VIETNAM: A LABORATORY FOR US ECOCIDE

November 1 marks the 70th anniversary of the United States' official entry into the war on Vietnam. For the Vietnamese people, the two-decade War of Resistance Against American Aggression was simply the final bloody chapter in a decades-long, nearly unbroken struggle for national liberation waged successively against Japan, France, and the United States. It ended in total victory, with the liberation of Saigon (now Ho Chi Minh City) on April 30, 1975, an event Vietnam celebrated in grand fashion earlier this year.

Thanks to the efforts of both Vietnamese revolutionaries and the solidarity movement they inspired, the world is now thoroughly familiar with the most egregious US atrocities of the war. 5 million tons of bombs, more than all theaters of WW2 combined. Mass destruction of human, animal, and floral life alike through the gratuitous use of napalm and Agent Orange, whose grotesque aftereffects still disable hundreds of thousands of children from birth decades later.

But lost among the more visible scars of this genocidal US aggression were more subtle experiments in environmental terrorism. One was "Operation Popeye," a top-secret effort to pump the skies of Vietnam full of silver and lead iodide in order to seed storm clouds. By manipulating the weather during the monsoon season, the US military aimed to flood the Ho Chi Minh Trail that North Vietnam used to supply the National Liberation Front ("Viet Cong") in the South.

Dogged investigative reporting by independent journalists and the organization Science for the People revealed the existence of this program in the early 1970s. They also unveiled a far more ambitious effort, spanning the entire US military-industrial complex, to weaponize weather for more insidious ends, including the wholesale destruction of enemy nations' agriculture.

Amid today's climate crisis, these proposals have mutated into gargantuan geo-engineering schemes that aim to deflect solar radiation at a planetary scale, supposedly enabling limitless fossil-fuelled capitalist growth. And now the laboratory for this untested and uncontrolled experiment would be the entire Global South.