[Ngo-lwg] 50 Years After U.S. Launched Secret War on Laos, Unexploded Bombs Still Killing Civilians

Chuck Searcy chuckusvn at gmail.com
Thu Jun 26 04:05:12 BST 2014


*DemocracyNow
<http://www.democracynow.org/2014/6/25/50_years_after_us_launched_secret>*
*
<http://www.democracynow.org/2014/6/25/50_years_after_us_launched_secret>*

June 25, 2014


(

Interview with Karen Coates and Jerry Redfern, co-authors of *Eternal
Harvest: The Legacy of American Bombs in Laos.*)


**
*50 Years After U.S. Launched Secret War on Laos, Unexploded Bombs Still
Killing Civilians*


Fifty years ago this month, the United States began raining down bombs on
Laos, in what would become the largest bombing campaign in history. From
June 1964 to March 1973, the United States dropped at least two million
tons of bombs on the small, landlocked Southeast Asian country. That is the
equivalent of one planeload every eight minutes, 24 hours a day, for nine
years -- more than was dropped on Germany and Japan during World War II. The
deadly legacy of the Vietnam War lives on today in the form of unexploded
cluster bombs, which had about a 30 percent failure rate when they fell
from American planes over large swaths of Laos. Experts estimate that Laos
is littered with as many as 80 million "bombies," or bomblets --
baseball-sized bombs found inside cluster bombs. Since the bombing stopped
four decades ago, tens of thousands of people have been injured or killed
as a result.


*[more]
<http://www.democracynow.org/2014/6/25/50_years_after_us_launched_secret>*



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