I'm no toxicologist. People here are emotional and each morning wake up with new nails pounded into their palms. What's needed is solid scientific investigation. All I hope is they don't leave us hanging in the air for the next 20 years."

Appendix 3

[From the New Yorker, Feb. 7, 1970]

A REPORTER AT LARGE: DEFOLIATION

By Thomas Whiteside

Late in 1961, the United States Military Advisory Group in Vietnam began, as a minor test operation, the defoliation, by aerial spraying, of trees along the sides of roads and canals east of Saigon. The purpose of the operation was to increase visibility and thus safeguard against ambushes of allied troops and make more vulnerable any Vietcong who might be concealed under cover of the dense foliage. The number of acres sprayed does not appear to have been publicly recorded, but the test was adjudged a success militarily. In January, 1962 following a formal announcement by South Vietnamese and American officials that a program of such spraying was to be put into effect, and that it was intended "to improve the country's economy by permitting freer communication as well as to facilitate the Vietnamese Army's task of keeping these avenues free of Vietcong harassments," military defoliation operations really got under way. According to an article that month in the New York Times, "a high South Vietnamese official" announced that a seventy-mile stretch of road between Saigon and the coast was sprayed "to remove foliage hiding Communist guerrillas." The South Vietnamese spokesman also announced that defoliant chemicals would be sprayed on Vietcong plantations of manioc and sweet potatoes in the Highlands. The program was gathering momentum. It was doing so in spite of certain private misgivings among American officials, particularly in the State Department, who feared, first, that the operations might open the United States to charges of engaging in chemical and biological warfare, and second, that they were not all that militarily effective. Roger Hilsman, now a professor of government at Columbia University, and then Director of Intelligence and Research for the State Department, reported, after a trip to Vietnam, that defoliation operations "had political disadvantages" and, furthermore, that they were of questionable military value, particularly in accomplishing their supposed purpose of reducing cover for ambushes. Hilsman later recalled in his book, "To Move a Nation," his visit to Vietnam, in March, 1962: "I had flown down a stretch of road that had been used for a test and found that the results were not very impressive. . . . Later, the senior Australian military representative in Saigon, Colonel Serong, also pointed out that defoliation actually aided the ambushers-if the vegetation was close to the road those who were ambushed could take cover quickly; when it was removed the guerrillas had a better field of fire." According to Hilsman, "The National Security Council spent tense sessions debating the matter."

Nonetheless, the Joint Chiefs of Staff and their Chairman, General Maxwell Taylor, agreed that chemical defoliation was a useful military weapon. In 1962, the American military "treated" 4,940 acres of the Vietnamese countryside with herbicides. In 1963, the area sprayed increased five-fold to a total of 24,700 acres. In 1964, the defoliated area was more than tripled. In 1965, the 1964 figure was doubled, increasing to 155,610 acres. In 1966, the sprayed area was again increased fivefold, to 741,247 acres, and in 1967 it was doubled once again over the previous year, to 1,486,446 acres. Thus, the areas defoliated in Vietnam had increased approximately three hundred fold in five years, but now adverse opinion among scientists and other people who were concerned about the effects of defoliation on the Vietnamese ecology at last began to have a braking effect on the program. In 1968, 1,267,110 acres were sprayed, and in 1969 perhaps a million acres. Since 1962, the defoliation operations have covered almost five million acres, an area equivalent to about twelve per cent of the entire territory of South Vietnam, and about the size of the state of Massachusetts. Between 1962 and 1967, the deliberate destruction of plots of rice, manioc, beans, and other foodstuffs through herbicidal spraying-the word "deliberate" is used here to exclude the many reported instances of accidental 45-362-70-8

spraying of Vietnamese plots-increased three hundred fold, from an estimated 741 acres to 221,312 acres, and by the end of 1969 the Vietnamese cropgrowing area that since 1962 had been sprayed with herbicides totalled at least half a million acres. By then, in many areas the original purpose of the defoliation had been all but forgotten. The military had discovered that a more effective way of keeping roadsides clear was to bulldoze them. But by the time of that discovery defoliation had settled in as a general policy and taken on a life of its own-mainly justified on the ground that it made enemy infiltration from the North much more difficult by removing vegetation that concealed jungle roads and trails.

During all the time since the program began in 1961, no American military or civilian official has ever publicly characterized it as an operation of either chemical or biological warfare, although there can be no doubt that it is an operation of chemical warfare in that it involves the aerial spraying of chemical substances with the aim of gaining a military advantage, and that it is an operation of biological warfare in that it is aimed at a deliberate disruption of the biological conditions prevailing in a given area. Such distinctions simply do not appear in official United States statements or documents; they were long ago shrouded under heavy verbal cover. Thus, a State Department report, made public in March, 1966, saying that about twenty thousand acres of crops in South Vietnam had been destroyed by defoliation to deny food to guerrillas, described the areas involved as "remote and thinly populated," and gave a firm assurance that the materials sprayed on the crops were of a mild and transient potency: "The herbicides used are nontoxic and not dangerous to man or animal life. The land is not affected for future use."

However comforting the statements issued by our government during seven years of herbicidal operations in Vietnam, the fact is that the major development of defoliant chemicals (whose existence had been known in the thirties) and other herbicidal agents came about in military programs for biological warfare. The direction of this work was set during the Second World War, when Professor E. J. Kraus, who then headed the Botany Department of the University of Chicago, brought certain scientific possibilities to the attention of a committee that had been set up by Henry L. Stimson, the Secretary of War, under the National Research Council, to provide the military with advice on various aspects of biological warfare. Kraus, referring to the existence of hormone-like substances that experimentation had shown would kill certain plants or disrupt their growth, suggested to the committee in 1941 that it might be interested in "the toxic properties of growth-regulating substances for the destruction of crops or the limitation of crop production." Military research on herbicides thereupon got under way, principally at Camp (later Fort) Detrick. Maryland, the Army center for biological-warfare research. According to George Merck, a chemist, who headed Stimson's biological-warfare advisory committee, "Only the rapid ending of the war prevented field trials in an active theatre of synthetic agents that would, without injury to human or animal life, affect the growing crops and make them useless."

After the war, many of the herbicidal materials that had been developed and tested for biological-warfare use were marketed for civilian purposes and used by farmers and homeowners for killing weeds and controlling brush. The most powerful of the herbicides were the two chemicals 2,4-dichlorophenoxyacetic acid, generally known as 2,4-D, and 2,4,5-trichlorophenoxyacetic acid, known as 2,4,5-T. The direct toxicity levels of these chemicals as they affected experimental animals, and, by scientific estimates, men, appeared then to be low (although these estimates have later been challenged), and the United States Department of Agriculture, the Food and Drug Administration, and the Fish and Wildlife Service all sanctioned the widespread sale and use of both. The chemicals were also reported to be shortlived in soil after their application. 2,4-D was the bigger seller of the two, partly because it was cheaper, and suburbanites commonly used mixtures containing 2,4-D on their lawns to control dandelions and other weeds. Commercially, 2,4-D and 2,4,5-T were used to clear railroad rights-of-way and power-line routes, and, in cattle country, to get rid of woody brush, 2,4,5-T being favored for the last, because it was considered to have a more effective herbicidal action on woody plants. Very often, however, the two chemicals were used in combination. Between 1945 and 1963, the production of herbicides jumped from nine hundred and seventeen thousand pounds to about a hundred and fifty million pounds in this country;

since 1963, their use had risen two hundred and seventy-one percent-more than double the rate of increase in the use of pesticides, though pesticides are still far more extensively used. By 1960, an area equivalent to more than three per cent of the entire United States was being sprayed each year with herbicides.

Considering the rapidly growing civilian use of these products, it is perhaps not surprising that the defoliation operations in Vietnam escaped any significant comment in the press, and that the American public remained unaware of the extent to which these uses had their origin in planning for chemical and biological warfare. Nevertheless, between 1941 and the present, testing and experimentation in the use of 2,4-D, 2,4,5-T, and other herbicides as military weapons were going forward very actively at Fort Detrick. While homeowners were using herbicidal mixtures to keep their lawns free of weeds, the military were screening some twelve hundred compounds for their usefulness in biological-warfare operations. The most promising of these compounds were testsprayed on tropical vegetation in Puerto Rico and Thailand, and by the time fullscale defoliation operations got under way in Vietnam the U.S. military had settled on the use of four herbicidal spray materials there. These went under the names Agent Orange, Agent Purple, Agent White, and Agent Blue— designations derived from color-coded stripes girdling the shipping drums of each type of material. Of these materials, Agent Orange, the most widely used as a general defoliant, consists of a fifty-fifty mixture of n butyl esters and of 2,4-D and 2,4,5-T. Agent Purple, which is interchangeable with Agent Orange, consists of the same substances with slight molecular variations. Agent White, which is used mostly for forest defoliation, is a combination of 2,4-D and Picloram, produced by the Dow Chemical Company. Unlike 2,4-D or 2,4,5-T, which, after application, is said to be decomposable by micro-organisms in soil over a period of weeks or months (one field test of 2,4,5-T in this country showed that significant quantities persisted in soil for ninety-three days after application), Picloram-whose use the Department of Agriculture has not authorized in the cultivation of any American crop-is one of the most persistent herbicides known. Dr. Arthur W. Galston, professor of biology at Yale, has described Picloram as "a herbicidal analog of DDT," and an article in a Dow Chemical Company publication called "Down to Earth" reported that in field trials of Picloram in various California soils between eighty and ninety-six and a half per cent of the substance remained in the soils four hundred and sixty-seven days after application. (The rate at which Picloram decomposes in tropical soils may, however, be higher.) Agent Blue consists of a solution of cacodylic acid, a substance that contains fifty-four per cent arsenic, and it is used in Vietnam to destroy rice crops. According to the authoritative "Merck Index," a source book on chemicals, this material is "poisonous." It can be used on agricultural crops in this country only under certain restrictions imposed by the Department of Agriculture. It is being used herbicidally on Vietnamese rice fields at seven and a half times the concentration permitted for weed-killing purposes in this country, and so far in Vietnam something like five thousand tons is estimated to have been sprayed on paddies and vegetable fields.

Defoliation operations in Vietnam are carried out by a special flight of the 12th Air Commando Squadron of the United States Air Force, from a base at Bien Hoa, just outside Saigon, with specially equipped C-123 cargo planes. Each of these aircraft has been fitted out with tanks capable of holding a thousand gallons. On defoliation missions, the herbicide carried in these tanks is sprayed from an altitude of around a hundred and fifty feet, under pressure, from thirty-six nozzles on the wings and tail of the plane, and usually several spray planes work in formation, laying down broad blankets of spray. The normal crew of a military herbicidal-spray plane consists of a pilot, a copilot, and a technician, who sits in the tail area and operates a console regulating the spray. The equipment is calibrated to spray a thousand gallons of herbicidal mixture at a rate that works out, when all goes well, to about three gallons per acre. Spraying a thousand-gallon tankload takes five minutes. In an emergency, the tank can be emptied in thirty seconds-a fact that has particular significance because of what has recently been learned about the nature of at least one of the herbicidal substances.

The official code name for the program is Operation Hades, but a more friendly code name, Operation Ranch Hand, is commonly used. In similar fashion, military public-relations men refer to the herbicidal spraying of crops sup

posedly grown for Vietcong use in Vietnam, when they refer to it at all as a "food-denial program." By contrast, an American biologist who is less than enthusiastic about the effort has called it, in its current phase, “escalation to a program of starvation of the population in the affected area." Dr. Jean Mayer, the Harvard professor who now is President Nixon's special adviser on nutrition, contended in an article in Science and Citizen in 1967 that the ultimate target of herbicidal operations against rice and other crops in Vietnam was "the weakest element of the civilian population"—that is, women, children, and the elderly-because in the sprayed area "Vietcong soldiers may . . be expected to get the fighter's share of whatever food there is." He pointed out that malnutrition is endemic in many parts of Southeast Asia but that in wartime South Vietnam, where diseases associated with malnutrition, such as beri-beri, anemia, kwashiorkor (the disease that has decimated the Biafran population), and tuberculosis, are particularly widespread, "there can be no doubt that if the (crop-destruction) program is continued, (the) problems will grow."

Whether a particular mission involves defoliation or crop destruction, American military spokesmen insist that a mission never takes place without careful consideration of all the factors involved, including the welfare of friendly inhabitants and the safety of American personnel. (There can be little doubt that defoliation missions are extremely hazardous to the members of the planes' crews, for the planes are required to fly very low and only slightly above stalling speed, and they are often targets of automatic-weapons fire from the ground.) The process of setting up targets and approving specific herbicidal operations is theoretically subject to elaborate review through two parallel chains of command; one chain consisting of South Vietnamese district and province chiefs-who can themselves initiate such missions-and South Vietnamese Army commanders at various levels; the other a United States chain, consisting of a district adviser, a sector adviser, a divisional senior adviser, a corps senior adviser, the United States Military Assistance Command in South Vietnam, and the American Embassy in Saigon, ending up with the American ambassador himself. Positive justification of the military advantage likely to be gained from each operation is theoretically required, and applications with such positive justification are theoretically disapproved. However, according to one of a series of articles by Elizabeth Pond that appeared toward the end of 1967 in the Christian Science Monitor:

"In practice, [American] corps advisers find it very difficult to turn down defoliation requests from province level because they simply do not have sufficient specific knowledge to call a proposed operation into question. And with the momentum of six years' use of defoliants, the practice, in the words of one source, has long since been "set in cement."

"The real burden of proof has long since shifted from the positive one of justifying an operation by its [military] gains to the negative one of denying an operation because of [specific] drawbacks. There is thus a great deal of pressure, especially above province level, to approve recommendations sent up from below as a matter of course."

Miss Pond reported that American military sources in Saigon were "enthusiastic" about the defoliation program, and that American commanders and spotter-plane pilots were "clamoring for more of the same." She was given firm assurances as to the mild nature of the chemicals used in the spray operations:

"The defoliants used, according to the military spokesman contacted, are the same herbicides . . . as those used commercially over some four million acres in the United States. In the strengths used in Vietnam they are not at all harmful to humans or animals, the spokesman pointed out, and in illustration of this he dabbed onto his tongue a bit of liquid from one of . . . three bottles sitting on his desk."

As the apparently inexorable advance of defoliation operations in South Vietnam continued, a number of scientists in the United States began to protest the military use of herbicides, contending that Vietnam was being used, in effect, as a proving ground for chemical and biological warfare. Early in 1966, a group of twenty-nine scientists, under the leadership of Dr. John Edsall, a professor of biochemistry at Harvard, appealed to President Johnson to prohibit the use of defoliants and crop-destroying herbicides, and called the use of these substances in Vietnam "barbarous because they are indiscriminate." In the late summer of 1966, this protest was followed by a letter of petition to

President Johnson from twenty-two scientists, including seven Nobel laureates. The petition pointed out that the "large-scale use of anticrop and 'nonlethal' antipersonnel chemical weapons in Vietnam" constituted "dangerous precedent" in chemical and biological warfare, and it asked the President to order it stopped. Before the end of that year, Dr. Edsall and Dr. Matthew S. Meselson, a Harvard professor of biology, obtained the signatures of five thousand scientists to co-sponsor the petition. Despite these protests, the area covered by defoliation operations in Vietnam in 1967 was double that covered in 1966, and the acreage of crops destroyed was nearly doubled.

These figures relate only to areas that were sprayed intentionally. There is no known way of spraying an area with herbicides from the air in a really accurate manner, because the material used is so highly volatile, especially under tropical conditions, that even light wind drift can cause extensive damage to foliage and crops outside the deliberately sprayed area. Crops are so sensitive to the herbicidal spray that it can cause damage to fields and gardens as much as fifteen miles away from the target zone. Particularly severe accidental damage is reported, from time to time, to so-called "friendly" crops in the III Corps area, which all but surrounds Saigon and extends in a rough square from the coastline to the Cambodian border. Most of the spraying in III Corps is now done in War Zones C and D, which are classified as free fire zones, where, as one American official has put it, "everything that moves in Zones C and D is considered Charlie." A press dispatch from Saigon in 1967 quoted another American official as saying that every Vietnamese farmer in that corps area knew of the defoliation program and disapproved of it. Dr. Galston, the Yale biologist, who is one of the most persistent critics of American policy concerning herbicidal operations in Vietnam, recently said in an interview, "We know that most of the truck crops grown along roads, canals, and trails and formerly brought into Saigon have been essentially abandoned because of the deliberate or inadvertent falling of these defoliant sprays; many crops in the Saigon area are simply not being harvested." He also cited reports that in some instances in which the inhabitants of Vietnamese villages have been suspected of being Vietcong sympathizers the destruction of food crops has brought about complete abandonment of the villages. In 1966, herbicidal operations caused extensive inadvertent damage, through wind drift, to a very large rubber plantation northwest of Saigon owned by the Michelin rubber interests. As the result of claims made for this damage, the South Vietnamese authorities paid the corporate owners, through the American military, nearly a million dollars. The extent of the known inadvertent damage to crops in Vietnam can be inferred from the South Vietnamese budget-in reality, the American military budget-for settling such claims. In 1967, the budget for this compensation was three million six hundred thousand dollars. This sum, however, probably reflects only the barest emergency claims of the people affected.

According to Representative Richard D. McCarthy, a Democrat from upstate New York who has been a strong critic of the program, the policy of allowing applications for defoliation operations to flow, usually without question, from the level of the South Vietnamese provincial or district chiefs has meant that these local functionaries would order repeated sprayings of areas that they had not visited in months, or even years. The thought that a Vietnamese district chief can initiate such wholesale spraying, in effect without much likelihood of serious hindrance by American military advisers, is a disquieting one to a number of biologists. Something that disquiets many of them even more is what they believe the long-range effects of nine years of defoliation operations will be on the ecology of South Vietnam. Dr. Galston, testifying recently before a congressional subcommittee on chemical and biological warfare, made these observations:

"It has already been well documented that some kinds of plant associations subject to spray, especially by Agent Orange, containing 2,4-D and 2,4,5-T, have been irreversibly damaged. I refer specifically to the mangrove associations that line the estuaries, especially around the Saigon River. Up to a hundred thousand acres of these mangroves have been sprayed. . . . Some (mangrove areas) had been sprayed as early as 1961 and have shown no substantial signs of recovery. . . . Ecologists have known for a long time that the mangroves lining estuaries furnish one of the most important ecological niches for the completion of the life cycle of certain shellfish and migratory fish. If these plant communities are not in a healthy state, secondary effects on the whole