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Agent Orange, Antiwar Protest

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Agent Orange, Antiwar Protest if there were no studies that could reliably support the claim. The executive officer of AAAS had reason to vindicate Pfeiffer’s calls for investigation. For Wolfe, Coolidge’s revelation was all the more disconcerting when military officials disclosed that herbicide spray craft were using a rice-killing compound that contained pentavalent arsenic (Agent Blue, in Ranch Hand’s rainbow schema). The chemicals that comprise Agent Orange, 2,4-D and 2,4,5-T, had proven less effective as killers of grassy, or non-broadleaf plants. In July the AAAS demanded that the Pentagon cease spraying Agent Blue for two reasons. First, the large scale destruction of the staple of the Vietnamese diet struck the scientists as particularly odious threat to civilian starvation; second because arsenic—unlike Agent Orange—was a known poison. The Pentagon rejected the AAAS call, citing the use of arsenical herbicides on American cotton and tobacco farms and sticking to the Kennedy-era assumption that NLF guerillas could not be defeated so long as they had reliable sources of food.442 A board of directors meeting in October suggested a major shift since E.W. Pfeiffer’s original resolution was met tepidly by AAAS members. At this later juncture 12 of the board’s 13 members supported a resolution stating that the Pentagon had no basis in its claims of the overall safety of Operation Ranch Hand.443 One of the key factors that propelled the herbicide controversy was a lack of communication between civilian scientists and the military. This problem was symptomatic of a broader divide between the military-political decision making in 442 Thomas O’Toole, “Pentagon Defends Use of Herbicide on Vietcong Rice Crops,” Washington Post (8 August 1968). 443 “Herbicide Controversy May Flare Anew: DoD’s Position Remains Unchanged on Issue of Use of Arsenical Herbicides in Vietnam,” Chemical and Engineering News (23 September 1968), 27- 29. See also “Defoliants: Use Still Controversial,” in Ibid., (25 November 1968), 13. 197.
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