Foreign Policy In Focus / News Analysis
Published: Monday 8 October 2012
“Now, for the first time, a recently
uncovered U.S. army report reveals that, during the Vietnam War, the
United States stockpiled 25,000 barrels of Agent Orange on the Pacific
island.”
Since 1945, the small Japanese island of Okinawa has been unwilling host to a massive U.S. military presence and a storehouse
for a witches’ brew of dangerous munitions and chemicals, including
nerve gas, mustard gas, and nuclear missiles. However, there is one
weapon the Pentagon has always denied that it kept on Okinawa: Agent
Orange.
Now, for the first time, a recently uncovered U.S. army
report reveals that, during the Vietnam War, the United States
stockpiled 25,000 barrels of Agent Orange on the Pacific island. The
barrels, containing over 1.4 million gallons of the toxic defoliant,
were brought to Okinawa from Vietnam before being taken to Johnston
Island in the Pacific Ocean, where the U.S. military incinerated its
stocks of the compound in 1977.
Contradicting decades of denial by Washington, the report
is the first direct admission by the U.S. military that it stored these
poisons on Okinawa. A series of photographs was also uncovered,
apparently showing the 25,000 barrels in storage on Okinawa’s Camp
Kinser, near the prefectural capital of Naha.
The army report, published in 2003 but only recently
discovered, is titled “An Ecological Assessment of Johnston Atoll.”
Outlining the military’s efforts to clean up the tiny island that the
United States used throughout the Cold War to store and dispose of its
stockpiles of biochemical weapons, the report states directly, “In 1972,
the U.S. Air Force brought about 25,000 55-gallon (208 liter) drums of
the chemical Herbicide Orange (HO) to Johnston Island that originated
from Vietnam and was stored on Okinawa.”
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