[HN Gopher] Japan WWII poison gas agents still scarring people t...
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Japan WWII poison gas agents still scarring people today
Author : tomohawk
Score : 96 points
Date : 2022-10-02 17:13 UTC (5 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (mainichi.jp)
(TXT) w3m dump (mainichi.jp)
| PradeetPatel wrote:
| My 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 wrote:
| The article mentions almost offhandedly that the substance was
| buried no longer ago than 1993. Surely that must have been
| illegal? Is anyone investigating that?
| valenceelectron wrote:
| Random 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_ wrote:
| The 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.
| birdyrooster wrote:
| This is absolutely devastating to read and truly reminds me not
| to be a war monger.
| formerkrogemp wrote:
| Populations 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 wrote:
| I wonder what will happen to the SS Richard Montgomery, with
| 1400 tons of unexploded ordinance.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SS_Richard_Montgomery
| zx10rse wrote:
| It 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
| baxtr wrote:
| I clicked the link. I regret it. Don't watch this if you want
| your Sunday to stay nice.
| amelius wrote:
| Reminds me of:
|
| 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 wrote:
| The US version was Plum island in the Long Island Sound. If you
| draw a circle around early Lyme Disease cases, it just happens
| to be in the middle of that circle.
| dpe82 wrote:
| Please don't spread conspiracy theories.
|
| https://www.washingtonpost.com/health/no-lyme-diease-is-
| not-...
| [deleted]
| garmanarnar wrote:
| Synaesthesia wrote:
| Not to mention the birth defects and mutations due to the
| chemical warfare employed there.
| dane-pgp wrote:
| For 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-chemica...
| buildbot wrote:
| We have Henry Kissinger to thank for that. Disgusting what we
| (America) did there.
| Waterluvian wrote:
| Being 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 wrote:
| There are still unexploded bombs in England and Germany being
| found. A few years ago, a Civil War shell exploded killing
| someone. Hopefully the last casualty of that war.
|
| Me, I'd press for a law that mines can only be electrically set
| off using a battery that decays over time. (Or any triggering
| device that decays away.) This is so after a year or so, past
| any military value, they'll be inert.
| bombcar wrote:
| It's hard to decay away the actual explosive, and they can be
| set off concussively.
| ok_dad wrote:
| Most military high explosives today cannot be set off
| without a secondary. Still not great to have lying around,
| but it's also not just TNT.
| pvaldes wrote:
| Four people walking in a forest near Chernobyl killed by
| a land mine today. And farmers found also potato fields
| with land mines buried on it.
|
| We can create the most "tremendous" and beautiful and
| well written law possible. It will not change the fact
| that war criminals don't obey the law, and that some
| armies are using still a lot of obsolete stuff. Landmines
| are still an unsolved problem.
| samatman wrote:
| Was this an old mine, or a new one due to the war?
|
| Old mines don't decay, which is why new ones do.
|
| Civilians being killed in war is tragic, but also seems
| out-of-scope, militaries aren't going to stop using area
| denial weapons. Making sure they don't kill people once
| they're no longer intended to is as close as we're likely
| to come without reaching utopia.
| bombcar wrote:
| But can the secondary be set off without a tertiary?
| mhh__ wrote:
| There was a British nuclear mine (design) that actually used
| a chicken to keep the electronics warm
|
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blue_Peacock
| dane-pgp wrote:
| For what it's worth, most countries, including the US, are
| parties to the Convention on Certain Conventional Weapons, of
| which Protocol II requires a ban on "the use of non-self-
| destructing and non-self-deactivating mines outside fenced,
| monitored and marked areas"[0].
|
| I think that means that countries have to either use mines
| which decay over time, as you suggest, or they have to remove
| the mines themselves from any designated area once the
| relevant conflict ends. I'm not sure if any signatories have
| deployed any non-decaying mines since the convention entered
| into force, though.
|
| [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Convention_on_Certain_Conve
| nti...
| jcmeyrignac wrote:
| My grand-father was gassed in Verdun (WW I).
|
| All his children had pulmonary problems.
|
| Some of his grand-children also have similar problems.
| Eisenstein wrote:
| I 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/
| linschn wrote:
| How 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.
| collegeburner wrote:
| not necessarily. a lot of the people in WWI were young and
| lied about their age. say he was 16, so born in 1900. he and
| this person's dad could have very well had kids at 50 or so,
| i.e. father born 1950 and the person born in 2000 making him
| young. though he is probably a bit older than this.
| dane-pgp wrote:
| That reminds me of the strange little piece of trivia that
| the last surviving US Civil War widow died in 2020:
|
| https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2021/jan/08/last-
| civil-w...
| samatman wrote:
| The grandson of President John Tyler died at 95 years of
| age in 2020.
|
| John Tyler was President starting in 1841. It is indeed
| possible.
| chucksmash wrote:
| This has been my go-to "that can't possibly be right"
| factoid for years. He had two living grandsons the last
| time someone made me Google it. It looks like one of them
| passed away in 2020, but the other is still alive albeit
| no longer in good health[1].
|
| [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harrison_Ruffin_Tyler
| linschn wrote:
| Never mind, I had a brain fart and misread gand father for
| father, and the sibling comment provided a link to a study
| showing that indeed, mustard gas has a measurable effect on
| spermogenesis and can increase the rate of respiratory
| diseases in the victims offspring.
|
| My apologies.
| fatneckbeardz wrote:
| one of the clearest examples of "privatize the profits, socialize
| the losses."
| [deleted]
| Godel_unicode wrote:
| Which profits are those? The article seems to indicate that the
| factory was operated by the Japanese army.
| gfaster wrote:
| Well 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 wrote:
| Why 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 wrote:
| I mean, they are pretty honest about. Land is how
| countries make money. Its not a secret.
| zopa wrote:
| In 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/CountryPro
| file/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-08da3a5a2c
| 06_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_ )
| Godel_unicode wrote:
| Ukraine also has some of the best agricultural land in
| the world, which nets exports of around $18bn. Hard to
| argue that's not about the land. Then there's the big
| one; Putin believes that land belongs to him. Once you
| get into squishy questions like how much is it worth to
| get your thing back from someone the financial calculus
| becomes much harder.
| toast0 wrote:
| > 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.
|
| With my deeply cynical hat on...
|
| I mean, if they keep the territory (which seems unlikely
| at this moment), they get that revenue, so good for them?
|
| They also got to clear out their stores of old munitions,
| and run a sales demo for newer munitions. Might have been
| a better demo if the campaign didn't go sideways, though.
| Either way, lots of business for domestic producers of
| munitions to resupply.
| sva_ wrote:
| From the article (sounds very speculative though):
|
| > Why the chemical agent was buried in Kamisu has not yet
| been clarified by government investigations. Some believe
| that during the chaotic years following the war, the
| substance was sold and eventually transported to the city.
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(page generated 2022-10-02 23:00 UTC)