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Episode 2491 of the Vietnam Veteran News Podcast will feature a paper that reveals the secrets of the Ho Chi Minh Trail. The featured report is titled, United States Secret War in Laos: Long-Term Environmental and Human Health Impacts of the Use of Chemical Weapons. In this episode the Abstract and Introduction of the Paper will be presented.
The paper was submitted to the Scientific Research Publishing service by Professor Kenneth R. Olson of the College of Agricultural, Consumer, and Environmental Sciences, University of Illinois, Urbana, USA and David R. Speidel of the Natural Resource Conservation Service and Foreign Agricultural Service, Benton, Missouri, USA.
Olson and Speidel begin their paper with this, In 1959, the United States Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) operation, against the Pathet Lao insurgences and Viet Mien military troops and supply route, began. The Hồ Chi Minh Trail was developed after the North Vietnam government and military decided to reunify South and North Vietnam.
The primary objective of this paper is to determine the environmental and human health impacts of RLAF and US Air Force secret spraying of tactical herbicides on Hồ Chi Minh Trail in Laos.
According to the U.S. National Security Agency’s official history of the war, the Ho Chi Minh Trail system was “one of the great achievements of military engineering of the 20th century.” For that very reason all aspects the Trail should be studied.
The primary objective of this study was to: 1) determine locations of potential dioxin TCDD and arsenic hotspots as a result the secret chemical spraying missions on the Hồ Chi Minh Trail in Laos and 2) determine environmental and human health effects from the spraying of tactical herbicides containing dioxin (TCDD) and/or arsenic.
Listen to episode 2491 and discover more about secrets of the Ho Chi Minh Trail.
