Envoy: 50 Years on, Vietnamese Children Still Suffer from Horrific Effects of US Chemical Weapons

Vietnam’s Ambassador to Tehran Nguyen Hong Thach blasted the US for using chemical weapons against his nation during the war in the 1960s, and said the Vietnamese children are still suffering from the horrific aftermaths of those attacks, AVA Diplomatic reports.

“Although it is now several decades that the Vietnam War ended, children are still born with deficiencies and deformities in our country,” the Vietnamese envoy said in an interview with FNA on Tuesday.

He noted that the Americans used chemical bombs in the Vietnam War to destroy the country’s forests which were much successfully used by the Vietnamese soldiers and resistance fighters, and said, “These chemical bombs not only destroyed the jungles, but also left destructive impacts on human lives in there.”

Nguyen said that the soldiers who were exposed to the chemical substances in Vietnam later married and their children were born with deficiencies, adding that these deficiencies and deformities still continue throughout the next generations.

Asked whether the Vietnamese government has filed a lawsuit against the US, he responded, “The government has not adopted any such action, but Vietnam’s popular groups have lodged complaints against the US firms, which have not resulted in any court ruling in the interest of the victims of the Vietnam War.”

The Vietnam War also known as the Second Indochina War, and also known in Vietnam as Resistance War Against America or simply the American War, was a Cold War-era proxy war that occurred in Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia from November 1955 to the fall of Saigon on April 30, 1975. This war followed the First Indochina War (1946–54) and was fought between North Vietnam supported by the Soviet Union, China and other communist allies and the government of South Vietnam supported by the US, Philippines and other anti-communist allies.

During the Vietnam War, between 1962 and 1971, the US military sprayed nearly 20 million gallons of material containing chemical herbicides and defoliants mixed with jet fuel over parts of Vietnam, eastern Laos and Cambodia.

Chemicals were also sprayed on crops. Between 1962 and 1969, 688,000 agricultural acres were sprayed with a chemical called Agent Blue. The aim of this exercise was to deny food to the National Liberation Front (NLF). However, research suggests that it was the civilian population who suffered most from the poor rice harvests that followed the spraying.

When a report appeared in the St. Louis Dispatch about the dropping of “poison” on North Vietnam the United States denied the herbicide they were using was a chemical weapon. It was claimed that Agent Orange and Agent Blue were harmless to humans and only had a short-lived impact on the environment.

This was disputed by international experts and 5,000 American scientists, including 17 Nobel prize winners and 129 members of the Academy of Sciences, signed a petition against chemical and biological weapons being used in Vietnam. However, it was not until 1974 that the United States government stopped using Agent Orange and Agent Blue.

Agent Orange is the combination of the code names for Herbicide Orange and Agent LNX – one of the herbicides and defoliants used as part of its chemical warfare program, Operation Ranch Hand.

The goal of spraying Vietnam’s forests was to destroy forested and rural land – depriving guerrilla fighters of cover while cutting off their food supply.

Among the illnesses contracted by people exposed to the dioxin are non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma, cancer, type 2 diabetes, soft tissue sarcoma, birth defects in children, spina bifida and reproductive abnormalities.

In 2013, the Association for Victims of Agent Orange in Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam, filed its fourth lawsuit against the American chemical companies that produced Agent Orange.