Piousbox

A near-perfect storm has hit China: hailstones the size of chicken eggs rained down on people in Zhangpu County. The Middle Kingdom has never seen anything like this before. Experts are still calculating the cost of the March storm. Rumors are already swirling among the public: Mother Nature is incapable of such a thing, and the cataclysm is supposedly man-made.

Humans have long desired to assume the role of creator and harness all the forces of nature. Incidentally, some are quite successful at this. It's enough to recall Operation Popeye, which the Americans carried out 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? The program "Incredibly Interesting Stories" with Alexey Korzin and Vladislav Ryabov on REN TV explores this .

The Americans brutally killed the jungles of Vietnam with chemicals.

The Americans were having a rough time in Vietnam. They expected a quick victory, but things didn't go according to plan. So, US generals turned to scientists. Thus, in the summer of 1961, US President John F. Kennedy authorized the use of chemicals to destroy the enemy jungle.

"The jungle was our main enemy. The guerrillas were at home there, like fish in water. And we wandered around like blind kittens," recalled soldier Tony Mann.

Mann was an artilleryman in the 199th Brigade. They patrolled the area around Saigon and observed how American chemicals were killing the local forests.

The soldiers looked at this miracle and rejoiced. But in vain. After all, the toxin wasn't just poisoning the jungles the Americans hated.

How the deadly power of Agent Orange fell upon its creators

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

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

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

But the bigwigs forgot something: dichlorvos poisons not only pests, but also those who spray it.

As a result, the mobile partisans suffered the least, while the worst hit were the peaceful peasants and American soldiers who were unable to abandon their bases and escape.

Operation Popeye in Vietnam

Dioxin poisons people even after decades; it doesn't 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 were fighting for freedom, so they're allowed to do so.

In Vietnam, the US didn't limit itself to Agent Orange. They turned the battlefield into a laboratory for dubious experiments. Thus began Operation Popeye.

The operation's technical development was led by Donald Hornig, the US Presidential Envoy for Science and Technology, and the gist of it was this: The Americans wanted to spray toxic chemicals into rain clouds to cause heavy rainfall. They assumed this heavy rainfall would destroy all the vegetation that provided the food supply for the entire Vietnamese army. But, as usual, things didn't go according to plan.

Every year, rain falls on Vietnam from May to October. Most rain falls high in the mist-shrouded mountains. In the central valleys, the downpours arrive later, closer to September.

But in October 1966, American specialists were particularly eager for the start of the monsoon season in Vietnam. After all, they had pumped the clouds moving toward the rebels with chemicals—specifically, silver iodide.

Toxic rain became heavenly punishment for the Pentagon

"This cloud immediately ejected four times more precipitation than would have been distributed over the course of a day or two. This two-day amount of precipitation fell in the first hour of this cloud's spray," noted historian Blonsky.

The Pentagon watched as the guerrillas, not yet fully poisoned by Agent Orange, were washed away by chemical rains. But the big water fell in the wrong place. The elements descended on the heads of the American special forces. The cloud couldn't withstand it and spilled everything ahead of schedule.

The White House concluded that it worked, but the calculations needed to be more precise. And to be sure, they decided to practice on the Laotians on the Bolaven Plateau, in the Kong River Delta.

Naturally, they didn't tell the authorities about this. After all, had the operation succeeded, the region would have been left without roads or crops, but with landslides and dozens of casualties. And that's exactly what happened.

Pleased with the result, the Americans returned to Vietnam to join those they had worked so hard for. For appearance's sake, they flew over the enemy and bombed nonstop. In short, they did everything as usual. But in reality, it was not so.

" The intensification of this precipitation with silver iodide and Operation Popeye, carried out from 1967 to 1972, was aimed at maximally eroding the Ho Chi Minh Trail. The pilots who flew the operation said that mud was better than war, meaning they would erode the trail as much as possible and cut off the guerrillas' contact with Northern China and their northern brothers," emphasized Leonid Blonsky.

The plan worked, although only partially.

• The United States still lost this war.
• In 1973, the last American soldier left Vietnam.
• Two years before, the country was devastated by a flood comparable in power only to the Great Flood of the Bible. According to various estimates, around 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 were trying so hard to bring down torrential rains over Vietnam. So, they overdid it again?

Of course, the White House denied any guilt. They blamed it all on the La Niña effect, when cold Pacific waters shift north, causing drought in some places and flooding in others. It seemed true, but no one believed the Americans. Even though they officially admitted they had nothing to do with it.

Could US experiments have changed Vietnam's climate?

According to one theory, Vietnam still suffers from flooding precisely because of the American "Popeye" operation. Incidentally, the operation was named not after the exotic papaya fruit, but because of the American people's love of the cartoon about the sailor and his magical spinach.

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

After the floods in Vietnam, the US officially had to shut down its climate weapons experiments. After all, the UN passed a resolution banning them. The US signed it. But a promise isn't a promise.

American climate scientist Alan Robock of Rutgers University stated that the United States is still developing climate weapons. They're simply now using the fight against global warming as a cover.

"I'm concerned about who will gain control of these climate-changing technologies if they prove effective. But what's even more frightening 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 would allow for the manipulation of solar radiation. This method involves spraying fine aerosols into the atmosphere to reflect sunlight away from 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, things don't go according to plan for the Americans again? After all, the entire world will now be at risk. And no matter how independent the United States considers itself, it's unlikely it will be able to separate from planet Earth.