Inventing Ecocide: Agent Orange, Antiwar Protest, and Environmental Destruction in Vietnam

Abstract

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. This project utilizes oral history interviews of American and Vietnamese scientists who were involved in some aspect of the Agent Orange controversy. 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 only 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.