Another Not So Little Dirty Secret
0316blog
File this under the category of one more blot on American history that they kept hid from us and it has to do with the thousands of tons of the lethal Agent Orange defoliant that was dumped over Vietnam by U.S. warplanes to wipe out vegetation so that the enemy were easier targets for American war planes.
You would think that it wouldn’t take a rocket scientist to conclude that a chemical that was powerful enough to wipe out thousands of acres vegetation just might be harmful to humans. It took 10 years of its use and it wasn’t until 1971 that the U.S. government stopped dumping the chemical after scientists concluded that an unintended consequence of the defoliant was that it had caused serious health problems for millions of Vietnamese and Americans, including higher rates of various kinds of cancer.
Check out the Wikipedia entry about Agent Orange, euphemistically called “Operation Ranch Hand,” and you will learn about its use in many countries outside of Vietnam. You won’t read that Agent Orange also was dropped on large swaths of neighboring Laos and resulted in all kinds of ungodly and deadly physical issues among the offspring of the adult Laotians who lived during the war. A lengthy and jaw dropping story in Monday’s N.Y. Times outlined, for the first time, the extensive Agent Orange campaign in Laos and it is not sympathetic picture for the U.S.
Agent Orange is a mixture of equal parts of two herbicides, 2,4,5-T and 2,4-D. In addition to its damaging environmental effects, traces of dioxin (mainly TCDD, the most toxic of its type) found in the mixture have caused major health problems for many individuals who were exposed.
Up to four million people in Vietnam were exposed to the defoliant. The government of Vietnam says as many as three million people have suffered illness because of Agent Orange and the Red Cross of Vietnam estimates that up to one million people are disabled or have health problems as a result of Agent Orange contamination.
An epidemiological study done by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention showed that there was an increase in the rate of birth defects of the children of military personnel as a result of Agent Orange. Agent Orange also caused enormous environmental damage in Vietnam where more than 11,969 square miles of forest were defoliated. Defoliants eroded tree cover and seedling forest stock, making reforestation difficult while animal species diversity was sharply reduced.
Agent Orange was first used by the British in Malaya during the Malayan Emergency. The herbicide was also used in Brazil to clear out sections of land for agriculture.
So what is the difference between a chemical that kills vegetation and causes serious illness in people and a chemical that is used intentionally to kill and maim people. Sounds like an Orwellian game of semantics to me but not to those who orchestrated the war, because it created a way around the Geneva Protocol of 1925, an international treaty that was signed in the aftermath of the use of deadly mustard gas in World War I and reaffirmed the ban on chemical and biological weapons. If you don’t call it a chemical weapon, it isn’t prohibited.
Which leads me to another conundrum that would make George Orwell spin over in his grave. We, as a world of professed civilized nations, banned the use of mustard gas but not the use of high-explosive bombs and incendiary devices that the allies used to destroy the city of Dresden in World War II. It took three quarters of a century after the annihilation of Nagasaki and Hiroshima, that the Nuclear Weapon Ban Treaty became the first legally binding international agreement to comprehensively prohibit nuclear weapons. However, no nation that currently has nuclear weapons supports the treaty, including the U.S. and Russia.
And despite the words and the documents and the treaties, nations, including the U.S., have continued to use any and all devastating weapons at their disposal. Here is a brief list of the use of chemical weapons since chemical weapons were banned.
1921–27
After World War I, Spanish forces air-dropped mustard gas to quell the Berber rebels in the Rif region of northern Morrocco.
1935
The Italian army attacked Ethiopian forces with 700 tons of sulfur mustard gas during the Second Italo-Abyssinian War.
1937–45
During the Second Sino-Japanese War that began in 1937, Japan frequently used cyanide and mustard gas when conventional attacks failed to reduce Chinese defenses.
Nazi Germany used Zyklon B, a cyanide-based pesticide, to kill more than one million people, mostly Jews, in gas chambers.
1947–91
After World War II, the United States and the Soviet Union manufactured massive stockpiles of chemical weapons as part of the Cold War.
1963–67
Intervening in the Yemeni Civil War, Egyptian forces used mustard and phosgene gas against royalist forces.
1980–88
During the Iran-Iraq War, Iraqi forces used the deadly nerve agents sarin and tabun against Iran. Saddam Hussein’s regime also used chemical weapons (mustard gas, and nerve agents Sarin, Tabun, and VX) against Kurdish towns in Iraq.
2013–14
U.N. investigators confirmed that the Assad regime in Syria used chemical weapons numerous times to kill rebels involved in Syria’s civil war.
2018
The Syrian government again used chlorine gas to attack the rebel-held city of Douma.
Here is a link to the N.Y. Times story.