Towards the end of June the Democratic Republic of Vietnam made an appeal to world public opinion against the threatened destruction of the dikes of North Vietnam by American bombardment. According to the North Vietnamese spokesman jn Paris, *THE SYSTEMATIC, PLANNED ATTACKS BY THE AMERICAN ARMED FORCES AND NAVY AGAINST THE DAMS AND THE DIKES ALONG THE RIVER BANKS AND SEA-SHORE OF NORTH VIETNAM, COULD CAUSE CATASTROPHIC FLOODS DURING THE RAINY SEASON OF JULY AND AUGUST." He accused Nixon of deliberately trying to spread death and tamine among the civilian population, and sap the morale of the Vietnamese people.
There is every reason to take this seriously. News of bombing of the dikes continues to flow in. Between 10 April and 10 June there were 68 massive attacks on the dikes and 38 dams were severely damaged, and on 20 June two dikes in Quang Ninh province, to the north of the Red River, were broken.
According to The Guardian that same week, the U.S. might use 'rain makers" during the Vietnam war to trigger off torrential rains. The operation, codenamed Popeye, involves dropping silver iodine bombs on clouds over Laos to make the Ho Chi Minh trail unusable. The Pentagon Papers show that research has been going on since 1967 to prepare such weapons. Defence Minister Laird recently answered a question put to him about this by saying that they would not go so far as to make artificial rain storms over North Vietnam'. This could be taken as an admission that such practices have been used in Laos - where there is evidence that this is so -and South Vietnam If this practice is also used in North Vietnam now, the results could be quite catastrophic.
The basic facts of the situation according to the French geographer Yves Lacoste are the following: the rivers in North Vietnam run well above the alluvial deposits they have washed down from the mountains. In the rainy season they rise to a very high level. In addition there are frequent typhoons in the region, which can also cause flooding. The system of dikes, over 2,500 miles long, and built by the hard labour of whole generations, protects the 15 million people living in the Plain of Tonkin (with a density of 700-800 people per square kilometre). The Americans have recently been making systematic attempts to destroy these dikes, especially by dropping very heavy bombs in the vicinity to cause intense vibrations. If these dikes broke, millions of people would risk drowning or tamine.
The Vietnamese have plenty of experience of dealing with destruction of dikes. Towards the end of the Second World War there was famine in the Northern provinces because the French had confiscated the best part of the rice harvest for the Japanese occupation authorities. The famine and the seizure of power by the Japanese in March 1945 - they had left the French formally in charge until then - led to the abandonment of the irrig ation system. When the waters rose eight provinces of the plain of Tonkin were flooded. Two million people died in 1944 45 as a result of tamine and flood. Seven hundred and fifty miles of dikes had to be repaired, using 11 million working days.
The dikes of the North were also bombed between 1965 and 1968, under President Johnson. In 1965 there were 500 attacks against the dikes and dams. In 1966 the number rose to 1,000, and the following year to 1,300. It was striking that the attacks were heaviest in the rainy seasons, and then as now, peasants rushing to repair the dikes became the target of further bombing. Although an incredible amount of damage was done to the dikes, water pumps and dams in the Johnson period- the photos of the period bear silent witness to the facts -the Vietnamese, with immense efforts, managed to prevent greater catastrophes. The problem is whether they can do the same against Nixon's much more refined and accurate bombing, possibly to be backed up by rain making'.
This article first appeared in the Dutch left-wing weekly, De Groene Amsterdammer 27 June - 4 July
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