At some point in 1943, the United States Navy decided it wanted to expose its sailors to mustard gas. The official experiment was supposed to test the effectiveness of new clothing and gas masks. Since the gas was so damaging during World War I, it made sense to want to find ways to battle it. This led them to conduct experiments at the Naval Research Laboratory in Washington. The Navy recruited thousands of 17 & 18-year-old boys that were all roughly eight weeks into boot camp.
[Image via Nick Beer/Shutterstock.com]They were told that they needed people to help with experiments that could help them shorten the war. The boys jumped at the chance to help their country. When governments conducted experiments on their own people, as we know, there is always a catch. Only once the boys arrived at the Research Lab, they were told it would involve mustard gas. But they could not get out of the experiment now. Pretty much all of them suffered severe external and internal burns, which were ignored by the Navy. They even threatened some with the Espionage Act, which the nation used to punish spies, terrorists, etc.
