Should Henry Ford (and his legal heirs) be responsible for every car fatality?

No, that is the point. Cars were designed for the purpose of taking people from A to B while making the manufacturers of them large fortunes. That is no particular problem in a capitalist society, but; are the guys who invented nerve gasses to be compared with car designers? Did nerve gas have a beneficent purpose? Oh, and on a point Henry Ford did not invent the automobile, he just worked out how to make the most money out of it.

So.. once again are scientists combatants in war?

I'm at a loss to think of anything used in war that doesn't have some use for good in time of peace. Can you suggest something?

Mustard gas was the first effective chemotherapy drug. It's still in use today.

As for nerve agents, many are used today as effective insecticides and pesticides (most of these particular nerve agents have little effect on humans at legal doses; many that don't have since been banned). They are used as antihelminthics in livestock, and they are used to prolong shelf life of various chemicals. Some are used as organic semiconductors. At least one nerve agent is being investigated as a treatment for Alzheimer's as a Tau Aggregation Inhibitor and may possibly treat Parkinson's.

If you are familiar with budo, the Japanese martial arts, you may be familiar with "the sword that takes life, and the sword that gives life." These are the same sword, wielded differently. The gun used by a criminal to murder innocent life is the same tool used by a mother to protect her baby from a rabid dog. In the first case, the gun takes life. In the second, it gives life.

How can we know what the intent of each and every researcher involved actually is? And how would we weigh their intents with how people they never met or imagined existed / would exist would use their discoveries?

Sorry about misrepresenting Ford's role in automobile history. All I know about cars is that one pedal makes them go, a different pedal makes them stop, and don't ever put diesel into a car that uses unleaded gasoline. :)

If your question is about what the Geneva Convention says, then no, scientists are not combatants. But neither are military chaplains, medical personnel, prisoners of war, and civilians.

I had Fritz Haber in mind when I asked the question, a brilliant chemist but not much of a human being. He enjoyed wearing his officers uniform and relished the effects of poison gas on its victims. I agree that many weapons are put to good use and wars have great spin off effects, just like Budo suggests, but I was questioning the status of their inventors rather than those who use them.

It has always been difficult to judge the morality or culpability of scientists in war. We put on trial the Nazi medical doctors but rewarded and celebrated Werner von Braun.

I am very familiar with the effects of nerve gasses both as weapons and insecticides. It was in fact insecticides that led to nerve agents rather than the other way around and the adaptation of them as weapons never had any good purpose. I am astonished that scientists are not satisfied with a gas such as Tabun but work towards making Soman, thousands of times more toxic. I suppose it is something akin to being unsatisfied with a nuclear bomb that can destroy a city, lets have one a hundred times as powerful

Overall I do think scientists are combatants in wars. Who are the good guys and who are the bad depends of course on whose side you are on, and more usually on who wins.

Frizt Haber, then, was a horrible person and a sadist, and I hope the good people in the world rejoiced when he died. I hope he was charged with war crimes for his involvement in the Nazi regime. Besides war crimes, he seems guilty of murder, or at least felony murder. Whether he was an enemy combatant, I doubt.

My understanding of the trials of the Nazi doctors was that they committed crimes like murder, torture, intentional infliction of harm, poisoning, etc. They weren't on trial for taking part in combat.

Legal combatants who act under the laws of war are not put on trial for their actions, unless they do things illegal under the Geneva code.

You can call scientists "combatants," but then you'll also have to call these people combatants: military chaplains, military medics and surgeons, civilian doctors in military hospitals, the women who work in the mutations factories, the women who knit socks for the soldiers, the farmers who grow hemp and harvest silk for rope and parachutes, and the children collecting scrap metal to be melted down.

The US should not have honored van Bruen at all. I understand the pragmatic decision to bring him to the US and put him to work, but I am disgusted that a high-ranking Nazi responsible for so much suffering was not held to justice.

Ironically, if we called him an enemy combatant, we would not have legally been able to put him on trial.

I think one of the strategies the military has is "shock and awe" - if the initial attack is so destructive and so final, then the enemy surrenders immediately rather than risk war.

This was what happened with the atomic bomb in Japan during WWII. Dropping the bombs was a last-ditch, desperate effort with poorly-tested technology. The bombs were successful, in that they killed tens of thousands and brought about the total Japanese surrender. Had the bombing failed, the US would have launched a full-scale invasion of Japan. Millions would have been killed - US soldiers, Japanese soldiers, and Japanese civilians alike. By killing thousands, millions were potentially saved. Which would have been the moral choice? (I"m honestly asking you.)

Fritz Haber was an officer in WW1 and as was of Jewish origin. He would not have been able to assist the Nazis in WW2 as they would probably have put him in a concentration camp and ironically gassed him. He was a chemist who had worked on artificial fertilisers but made his name inventing and adapting the various weaponised gases used in WW1. He was given military rank and a uniform, which thrilled him and he loved watching his poison gasses kill soldiers.

His wife was so appalled by his enjoyment of his 'work' that she shot herself with his service pistol. His reaction was to go back to work on the same day to examine data on how many Russian soldiers had been gassed.

The Nazi doctors carried out experiments related to combat. They placed Russian soldiers in freezing water to see how long a pilot could survive if shot down over the sea. They also put people into decompression chambers in high altitude experiments while experimenting on very high altitude bombers and fighters, Another trick was to shot concentration camp victims in the legs and arms to see how long it took them to die from trauma injuries and septicaemia.

The dropping of the atomic bombs on Japan was a demonstration to the Russians, not the Japanese. There would have been no more need for a full scale invasion of Japan than there was after the surrender. Japan was in absolute ruins in August 1945 with American bombers ranging unopposed in its skies. Its navy and airforce had ceased to exist and Hiroshima and Nagasaki were chosen because they were least damaged. Japan would have surrendered within weeks without the bombs being used. It was politics that determined their use not military strategy.

Civilians were certainly seen as targets by the Germans in WW1 shooting of 'franc tirreurs' for instance or Zeppelin and aircraft bombing of London. The UK and its allies saw them as combatants deliberately starving German civilians by naval blocked even after the war ended

On a final note women in munitions factories were certainly seen as combatants by the head of the British Bomber Command. He openly stated that civilians should be killed in bombing raids because they made the weapons the soldiers used. Henry Morgenthau wanted to treat all Germans as war criminals after WW2. It wasn't a question about morality. A state of war eliminates normal morality and replaces it with what is perceived at the time with necessity.

I pay taxes. I live in the US. Am I therefore a combatant in every war or combat operation the president and congress gets my country into?

I believe "combatant" is an operational term, isn't it? Defined by treaty and law?

If you redefine "combatant" as anyone who contributes to a war effort (as it seems that you do), then there is no meaningful difference between combatant and noncombatant.

It's one thing to say all contributors to a war are guilty of immoral acts. In that case combatants and non-combatants are distinct without a difference.

I live in the UK but every war Parliament gets my country into does not involve me in its morality. I never suggested that all participants in war are equally culpable, only that they are participants. This is not a 'j'accuse' on all participants in war. The question asked "are scientist combatants in war?" Not which scientists committed immoral acts in them?