StarDestroyer.Net BBS

Hola. So, a question - in the Vietnam war, why didn't the USA try pumping gas, or even CO2 down the various tunnels the vietkong were using?
As I understand it, the tunnels were used exclusively by military/paramilitary forces; (as opposed to being under civilian homes).
So, why bother going into the booby trap laden hellholes (I actually saw some o the traps when I was in Vietnam. Nasty!), with flamethrowers, as opposed to pumping gas (even something relatively nonlethal, but heavier than air)? Was it purely an ethical issue? (As opposed to dousing areas with agent orange )

The Geneva Protocol banned first use of toxic chemical weapons in 1928. Also nothing you might use is actually non lethal in tight underground confines without forced ventilation.

The US did however often pump teargas down tunnels after they had been explored to deny future use of them, destroying with explosives was not practicable. This was legally dubious at best. Gas attacks would not actually be very effective against VC tunnel systems anyway because they were often built with water traps just like what you have under a faucet to block them, as well as other anti gas barrier. This was done not so much because the VC feared the US would use Sarin gas on them, but because the threat of carbon monoxide and other fumes from normal explosions and gunfire in the tunnels or on the surface. A single grenade explosion is a lot of poison gas in that situation. The tunnels were explored manually because this was a way to gain valuable intelligence on the Viet Cong as well as the only way to ensure the tunnels were actually cleared.

Agent Orange meanwhile was being sprayed on US soil until 1968 or some such. Wasn't thought of the same way, even if people at Dow Chemical and some in the military always knew a certain proportion of the production was being contaminated with dioxin. The actual foliage destroying chemical itself was relatively safe for humans.

Many tunnels were under civilian homes FYI, though the biggest networks were in deep forests. Tunnels were not just built by the organized VC, they were also built in some cases purely by civilians as a place to shelter from constant fighting and air strikes. This was one of the reasons why the US perfered to explore them, as it was a way to indicate actual VC strength as opposed to making assumptions about what could just be local bomb shelters.

Agent Orange, the actual chemical, is still used as a defoliant, even by civilians. I assume they've more or less fixed the quality control issues so that the dioxin issue is reduced.

I don't think so. Agent Orange isn't a chemical, its a mix of two chemicals. One of its two components was the one that had the the huge dioxin risk, 2,4,5-T, and it's illegal for use as a herbicide in the US and I believe most everywhere else. With good enough equipment you can produce it mostly safely and small amounts still are made for other purposes, but this is much different then the mass scale production of the past.

The other component I forget the name of is still legal as a herbicide but a long running effort has existed to get it banned too. Far as the EPA can tell though it doesn't cause cancer on a significant basis so they wont on the the strong suspicion, this is of course also political in the US to not preemptively ban anything chemical, so long as it isn't a suspected designer drug of course nobody ever made. Many countries have restrictions on its use on the basis of this suspicion.

Some countries did make 2,4,5-T well after the US did as a herbicide but they all eventually stopped decades ago as far as I'm aware. The risk of bad batches is just too high, you get one screw-up and oh you have some giant vat of bad product that is also a super dangerous hazmat you have to pay to dispose of. That's a really unattractive proposition in general.

Aha. Gotcha.

That explains why my father identifies a commercially available herbicide as 'Agent Orange,' neither of us knew that Agent Orange is in fact a cocktail of two different herbicides.

At some point he might have heard something confused with some of the other color agents, Dow chemical made several other herbicides used in Vietnam, the largest single one of which was IIRC Agent White. Several of them had other contamination problems, but none was on par with actual pounds Dioxin being spread over Vietnam. I believe it was six or seven in total that got code names, about half from Dow and half from other providers, but the Agent Orange blend was something like 80% of all use by weight because it worked best. Most if not all of them were blends, the reason being both that some herbicides work better on certain plants then others and that viscosity at tropical temperatures had to be controlled. If it was too low the spray clouds would disperse in the wind, too heavy and the chemical would be applied excessively (which happened anyway from erratic flight paths).

A rather similar problem affects spray tanks for lethal chemical weapons, mainly nerve and blister agents, which may be mixed with less toxic agents to ensure more uniform dispersion. Do it right and you can make lethal drops of gas fall from 5000ft or more, while do it badly and this might not work from 300ft if the plane is moving at high speed. Sometimes mixing also occurs for anti freeze purposes, as some chemical agents freeze as high as 60F. Killing people with deadly poisons isn't completely simple. People found that out by failure, as normal, such as France filling 4 million cyanide shells in WW1 only to find out that the human body could naturally eradicate cyanide faster then artillery shells could deliver it. This is why you don't hear much about cyanide based gases then or now.

Sea Skimmer wrote:The other component I forget the name of is still legal as a herbicide but a long running effort has existed to get it banned too. Far as the EPA can tell though it doesn't cause cancer on a significant basis so they wont on the the strong suspicion, this is of course also political in the US to not preemptively ban anything chemical, so long as it isn't a suspected designer drug of course nobody ever made. Many countries have restrictions on its use on the basis of this suspicion.

2,4-D is the other component and pretty common.