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Chemical warfare in Vietnam.
Episode 2843 of the Vietnam Veteran News Podcast will feature a paper just received about why chemical weapons were used in the Vietnam War. The paper was provided to this podcast by the Merry Band of Retirees. The title of the paper is: Review and Analysis: Evaluation of the Impacts and consequences of Using Agricultural Herbicides as Military Chemical Weapons in Second Indochina.
The paper was submitted by Kenneth R. Olson, College of Agricultural, Consumer, and Environmental Sciences, University of Illinois, Urbana, USA and David R. Speidel1, USDA Resource Conservationist and Agricultural Consultant with Natural Resource, Conservation Service and Foreign Agricultural Service, Benton, Missouri, USA.
This episode will be an introduction to the paper. It is important to learn as much as we can about events and circumstances that resulted in the use of chemical weapons in the Vietnam War.
The writers states this in his article abstract: The legacy of the human misery caused by the application of the herbicides including Agent Purple and Agent Orange contaminated with unknown amounts of dioxin TCDD and Agent Blue, the arsenic-based herbicide, sprayed over the jungles, rice fields, and hamlets of Vietnam is still haunting us today. Why did this happen?
Could it have been prevented? Was it necessary United States military strategy? Was it an intentional decision to inflict this blight on the enemy soldiers and the Vietnamese, Cambodian, and Laotian civilians, to poison their land and cause generations of harm?
Were the National interests achieved by U.S. military strategy in the RVN using herbicide weapons worth the long-term environmental and human health consequences in Vietnam, Cambodia, and Laos? Did it impact the outcome of the Second Indochina War?
Listen to episode 2843 and discover more about why chemical weapons were used in Vietnam.
