In 1961, President Ngo Dinh Diem of South Vietnam asked the US to conduct aerial herbicide spraying, to which the US initially hesitated to help. For months, US officials analyzed a British herbicide operation during the Malayan Emergency in the 1950s and used its success as a precedent for the US’s own herbicide-spraying mission. Soon after in November 1961, President Kennedy authorized the start of Operation Ranch Hand.
The campaign’s intentions were to deprive Vietnamese forces by defoliating dense forest areas that might conceal Vietcong and North Vietnamese forces, and destroying crops that fed civilians and soldiers. Destroying food sources had two main impacts on the Vietcong: 1) they wouldn’t be able to feed themselves, which forced them out of hiding, and 2) they would be deprived of their rural support bases as the peasants who once inhabited those rural villages would flee to US-dominated cities in need of food.Initially, the US said that there was no lasting harm and justified the use of the herbicide as a “form of conservation” that saved GI’s lives. In fact, when the North Vietnamese initially reported the impacts of Agent Orange on their soldiers and civilians, the US dismissed their comments as communist propaganda. However, after US labs performed experiments that linked the exposure to dioxin to several congenital birth defects in lab animals, Agent Orange was discontinued in 1970.
Following the end of the Vietnam War, the US government did little to support veterans affected by Agent Orange, claiming that there was a lack of scientific consensus that got in the way of the government doing anything to help. However, these comments didn’t discourage veterans from fighting for their rights. For example, after a sharply critical report from the Department of Veterans Affairs in 1990, the government agreed to allocate $8 million a year to pay veterans who were affected.
Although the production of Agent Orange was outlawed in 1971, it continues to have a harmful impact on the environment and those exposed to it. The US government has helped clean up some dioxin hotspots such as the vicinity of the Danang airport, but several large hotspots still remain. To this day, millions of Americans and more than 3 million Vietnamese have developed cancer and other similar diseases due to their exposure, and more than 150,000 children have been born with severe birth defects.
https://www.history.com/topics/vietnam-war/agent-orange-1
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Agent_Orange
https://www.aspeninstitute.org/programs/agent-orange-in-vietnam-program/what-is-agent-orange/
https://www.nytimes.com/2014/05/12/us/agent-oranges-long-legacy-for-vietnam-and-veterans.html
I enjoyed reading this post and I thought that it was very interesting. Another chemical that the United States used in the Vietnam War was Napalm. Napalm is a mixture of plastic polystyrene, hydrocarbon benzene, and gasoline. This creates a jelly-like mixture that sticks to almost anything and ignites. It can generate temperatures up to 2,000 degrees Fahrenheit, so it is especially deadly and killed almost every person that it was in contact with. The US burned down forests and bushes in an attempt to get rid of hiding fighters. It was very destructive, especially when air raids used Napalm on Vietnamese fields and forests.
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https://vietnamawbb.weebly.com/napalm-agent-orange.html
I really like how you connected Agent Orange's use during the war to its impacts in the present day. Upon further research about the chemical's use by the US during the war, I found that it was more dangerous than it had to be. The government and chemical companies were aware of the health risks imposed on the soldiers and others who would be exposed. Additionally, manufacturers could have used techniques to lessen dioxin contamination in Agent Orange. According to evidence presented by the veterans' attorneys, a company called Dow Chemical knew of a technique to eliminate the dioxin from the chemicals by slowing the manufacturing process in 1957.
ReplyDeletehttps://www.chicagotribune.com/lifestyles/health/chi-agent-orange-dioxindec17-story.html.
This post really highlights how chemical warfare has always been the nasty side of war. Chemical warfare has always been used to devastating effect such as in World War One, where chlorine gas lead to the brutal asphyxiation of thousands of soldiers. This arguably lead to its ban as stated in the 1925 Geneva protocol in which asphyxiating and poisonous gases were banned. In addition, napalm was widely used to devastating effect during WW2 as a way to completely annihilate civilian structures in mainland Japan. This would also lead to napalm's ban in the 1980 Convention on Certain Conventional Weapons after the Vietnam War. However the question remains, did America violate the 1925 Geneva protocol? Although they went to trial in 1966-1967 and was accused by the U.N. of violating it, the U.S. claimed that it was not a chemical or biological weapon, but rather a herbicide and defoliant. This has lead to further restriction on chemical weapons such as Agent Orange through the Chemical Weapons Convention in 1997.
ReplyDeletehttps://www.nytimes.com/2017/12/01/opinion/did-america-commit-war-crimes-in-vietnam.html
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Agent_Orange
https://www.opcw.org/chemical-weapons-convention