• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

By Root 2718 0

of and all known laws of war”).62 Between 1961 and 1971, however, the U.S. Air Force sprayed 20 million gallons of concentrated arsenic-based and dioxin-laden herbicides (mainly Agent Orange) on 6 million acres of crops and trees, besides using large quantities of the “super tear gas” CS and vast amounts of napalm and phosphorus bombs.63 An estimated 13 percent of South Vietnam’s land was subjected to chemical attacks. This included 30 percent of its rubber plantations and 36 percent of its mangrove forests, along with other large forest areas, destroyed by toxic chemicals in programs that included multiple “large-scale intentional effort[s] combining defoliation with incendiaries to produce a forest fire in South Vietnam.”64 A 1967 study prepared by the head of the Agronomy Section of the Japanese Science Council concluded that U.S. anticrop warfare had already ruined more than 3.8 million acres of arable land in South Vietnam, killing almost 1,000 peasants and over 13,000 livestock.65 This policy of attempting to force enemy capitulation by destroying its food supply was not only contrary to the rules of war,66 it was notable in that it “first and overwhelmingly affected small children.”67

Laos was also subjected to chemical attacks in 1966 and 1969, directed at both crops, and vegetation along communication routes. And in Cambodia, some 173,000 acres of rubber plantations, crops and forests were heavily sprayed with Agent Orange in the spring of 1969.68 The Cambodian government complained bitterly at the violation of its neutrality by this inhumane and illegal action, but Cambodia was too small and weak for its voice to be heard or for it to be able to mobilize a legal or other defense. Although the U.N. General Assembly did strongly condemn the use of chemical agents as contrary to international law by an 83-to-3 vote in 1969,69 it was powerless to act against the United States, and there was no “international community” mobilization to halt its use of chemical warfare in Cambodia or elsewhere in Indochina.

During the Vietnam war, the use of chemicals was reported and criticized in the U.S. media when first disclosed in 1966, but the subject was quickly dropped. The illegality of chemical warfare and a policy of starvation, and their effects on the victim population, were virtually unreported. There were exceptions, such as Orville Schell, Jr.’s 1971 Look magazine article “Silent Vietnam: How we invented ecocide and killed a country,” but they were rare indeed. After the war, because of the effects of Agent Orange on U.S. soldiers, there was some coverage of this chemical warfare campaign; but the vastly greater impact on the direct targets of this warfare in South Vietnam remained close to invisible. Of 522 articles in the New York Times, the Washington Post, the Los Angeles Times, Newsweek, and Time during the 1990s that mentioned Agent Orange and Vietnam together, the vast majority focused on the harm done to U.S. service personnel; only nine articles acknowledged the targeting of food crops (thiry-nine mentioned forest cover alone as the target); only eleven discussed in any detail the impact on Vietnamese and the Vietnamese environment; only three characterized the use of Agent Orange as a “chemical weapon” or “chemical warfare;” and in only two articles was it suggested that its use might constitute a war crime.

The Wall Street Journal did have a lead story on this topic in February 1997, reporting that as many as 500,000 children may have been born with dioxin-related deformities and that birth defects in the South were four times those in the North.70 The article did acknowledge U.S. responsibility for this disaster but contended that “the United States, emotionally spent after losing the war, paid no heed.” But the United States did pay heed to the flight of the “boat people” and was not too exhausted to enforce a vigorous boycott of the target of its aggression, even if it took no responsibility whatever for the condition of its victims.

The large-scale application of chemical weapons, and napalm, in Vietnam