From the early 1990s, allegations that servicemen had been duped
into taking part in trials with toxic agents at top-secret Allied
research facilities throughout the twentieth century featured with
ever greater frequency in the media. In Britain, a whole army of
over 21,000 soldiers had participated in secret experiments between
1939 and 1989. Some remembered their stay as harmless, but there
were many for whom the experience had been all but pleasant,
sometimes harmful, and in isolated cases deadly. Secret Science
traces, for the first time, the history of chemical and biological
weapons research by the former Allied powers, particularly in
Britain, the United States, and Canada. It charts the ethical
trajectory and culture of military science, from its initial
development in response to Germany's first use of chemical weapons
in the First World War to the ongoing attempts by the international
community to ban these types of weapons once and for all. It asks
whether Allied and especially British warfare trials were ethical,
safe, and justified within the prevailing conditions and values of
the time. By doing so, it helps to explain the complex dynamics in
top-secret Allied research establishments: the desire and ability
of the chemical and biological warfare corps, largely comprised of
military officials, scientists, and expert civil servants, to
construct and identify a never-ending stream of national security
threats which served as flexible justification strategies for the
allocation of enormous resources to conducting experimental
research with some of the most deadly agents known to man. Secret
Science offers a nuanced, non-judgemental analysis of the
contributions made by servicemen, scientists, and civil servants to
military research in Britain and elsewhere, not as passive,
helpless victims 'without voices', or as laboratory and desk
perpetrators 'without a conscience', but as history's actors and
agents of their own destiny. As such it also makes an important
contribution to the burgeoning literature on the history and
culture of memory.
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