Agent Orange, Antiwar Protest and Environmental Destruction in Vietnam
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INVENTING ECOCIDE: AGENT ORANGE, ANTIWAR PROTEST AND ENVIRONMENTAL DESTRUCTION IN VIETNAM ____________________________________ A Dissertation Submitted to the Temple University Graduate Board ___________________________________ in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY ____________________________________ by David Zierler August, 2008 © by David Zierler 2008 All Rights Reserved ii ABSTRACT INVENTING ECOCIDE: AGENT ORANGE, ANTIWAR PROTEST AND ENVIRONMENTAL DESTRUCTION IN VIETNAM David Zierler Doctor of Philosophy Temple University, 2008 Doctoral Advisory Committee Chairs Richard H. Immerman and Andrew C. Isenberg This project examines the scientific developments, strategic considerations, and political circumstances that led to the rise and fall of herbicidal warfare in Vietnam. The historical narrative draws on a wide range of primary and secondary source literature on the Vietnam War and the Cold War, the history of science, and American and international history of the 1960s and 1970s. The author conducted archival research in the United States in a variety government and non-government research facilities and toured formerly sprayed areas in Vietnam. The thesis explains why American scientists were able to force an end to the herbicide program in 1971 and ensure that the United States would not engage in herbicidal warfare in the future. This political success can be understood in the context of two major political transformations in the Vietnam Era: the collapse of Cold War containment as a salient model of American foreign policy, and the development of globally-oriented environmental politics and security regimes. The movement to end herbicidal warfare helped shift the meaning of security away from the Cold War toward transnational efforts to combat environmental problems that threaten all of the world’s people. iii ACKOWLEDGMENTS I would not have been able to complete this project without the support and guidance of dozens of colleagues, mentors, family, and friends. There are several people that I would like to acknowledge by name. I want to thank my graduate school colleagues, particularly Drew McKevitt, Kate Scott, and Wendy Wong, who made my time at Temple fun and intellectually challenging. I could not have wished for a finer dissertation committee. Richard Immerman, Drew Isenberg, Will Hitchcock, and John McNeill have all provided me with sagely advice, sharp criticism, and friendship over the years. They are leading scholars in their respective fields, and it has been an honor to work under their direction. Finally, I would like to thank my families for their continuing love and support. I am blessed to have two. This dissertation is dedicated to my parents, Norm and Fran, and my brothers, Jeremy, Jonathan, and Zachary, and to my in-laws, Abe and Claire Akselrad, and their children Aviva, Rebecca, Ben, and Gila. I love you all. My wife Aviva, who worked her way through law school across the desk from me, is an honorary co-author of this project. In addition to becoming a scholar of Agent Orange in her own right, Aviva has been my research companion, my editor and compiler, and my best friend. It is because of her that this project became more than a few ideas I was bouncing around one night. iv TABLE OF CONTENTS Page ABSTRACT............................................................................................... iii ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS....................................................................... iv LIST OF TABLES..................................................................................... vi CHAPTER 1. INTRODUCTION ...................................................................................1 2. AN ETYMOLOGY OF ECOCIDE.......................................................17 3. AGENT ORANGE BEFORE VIETNAM ............................................49 4. GADGETS AND GUERILLAS............................................................76 5. HERBICIDAL WARFARE.................................................................106 6. SCIENCE, ETHICS AND DISSENT.................................................143 7. SURVEYING A CATASTROPHE.....................................................181 8. AGAINST PROTOCOL......................................................................223 9. CONCLUSION....................................................................................256 REFERENCES CITED............................................................................262 v LIST OF TABLES Page 1. Herbicide Spray Rates......................................................................... 133 vi CHAPTER 1 INTRODUCTION For the past two years I have followed 2,4-D and 2,4,5-T through history. Plant physiologists classify these synthetic chemical compounds as selective auxins of the phenoxyacetic herbicide family. 2,4-D and 2,4,5-T were the first plant killers developed by scientists to target specific “weeds,” or any plant useless or counterproductive to human needs. The discoveries that led to modern herbicides began in Charles Darwin’s laboratory. Late in his life Darwin discovered that some internal mechanism directs plants to grow toward sunlight and sources of water. American and European scientists later called this mechanism the plant a hormone system. On the eve of World War II scientists discovered that certain chemical syntheses could enhance the growth of a plant— and in higher concentrations, kill it. Via absorption through the leaf, 2,4-D and 2,4,5-T wreaks havoc on the plant’s hormone system. After several days the treated plant experiences uncontrolled and rapid growth, until its leaves shrivel back to a brown mass and fall off. The biochemical specificity of these herbicides has no cultural analog: there are no universal characteristics that distinguish weeds from other plants. The designation depends on what people want from land that they seek to control. On farms, sprayed applications of 2,4,-D and 2,4,5-T can keep weeds out of cropland and animal pasture. After World War II herbicides, along with pesticides, dramatically increased agricultural yields worldwide in what become 1 known as the “Green Revolution.”1 The massive application of herbicides for farming, forest management, and lawn care continues today at global annual rates exceeding a billion gallons. This project focuses on one aspect of herbicide use that is now a relic of history. During the Vietnam War, the United States military combined 2,4-D and 2,4,5-T, called the 50:50 mixture Agent Orange, and defoliated six million acres of dense tropical forest in an attempt to expose communist guerilla fighters loyal to the National Liberation Front (NLF, or Viet Cong) of South Vietnam. Known as Operation Ranch Hand from 1961-1971 the herbicidal warfare program targeted not specific weeds but entire ecosystems. In Vietnam the forest was the weed. The goals of agricultural and military use of herbicides are different—one aims to increase crop yields, the other to win wars. But the logic of unburdening human labor through chemistry applies to both. For a wheat farmer determined to rid his crop of invasive weeds, an herbicide application may seem more economical in the short run than removing the plants by hand.2 For President John Kennedy, determined to defend the government of South Vietnam from communist takeover, herbicidal warfare fought the NLF (or Viet Cong) by chemical proxy. As part of the broader counterinsurgency mission, Kennedy 1 The question of whether the benefits of the postwar chemicalization of agriculture have outweighed the liabilities remains hotly debated. For a critique of the “Green Revolution” see, for example, David A. Sonnenfeld, “Mexico’s ‘Green Revolution,’ 1940-1980: Towards an Environmental History,” Environmental History Review 16 (Winter 1992) 29-52, and Lakshman Yapa, “What Are Improved Seeds? An Epistemology of the Green Revolution,” Economic Geography 69 (July 1993), 254-273. A more positive (and self-serving) analysis is Ford Foundation, A Richer Harvest (New York: Ford Foundation, 1967). 2 Whether or not herbicidal applications is actually more economical than mechanical or manual weeding is a separate question. 2 sought innovative means to neutralize the ambush tactics of the NLF. The president’s strategy was simple: deny guerillas their only tactical advantage with chemicals, not infantry. Under President Lyndon Johnson herbicidal warfare expanded dramatically: out of a ten year program, Ranch Hand crew members sprayed fifteen of the twenty million total gallons, or seventy-five percent, between 1966 and 1969. This escalation occurred generally because the “Americanization” of the war after 1965 amplified all of the myriad US military operations in Vietnam, but specifically because Johnson never considered his predecessor’s linkage of herbicides as a way to prevent—rather than abet—an expansion of the war. The massively destructive effects of herbicidal warfare became known as ecocide, so called by a several academic scientists who protested herbicidal warfare beginning in 1964 and who ultimately won the right to inspect its effects in Vietnam six years later. What they found was not simply the elimination of “weeds” but the destruction of environments upon which humans depended—and the looming prospect that the chemicals themselves might be injurious to humans and animals. The herbicide controversy turned upside down a key component of President Richard Nixon’s policy of détente, or relaxation of Cold War tensions, with the communist