When are we going to stop being considered everyone's dumping ground?
US military planned nerve gas test on Aust troops
The US was planning to test Sarin and VX nerve gas on up to 200 Australian combat troops. Defence files have revealed the United States military was planning to test deadly nerve gas on Australian troops in a far north Queensland rainforest in the 1960s.
Australian Defence Department files obtained by Channel Nine show the US was planning to test Sarin and VX nerve gas on up to 200 Australian combat troops by aerial bombing areas around Lockhart River.
The plan never went ahead, but American survey teams inspected the proposed testing site.
The prime minister at the time, Harold Holt, vetoed the plan.
His former staffer, Peter Bailey, says the Australian government was concerned that its Cold War alliance with the US would be damaged if it did not acquiesce.
"If they weren't pretty good and pretty faithful to the Americans we would be dumped, so I think ministers were very aware that this was probably our one main support," he said.
Former Democrats Senator Lyn Allison has told Channel Nine the current Government should make the documents public.
"There's apparently a whole unit which the minister says didn't conduct testing but I think we need to know what they were doing and it is time for these documents to be released," she said.
"Let us have a look at what was being contemplated just 40 odd years ago - it's not the deepest, darkest history of Australia we're talking about."
http://www.abc.net.au/news/stories/2008/07/06/2295601.htm
As if England testing their bombs and doing nuclear tests on our serving men wasn't enough, America thought they could just murder 200 of our men as well! Wasn't it only a few months ago that Cheney was trying to pressure Howard into taking all their nuclear waste and burying it in our country too? When are we going to stop being used as canon fodder and scientific experiements and respected as a nation? Enough! If it's not good enough for your back yard it is not good enough for ours.
Comments
Crikey--that's scary...awful...there's so much evil stuff that we'll never find out that happens, happened, or almost happened with our government---just wait till the elections too.
ps--is Holt the one that went out for a swim and uh...never came back?
Holt - that's right. We are very casual with our leaders. We like to pretend that he swam out to a Russian sub and went to live in Russia rather than say we lost him somewhere!
I completely understand your feeling of being dumped on. Vegas has been the fastest growing American city in all of its history, yet we're still fighting about turning Yucca Mt. into a nuclear waste dump. That's just a short distance from the city. We're worried about the transport of the waste and the cities it will pass through. How in the world do they think they're going to get it "down under" without multiple opportunities for disaster in transit? I also don't understand asking another country to act as a trash can for our waste. That's outrageous.