NAM 0

Death of a village

The French newspaper, Le
Monde, recently carried a report
by a French citizen living in Sai-
gon. He wrote the story because
he felt it his duty to do so in
View of the recent expulsion of
a French journalist and his fears
that objective information was

no longer getting out of South

Vietnam.

_ “While the French have noth-
ing to learn about colonial re-
pression,” he writes, “the Ameri-
cans’ war in Vietnam has a very
Special character.

“Even if only a few National
Liberation Front fighters shelter
in a group of houses, a deluge of
fire and steel is directed on to
the suspected area for many
hours. Artillery, mortars, heavy
Machineguns (firing 6,000 rounds
a minute) and bombs dropped
from planes soon destroy the
place completely.

“The encirclement of such an
area is mostly carried out with
Out warning to the population,
even though it has to be said
that evacuation orders when they
x given are not always obey-

“Nobody left the village be-
Cause they feared they would be
imprisoned and their houses
looted by the soldiery. During
the night American planes bomb-
ed the place with rockets and
napalm.

“The following morning some
300 bodies were laid out along
the side of the road. There was
the beginning of a demonstration
Outside the Da Nang town hall
but the police opened fire.

“Who has spoken of this vil-
lage? Who will speak of the
others? Nam O is one among
hundreds of other localities, vil-
lages and urban areas. These 300
dead civilians, including women

and children, have gone into the
official statistics of killed Viet
Cong.

“That is how they have arrived
at the official figure of up to
35,000 Viet Cong killed in ten
days. There is every reason to
believe that in these figures the
number of Liberation fighters is
only about 10 to 15 percent be-
cause in general they do not wait
for the end of the bombardments
before withdrawing to fortified
or camouflaged positions.

“Many people in the towns
have seen, for the first time in
their lives, these famous Viet
Cong.

“And they have found them to
be young, civil, honest (some-
thing which has become rare in
this country) as well.as well-
armed. That Vietnamese should
have such good weapons of war,
often better than American ma-
terial, is a fact which strikes
everyone.

“There is thus a striking con-
trast between the behaviour of
the Viet Cong and that of the
Government forces who bomb
blindly and loot as they please.

“Many people have failed to
understand the aim of the Tet
offensive. Only in Hue has the
NLF clearly taken control of the
administration. But everyone
undersands in a confused way
that the war has undergone a
change. :

“Large sections of the urban
population have been thrust into
the war, not so much by the
presence of the NLF as by the
blind fury of the repression.

“A new anti-Americanism is
developing, which is not like the
old anti-Americanism, but which
resembles that which exists in
the countryside and touches the
very core of national sentiment.”

death.”

rotor blades make.

MUTTERING DEATH

Thanks to General Electric's Missile and Armaments
Development Division, U.S. aircraft are now equipped with
what is probably the most murderous machine gun ever
used against human beings. The GE “Minigun” is a
sophisticated modernization of the 19th century Gatling
gun. Its six barrels are rotated by an electric motor and
fired by a cam arrangement; huge box magazines hold
the 7.62 mm. bullets. One Minigun fires at the rate of 6,000
rounds per minute or 100 per second.

To understand what this means, say to yourself “One = |:
chimpanzee,” then reflect that in the time it took you to:
say this, 100 bullets would have struck the target. The
effect of the Minigun has been likened by observers to the
" by a solid stream of lead.
The human body disintegrates when hit by this stream.
The GE Miniguns are prime ingredient of the “muttering

victim’s being “hosed down

During the National Liberation Front (NLF) Tet offen-
sive on the cities, thousands of civilians fled from Cholon
and Hue and other sectors under attack by the U.S. and
Saigon armies. They were not fleeing the ground attacks
or the artillery. “It is the murder of the gun planes,” a
refugee told a French newsman.

Vietnamese have come to call helicopter gunships the
“muttering death,” because of the peculiar sound their

—John Duffett in the Guardian

here yesterday.

famous religious centers.

Forty Protestant, Orthodox and Roman Catholic
churchmen will meet near Moscow next month to discuss
the Christian attitude toward present-day economic and
social problems, the World Council of Churches announced

The churchmen will meet in a theological academy
attached to the monastery in Zagorsk, one of Russia's most

Prof. John Deschner, of the Perkins School of Theo-
logy at Dallas, a Methodist institution, will preside, About
a third of the participants will be laymen.

US. steps up chemical
and biological warfare

A million acres of South Viet-
nam, an area half the size of the

By JOHN MOSS
YOW is the time for a cam-
paign against the American
chemical war in Vietnam and
preparations for biological war-
fare.

In many ways scientists and
others have been a bit slow and
have lagged behind the. U.S.
scientists, 5,000 of whom peti-
tioned President Johnson urging
him to halt B.C. warfare and pre-
parations. ;

CBW. (chemical and biological
warfare) research, development
and procurement are being con-
ducted on a massive scale in the
United - States, costing about
$440 million a year.

A CBW research directory
compiled recently and published
in Viet-Report lists 57 univer-
sities and‘ colleges from Boston
to Yale, where this activity is
being carried out. The list is in-
completes | ge:.°o9 wees <

Most research on CB weapons
systems is classified and the ex-
istence of such projects is kept
secret. Also universities disguise
the presence of CBW contracts
in their campuses to avoid un-
favorable publicity.

For example, Johns Hopkins

‘University received over. a mil-

lion dollars. between 1955 and
1963, according to Elinor Lang-
er in Science, for-work described
as “studies of actual or poten-
tial injuries or illnesses, studies
on disease: of potential ‘bacterial
warfare significance, and evalua-
tion of certain toxoids and vac-
cines.” ;
In 1961 Johns Hopkins held

’ two contracts from the main

U.S. chemical warfare centre, the
Army Chemical Centre at the
Edgewood, Maryland, arsenal.

By 1965 the University of
Pennsylvania (Philadelphia) was
also receiving a million dollars
for applied research in CBW
weapons systems, most of it
through “Summit,” an army con-
tract, and “Spicerack,” an air.
force contract.

In the face of protests and un-
favorable publicity the work was
taken out of the university into
a semi-autonomous subsidiary
of Penn called Institute for Co-
operative Research. :

Research work in Britain has
also been going on for some
time at Porton (Wilts), where
side by side on Salisbury Plain
are the microbiological research
and the chemical warfare estab-
lishments.

The main reason for campaign-
ing now is that chemical weap-
ons are being used on an increas-
ing scale in Vietnam.

Just as scientists played a part
in the campaign against nuclear
tests, which resulted in the par-
tial test-ban treaty, so today
they could break the silence on
CBW research.

State. of Montana, has heen
sprayed with defoliants. °

Recent Pentagon orders total

led about $63 million for chemi-

cal agents from eight firms: Dow
Chemical; Diamond Alkali, Uni-
royal Chemical, Thompson Che-
mical, Hercules, Monsanto, An-

sul and Thompson Hayward.

The substances used are clas-
sical herbicides 2, 4-D and 2, 4,
5-T in tins with marks such as
corrosive and do not splash in
eyes. They do not normally poi-
son people or animals.

National Liberation Forces re-
ports of deaths and abortions
caused by herbicides were de-
nied by the Americans until it
was admitted that cacodylic
acid, an arsenical compound was
being sprayed.

The effects, correctly reported
by the NIF, were of arsenic poi-
soning.

Dr. Barry Commoner recently
told the American Association
for the Advancemnet of Science:
“We have engaged in a massive

environmental intrusion without |

becoming aware of the biological
consequences.”

The aim of defoliation is to.

deprive the NLF of food supplies

and, before spraying, the Ameri- .

cans studied the most effective
way of destroying rice stocks.

But it is the old, women and
children who suffer most from
such starvation. :

Prof. A. Galston, of the De-
partment of Biology, University
of Yale, has pointed out that the
long-term effect of this distur-
bance of the eco-system is un-
predictable. ;

Man knows too little about
ecology to tamper with it and
we may be creating the equiva-
lent of the Anterican dustbowls
in Vietnam.

This effect will outrun the im-
mediate effects of the war and
affect vegetation for years and,
like radiation, jeopardize genera-
tions yet unborn. _

The teargas SC, developed in
Britain, is widely used in Viet-
nam. It comes in an off-white
powder, which quickly volata-
lizes in air and is non-lethal—if
you are between 18 and 35,
healthy and the concentration is
low. :

But it is lethal to women and
children - if the concentration
builds up. Three Australian sol-
diers in Vietnam died after en-
tering a tunnel system into
which they had tossed CS; the
gas penetrated their protective
clothing. -

Clinical tests in France with
mice and other animals on sam-
ples show that CS can kill. The
Vietnamese found. the same re-
sults. A Canadian doctor in Viet-
nam has said that in civilian ca-

sualties in hospital from gas the
mortality rate is 90 percent in
children, 50 percent in adults.

And such gases are not non-

. lethal if used to flush Vietnam-

ese out of tunnels and they are
then shot. g

BZ, a hallucinogen gas related
to LSD, is claimed to have been
used in Vietnam, and, like CS,
is lethal in high concentration.

It is widely rumored that BZ
was leaked to San Francisco hip-
pies by the Defence Department
as a trial before use in Vietnam.

Deadly nerve gases — tabun
and sarin — are being stockpil-
ed. These are similar in many
‘ways to those used by the Nazis
in the gas chambers of concen-
tration camps.

The main bacteriological war-
fare certre is Fort Detrick,
Maryland, which cost about $82

million to set up, with one of.
the largest animal farms and a

long string of biological weap-
ons.

Limited testing is also con-
ducted on Seventh Day Adven-
tists and prisoners, although

“there is no evidence of tests like

that carried out by Britain dur-
ing World War II which has left
Gruinard Island, Wester Ross,
Scotland still uninhabitable from
anthrax infection. :

The actual use of biological
weapons in Vietnam cannot be

_alleged, but plague figures (alone
‘of all countries of South-East

Asia). are significantly up in Viet-
nam, and the journal Military
Medicine has carried several ar-
ticles recently about plague.

- Alone among the major pow-
ers, the United States has refus-
ed to ratify the 1925 Geneva
Convention and has explicitly
stated that it is not bound by any
international treaty or protocol.

Under the name Operation
Blueskies, the Americans tried
to.make BC warfare respectable,
but in fact have developed it as
a new form of anti-guerrilla war-
fare and this becomes of great
importance in a period of nuc-
lear stalemate.

They have developed it as a
counter-evolutionary response to
the success of guerrilla warfare
and Vietnam is being used as an
experimental war, precisely like

‘the Nazi bombing in Spain.

Scientists are coming together
in London, England, February
22-23, in conference, so that so-
ciety as a whole can be better
informed and the whole subject

‘can be opened up for discussion.

Practical proposals will be put
to the meeting, probably includ-
ing a call to declassify Porton, a
proposal that is also to be made
to the coming annual council of
the scientists’ section of the As-
sociation of Scientific, Technical
and Managerial Staffs, by Im-
perial College scientists.

MARCH 8” 1968-—PACIFIC TRIBUNE-—-Page 3