by CORAL WYNTER
US wages chemical warfare on Vietnam.
Agent Orange was manufactured by Monsanto Corporation and Dow Chemicals to use as a herbicide and defoliant in the Vietnam War. Agent Orange is the combination of the code names for Herbicide Orange (HO) and Agent LNX.
At the famous Battle of Dien Bien Phu, North Vietnamese General Giap and the Viet Minh forces totally defeated the French army on May 7, 1954, and the French garrison surrendered. At the 1954 Geneva Conference, the French negotiated a ceasefire agreement with the Viet Minh, and its leader Ho Chi Minh, and independence was granted to Cambodia, Laos and Vietnam.
Under the agreement, Vietnam was temporarily partitioned at the 17th parallel and divided into North Vietnam under the government of Ho Chi Minh and South Vietnam under the Catholic emperor Bao Dai. Elections were to be held throughout Vietnam in July 1956 to unify Vietnam. The US government didn’t agree with the Geneva Accords and, realising that Ho Chi Minh would easily win the elections, decided to abort the process and appointed their puppet Ngo Dinh Diem as president of South Vietnam in a fraudulent 1955 plebiscite. So began the 20-year-long war with the USA.
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To stop the supply of weapons and national liberation fighters, the US military decided on a strategy based on chemical warfare, to expose the trail and dense forest by dropping millions of tonnes of herbicides in the area and thereby force the Viet Minh into the open. At first, US soldiers attempted to blow up rice paddies and rice stocks, using hand grenades. But grains of rice were far more durable, and were not easily destroyed. Every grain that survived was a seed, to be collected and planted again. So the US Army went to an option that would kill off the paddies: straight out chemical warfare. Another goal was to induce the peasants to flee to urban centres, controlled by the US and South Vietnamese army, by destroying the ability of peasants to support themselves in the countryside, and depriving the guerrillas of their rural support and food supply. The chemical warfare was called “Operation Ranch Hand” and was operated from 1961 to 1971. The first aerial spraying was ordered by US President John F. Kennedy.