hitler-refused-to-use-sarin-gas-during-wwii-the-mystery-is-why/ https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/retropolis/wp/2017/04/11...
- fragmede 4y agohttps://www.history.com/news/the-nazis-developed-sarin-gas-but-hitler-was-afraid-to-use-it https://www.history.com/news/the-nazis-developed-sarin-gas-b...
- hoseja 4y agoTurns out chemical weapons are tactically garbage and nobody actually can use them effectively, which is the true reason the ban on them is upheld.
- Xylakant 4y agoI believe you’re referring to this article which makes the point https://acoup.blog/2020/03/20/collections-why-dont-we-use-chemical-weapons-anymore/ https://acoup.blog/2020/03/20/collections-why-dont-we-use-ch..., though with a slightly different conclusion: it says that chemical weapons are useless for a top tier modern army, because top tier modern opponents can easily protect against them, and other opponents are better targeted using conventional means. But for armies that are not top-tier modern armies, they still make sense and are still in use.
- joshstrange 4y agoWhen I went to the University of Kentucky for college I remember hearing from friends who grew up in Richmond, and the surrounding area, about the chemical weapon drills they had (similar to active shooter, fire, tornado, etc). Turns out Richmond had/has a large cache of chemical weapons waiting to be decommissioned and there was always a worry about a leak (due to age or natural disaster). It appears that as of this year [0] they are finally nearing the completion of decommissioning the weapons but it's crazy to me to how long these just sat without any real work (or very slow work) being done to remove the threat. [0] https://www.usnews.com/news/best-states/kentucky/articles/2022-07-07/work-begins-on-last-chemical-weapons-stockpile-in-kentucky https://www.usnews.com/news/best-states/kentucky/articles/20...
- mijowi 4y ago> crazy to me how long these just sat without any real work You must not be very familiar with the speed of government work.