Podcast: Play in new window | Download
Monsanto Chemical Plant in Nitro, West Virginia. Photo Credit: Terry Humphreys. Pinterest. Reprinted with the permission of the Editor of the Open Journal of Soil Science
Episode 2847 of the Vietnam Veteran News Podcast will feature a portion of 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.
In this episode, how the influence of political leaders and journalists affected the decision to use herbicides in Vietnam will be reviewed. 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.
For 40 years, our U.S. leaders followed the Truman Doctrine of using American military and economic aid to direct a communist containment policy. This ended with the fall of the Berlin Wall and the collapse of the Soviet Union. Each leader was not necessarily confined to following his predecessor.
President Richard Nixon with Secretary of State Henry Kissinger initiated a more open policy with China, participated in peace talks with North Vietnam to stop the bombing, and after persuasion by scientists rescinded the use of Agent Orange. This reflected a different approach and was the real turning point in the Second Indochina War.
The U.S. government and military policy for a secret operation (in Laos and Cambodia) prevented journalists from observing and questioning the program’s effectiveness, its value to America, and the hazards to innocent villagers and soldiers. Herbicides, originally a boon to agriculture, were made a part of a chemical weapon system program, and became a political tool, with harmful environmental and human health effects
Listen to episode 2847 and discover more about the historical events that led to our use of chemical weapons in Vietnam.
