The Nuremburg Code arose from legal proceedings against the notorious Nazi Doctors. Although it did not prevent human experiments, like radiological studies, it did eventually lead to the notion of “informed consent”, and some other good things.
Steve Breyer points out that nuclear power and the bomb from which it derived are human experimentation.Countless rushed experiments were necessary to complete the Manhattan Project. An explosion tested the first Bomb in the New Mexican desert; within weeks, Hiroshima and Nagasaki became radioactive laboratories (and sarcophagi).
Beginning with rushed experiments to complete the Manhattan Project the experimentation includes atomic testing in the Nevada desert, the Soviet Arctic, the Kazakh steppe, the Algerian Sahara, French Polynesia, and on “American” atolls in the South Pacific enabled the development of the hydrogen bomb and sundry innovations. Nuclear testing was done underground for Britain, the US, and the USSR after the enaction of the Partial Test Ban Treaty (1963) . France continued atmospheric testing on Pacific islands, as they were not party to the treaty.
The number of victims of nuclear weapons manufacture and testing is unknown, but include Navajo uranium miners, soldiers, Utah sheep farmers, and residents around places like Rocky Flats, Colorado and Colonie, New York. Some New Mexicans. Helen Caldicott and Harvey Wasserman estimate 1000s of cancers result from civilian nuclear power annually. The recent book of collected studies on Chernobyl show nearly 1,000,000 deaths directly due to the accident.Time will reveal the toll Fukushima will take, although as with Chernobyl, great efforts will be taken to hide the data.
Countries employing nuclear power need to be held to the directives of the Nuremberg Code, as are social and medical scientists, we’d likely see a quick retreat from the nuclear brink.
The text of the Code, here edited for brevity, comes from Trials of War Criminals before the Nuremberg Military Tribunals under Control Council Law, No. 10, Vol. 2 (Washington: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1949), pp. 181-182. It is available online)
1. The voluntary consent of the human subject is absolutely essential.
2. The experiment should be such as to yield fruitful results for the good of society, unprocurable by other methods or means of study, and not random and unnecessary in nature.
3. The experiment should be so designed and based on the results of animal experimentation and a knowledge of the natural history of the disease or other problem under study that the anticipated results will justify the performance of the experiment.
4. The experiment should be so conducted as to avoid all unnecessary physical and mental suffering and injury.
5. No experiment should be conducted where there is an a prior reason to believe that death or disabling injury will occur.
6. The degree of risk to be taken should never exceed that determined by the humanitarian importance of the problem to be solved by the experiment.
7. Proper preparations should be made and adequate facilities provided to protect the experimental subject against even remote possibilities of injury, disability, or death.
8. The experiment should be conducted only by scientifically qualified persons. The highest degree of skill and care should be required through all stages of the experiment of those who conduct or engage in the experiment.
9. During the course of the experiment the human subject should be at liberty to bring the experiment to an end if he has reached the physical or mental state where continuation of the experiment seems to him to be impossible.
10. During the course of the experiment the scientist in charge must be prepared to terminate the experiment at any stage, if he has probable cause to believe, in the exercise of the good faith, superior skill and careful judgment required of him that a continuation of the experiment is likely to result in injury, disability, or death to the experimental subject.
Credit to Steve Breyer’s article on Dianuke