Environmental Warfare

Impact and Consequences of the Military Transfer of Technology to Developing Countries

“…It is perhaps too soon to consign to history the lessons of the Vietnam war, for it is difficult to assess the social havoc and the massive civilian reorganisation made necessary by saturation napalm and steel-pellet bombing and heavy bombing of urban and industrialised areas and harbours, dykes and irrigation systems; by industrial crop destruction or other 'food denial' programmes ; by the ecological ruination of commercial forest and strategic jungle areas by chemical herbicides, defoliation, fire or the shock wave of 'daisy cutter' bombs; by the long-term damage to the habitat by cratering; or by the first attempts at 'environmental modification' as an instrument of warfare, the rain-making over the communication and transport trails of Laos, Cambodia and Vietnam (Barnaby, 1976).…”

The World Environment 1972–1992

“…In the 1970s there was speculation about the possibility of environmental modification being used to cause economic or other damage to the population of an enemy (Box 3) (Goldblat, 1975;Barnaby, 1976;SIPRI, 1977SIPRIj UNEP, 1984b. Environmental warfare could, at least in principle, involve damage caused by manipulations of celestial bodies (Sullivan, 1983) or space, the atmosphere, the land, the oceans or the biota.…”