Piousbox

An almost perfect storm has hit China: in Zhangpu County, hailstones the size of chicken eggs rained down on people. The Celestial Empire has never seen anything like this. Experts are still calculating how much the March rampage of the elements cost the country. And rumors have already begun to spread among the people: Mother Nature is not capable of such a thing, and the cataclysm is allegedly the work of people.

Man has long wanted to try on the role of a creator and subjugate all the forces of nature. By the way, some are quite good at it. It is enough to recall Operation Popeye, which was carried out by the Americans during the Vietnam War.

Why did the Pentagon spray poisons over Vietnam? Why do American military experiments still pose a danger to all of humanity? This is told in the program "Incredibly Interesting Stories" with Alexey Korzin and Vladislav Ryabov on REN TV.

The Americans cruelly killed the jungles of Vietnam with chemicals

The Americans were unlucky in Vietnam. They expected a quick victory, but everything did not go according to plan. And then the US generals turned to scientists. So, in the summer of 1961, American President John Kennedy authorized spraying chemicals over the enemy to destroy the jungle.

"The jungle was our main enemy. The guerrillas felt at home there. And we wandered around it like blind kittens," recalled military man Tony Mann.

Mann was an artilleryman in the 199th Brigade. They patrolled the area around Saigon. And watched as American chemicals killed the local forests.

Then the soldiers looked at this miracle and rejoiced. But in vain. After all, the toxin poisoned not only the jungles hated by the Americans.

How the deadly power of Agent Orange fell upon its creators

"After the war, I was diagnosed with severe esophageal cancer, I had strokes and operations, and no one doubts that these chemicals are to blame for my illnesses," Mann added.

"This is the so-called Agent Orange, as it became known, which was a mutagen dioxin. Approximately 80 million liters of mutagen dioxin were dropped or used. It is believed that about three million people, both Vietnamese and Americans, suffered from direct exposure," - historian Leonid Blonsky.

The American generals saw it this way: they spray poison, the jungle disappears, and they kill the guerrillas with dichlorvos like cockroaches.

But the big ranks forgot about something: dichlorvos poisons not only the pests, but also the one who sprays it.

As a result, the mobile guerrillas suffered the least, the most were peaceful peasants and American soldiers who could not abandon their bases and escape.

Operation Popeye in Vietnam

Dioxin poisons people even after decades, it does not decompose. But so far, no organization has officially recognized this experiment as a war crime against humanity. After all, this is the United States, they fought for freedom, they can.

In Vietnam, the United States did not limit themselves to Agent Orange alone. They turned the battlefield into a laboratory for dubious experiments. This is how Operation Popeye began.

The technical development of the operation was carried out by Donald Hornig, the authorized representative of the US President for Science and Technology, and the essence of the operation was as follows. The Americans wanted to spray toxic chemical reagents in rain clouds to cause heavy rainfall. They assumed that this heavy rainfall would destroy all the vegetation, which formed the food base of the entire Vietnamese army. But, as usual, everything did not go according to plan.

Every year from May to October, rains come to the lands of Vietnam. Most of them are high in the mountains, shrouded in fog. In the central valleys, the showers come late, closer to September.

But in October 1966, American specialists were waiting for the beginning of the monsoon season in Vietnam with particular impatience. After all, they pumped the clouds that were moving towards the rebels with reagents. Or more precisely, silver iodide.

Poisonous rain became a punishment from heaven for the Pentagon

"This cloud immediately erupted from itself four times more precipitation than this precipitation would have spread over the course of a day or two. This two-day norm of precipitation fell in the first hour of spraying this cloud," noted historian Blonsky.

In the Pentagon, they slept and saw how the partisans who had not been poisoned by Agent Orange were washed away by chemical showers. But the big water spilled in the wrong place. The elements fell on the heads of American special forces. The cloud could not withstand it and spilled everything earlier than planned.

The White House concluded: it works, but the calculations need to be made more accurately. And to be sure, they decided to practice on the Laotians on the Bolaven Plateau, in the Kong River Delta.

Of course, they did not tell the state authorities about this. After all, in case of success, the region would be left without roads, crops, but with landslides and dozens of victims. And so it happened.

Pleased with the result, the Americans went to those for whom they had tried so hard, to Vietnam. For the sake of appearances, they cut over the enemy and bombed without a break. In a word, they did everything as usual. But in reality, this was not the case.

"The intensification of these precipitations with the help of silver iodide and Operation Popeye, carried out from 1967 to 1972, was aimed at washing away the Ho Chi Minh Trail as much as possible. The pilots who flew out on the operation said that mud was better than war, meaning that they would wash away this trail as much as possible and deprive the partisans of communication with Northern China and their northern brothers," Leonid Blonsky emphasized.

The plan worked, however, only partially.

The United States lost this war after all. In 1973, the last American soldier left Vietnam. And two years before that, the country was hit by a flood that can only be compared in power to the Great Biblical Flood. According to various estimates, about a hundred thousand people died. The country was simply washed away.

And at that moment the whole world looked askance at the Americans. After all, they tried so hard to cause torrential rains over Vietnam. So, they overdid it again?

Of course, the White House did not admit their guilt. They blamed the La Niña effect, when the cold waters of the Pacific Ocean shift to the north, and a drought begins in one place, and a flood in others. It seems true, but no one believed the Americans. Although they officially admitted that they had nothing to do with it.

Could the US experiments have changed the climate of Vietnam

According to one version, Vietnam still suffers from floods precisely because of the American "Popeye". By the way, the operation was named not in honor of the exotic papaya fruit, but because of the love of US residents for the cartoon about the sailor and his magic spinach.

"If he was threatened by his eternal rival, such a big guy he was, when a skirmish with this big guy was expected, he would immediately eat spinach. Spinach helped him, his biceps would literally grow immediately. The instantaneous eruption of precipitation in this case was reminiscent of the effect of Popeye's enlarged biceps in the event of a threat," recalled historian Blonsky.

After the flood in Vietnam, the US officially had to close the shop with experiments with climate weapons. After all, the UN adopted a resolution banning them. The States signed it. But to promise does not mean to marry.

American climatologist Alan Robock from Rutgers University said that the States are still developing climate weapons. They are just now hiding behind the fight against global warming.

"I'm concerned about who exactly will gain control of these climate-changing technologies if they prove effective. But what's even scarier is that the military is now planning their experiments not in our atmosphere, but in space," Robock said.

In October 2022, the US government announced funding for a five-year plan to combat climate change through solar geoengineering, which will allow solar radiation to be controlled. This method involves spraying fine aerosols into the atmosphere to reflect sunlight away from the Earth.

As soon as the light is reflected, there will be less heat, and the temperature will drop. But what if this time, like all the previous ones, everything goes wrong for the Americans again? After all, now the whole world will be under attack. And no matter how independent the United States considers itself, it is unlikely to be able to separate from planet Earth.