frigidweirdo
Diamond Member
- Mar 7, 2014
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What chemical weapons did the US use in Vietnam?
The name's Orange, James Orange. Well doesn't quite have the same ring to it as Agent Orange.
Agent Orange - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
"The 2,4,5-T used to produce Agent Orange was contaminated with 2,3,7,8-tetrachlorodibenzodioxin (TCDD), an extremely toxic dioxin compound. In some areas, TCDD concentrations in soil and water were hundreds of times greater than the levels considered safe by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency."
"U.S., British, and other Allied authorities officially stated that the use of herbicides and defoliants in warfare were not carried out in forms of chlorine, mustard, nerve, and sarin gases (all which were classified as chemical weapons). Rather, these substances were considered extremely harmless to human life and were mainly used in both Malaya and Vietnam to defoliate plants to deprive the enemy of cover or concealment so as to protect Allied troops from ambushes and/or expose their lines of communication to Allied reconnaissance aircraft and not as a weapon of war against human populations and human-made structures. Therefore, Agent Orange fall under the category of herbicidal warfare, not chemical warfare."
They claimed it wasn't chemical warfare.
"Many experts at the time, including Arthur Galston, the biologist who developed and intensively studied 2,4,5-T and TCDD, opposed herbicidal warfare, due to concerns about the side effects to humans and the environment by indiscriminately spraying the chemical over a wide area. As early as 1966, resolutions were introduced to the United Nations charging that the U.S. was violating the 1925 Geneva Protocol, which regulated the use of chemical and biological weapons. The U.S. defeated most of the resolutions,[40][62] arguing that Agent Orange was not a chemical or a biological weapon as it was considered a herbicide and a defoliant and it was used in effort to destroy plant crops to deprive the enemy of cover and not meant to target human beings. A weapon, by definition, is any device used to injure, defeat, or destroy living beings, structures, or systems, and Agent Orange did not qualify under that definition. It also argued that if the U.S. were to be charged for using Agent Orange, then Britain and its Commonwealth nations should be charged since they also used it widely during the Malayan Emergency in the 1950s"