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Chemistry: The hidden war

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Paul A. Lombardo applauds a shocking study detailing the Allies' Second World War experimentation with chemical weapons on their own troops.

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Correspondence to Paul A. Lombardo.

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Lombardo, P. Chemistry: The hidden war. Nature 541, 154–155 (2017). https://doi.org/10.1038/541154a

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  1. This is truly horrible and wrong, but I suspect that doing these things seemed small in scale when routinely ordering large numbers of people to their deaths in combat. I think it is probably hard for us so far removed from the horror of World War II to understand the mindset of people tasked with committing those horrors. (Incidentally, if this is a des cription of activities during World War II, then one case described herein of an "Air Force trainee" could not be a part of it, since the US Air Force was created in 1947, two years after the end of World War II.)

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  9. This is truly horrible and wrong I think it is probably hard for us so far removed from the horror of World War II to understand the mindset of people tasked with committing those horrors.

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