Dow’s Expansion into Nuclear Weapons and the Aftermath
Rocky Flats Plant, a nuclear weapons production facility managed by Dow from 1951 to 1975, produced plutonium triggers for hydrogen bombs. A number of accidents took place under Dow’s management during this period. In 1957, radioactive particles were released into the atmosphere due to the burning of plutonium dust by a fire in the facility. In 1967, 3,500 barrels (560 m3) of lubricants and solvents, laden with plutonium, leaked into the ground. Another fire took place in 1969 and it was the costliest industrial accident in the USA up to that time. Finally, Rockwell International took over the management of the facility in 1975.
In 2008, a federal judge ordered Dow and Rockwell to pay a combined $925 million in damages to citizens in response to a lawsuit filed against Dow and Rockwell in 1990. However, the Tenth Circuit Court of Appeals reversed the decision in September 2010 because the owners of the 12,000 properties in the area had not proved that their properties were damaged or that they had suffered bodily injury from the plutonium that blew onto their properties.
Vietnam War: Napalm and Agent Orange, another of Dow’s innovations
Napalm bombs was another of Dow’s innovation or rather curse on humanity that The United States military dropped on North Vietnam during the Vietnam War to burn Vietnamese civilians and soldiers alike. It was a jelly-like chemical which when sprayed over people burned them on contact. The USA continued to drop napalm bombs on North Vietnam until 1973.
Dow was one of several manufacturers who began producing the napalm B compound under a government contract from 1965. The other suppliers discontinued manufacturing the product after experiencing...
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...o be delivered.
Dow has misused its knowledge that resulted in war crimes against the innocent people and did not even leave children alone. Dow forgets that people with power and capability should exercise their judgment and use it for the welfare of society and not to destroy it. What Dow did is heinous and repulsive.
Herbicidal chemicals used in South Africa during apartheid
During the reign of the apartheid government in South Africa, Dow supplied it with herbicidal chemicals to render the border between South Africa and Zimbabwe infertile. These actions have cost it a $71 million lawsuit in New York courts by farmers who claim that their lands remain infertile till date. Separately, in October 2003, a New York lawyer filed a case against five companies, including Dow and Union Carbide, accusing them of defrauding South African workers during the Apartheid era.
...nto the events surround Rocky Flats as well as the status of current nuclear operations.
Imagine working with radioactive materials in a secret camp, and the government not telling you that this material is harmful to your body. In the book Plutopia: Nuclear Families, Atomic Cities, and the Great Soviet and American Plutonium Disasters by Kate Brown, she takes her readers on a journey to expose what happened in the first two cities that started producing plutonium. Brown is an Associate Professor of History at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County. She has won a handful of prizes, such as the American Historical Association’s George Louis Beer Prize for the Best Book in International European History, and was also a 2009 Guggenheim Fellow. Brown wrote this book by looking through hundreds of archives and interviews with people, the evidence she found brought light to how this important history of the Cold War left a nuclear imprint on the world today.
Looking back at how the chemical weaponry expanded starting in the beginning of World War 1, it all began with Tear gas which was used by the French in August of 1914. Those techniques have been used in ancient times. Moving forward eight months in to the war the Germans have been giving great study in to the development of chemical weapons due to the first usage from the French and witnessed its great effectiveness and were the first to use it in a large scale.
In the 1970s, engineers found contaminants in the local wells: Well H and Well G. They found suspected carcinogens including trichloroethylene (TCE) known to cause cancer. Families gathered after the Anderson family noticed the recurring events of a rare disease in a small town. Although Woburn had a history of industrial activity, the two major companies that contributed to the contaminants were W.R. Grace Co. and Beatrice Foods. The families sought help and went to a Boston lawyer, Joe Mulligan, and signed his firm. No one picked up the case due to not enough evidence, but Jan Schlictmann, who was a newcomer, picked up the Woburn case. Although advised to neglect it, he still looked into it. He joined with a non-profit firm who were seeking an environmental case like Woburn’s. They quickly filed a complaint against the two major companies.
...h Americans used planes and helicopters to deploy sustained heavy bombardment over Vietnam. During this one operation there were more bombs dropped than in the entire WW2 – 864,000 tonnes in total.
On April 12, 1961, the first application of the chemical nicknamed Agent Orange was sprayed on Vietnamese foliage in an attempt to stop guerilla warfare, launching a herbicidal disaster ("Herbicidal Warfare"). The consequences of agent orange, unbeknownst to the former government officials, led to a series of catastrophic effects including, but not limited to neurobehavioral and physical anomalies of the human body. As a result of the lacking knowledge of Agent Orange, the United States and Vietnam are still cleaning up the herbicidal mess that could have been avoided (Magnuson). Decades later, scientific evidence proved that the use of the dioxin herbicide Agent Orange was linked to many physical and neurobehavior disorders (Poremba).
Almost thirty years after the last troops were pulled out of what was then South Vietnam, its effects are still felt in today’s society. It is hard not to find someone who’s life has not been affected because of this war. One of the most controversial decisions made in the war was to use chemicals to fight the enemy. The most boradly used chemiucal was called Agent Orange. Some people agreed with the use of Agent Orange. They saw it as a very viable weapon that needed to be used in order to keep the Communist from taking control of South Vietnam and subverting their democratic government. Many others disapproved of its use. They knew, correctly, that it would severely devastate the landscape of Vietnam and would forever ruin the land for agricultural use. They also knew of the harmful effect it would have once adults and children came in contact with the harmful chemicals that form the chemical make up of Agent Orange. Once the first bombs carrying Agent Orange were dropped there was no going back. For some people the use of Agent Orange changed their whole opinion of the war and what we were really fighting for. Pictures showing burns and disfigurement were soon to hit the presses. Once the American public could see exactly what was happening and how the civilian life was being treated impacted many people so much that they could no longer support what the United States was doing over in Vietnam. The goal of this paper is to show how the use of Agent Orange changed many people’s perspective of the war in Vietnam.
Three Mile Island was a three month old nuclear power plant located in southeast Pennsylvania. On March 28, 1979, a series of mechanical and human errors led to above-normal levels of radioactive gas being released into the air. Subsequently 400,000 gallons of water from a holding tank containing xenon-133 and xenon-135 was released into the Susquehanna River. (Davis 313) By the end of Thursday, March 29, detectable levels of increased radiation were measured over a four-county area. Plant officials estimated that 180 to 300 of the 36,000 fuel rods in the reactor had melted. (Davis 313) The governor advised that pregnant women and small children evacuate and stay at least five miles away from the facility. They did this for good reason because almost 80% of the gas escaped the morning of the accident (Davis 313). After the accident people filed more than 2,200 law suits. But only 280 claims have been settled for $14 million (Freiham 290). Deaths from thyroid cancer have been monitored in Middletown, but no link to
Between 1961 and 1971, Monsanto, along with Dow Chemical and other chemical companies, provided herbicides and defoliants, including Agent Orange, to the U.S. military during the Vietnam War. As a consequence of the exposure to dioxins contained in the defoliant, the military personnel in Vietnam suffered of injuries, such as Chloracne, heart disease, prostate cancer, respiratory cancers, etc. (“Veterans' Diseases Associated with Agent Orange”) In 1980, a class-action lawsuit concerning Agent Orange was filed against Monsanto, Dow Chemical and other chemical companies, but these companies denied that Agent Orange was linked to the veterans’ medical problems. In 1984, seven of the chemical companies involved decided to settle the class-action
Fries, A. A., & West, C. J. (1921). Chemical warfare,. New York [etc.: McGraw-Hill book company, inc..
“The Operation Rolling Thunder bombing campaign began on March 2, 1965, partly in response to a Viet Cong attack on a U.S. air base at Pleiku. The Johnson administration cited a number of reasons for shifting U.S. strategy to include systematic aerial assaults on North Vietnam. For example, administration officials believed that heavy and sustained bombing might encourage North Vietnamese leaders to accept the non-Communist government in South Vietnam. The administration also wanted to reduce North Vietnam’s ability to produce and transport supplies to aid the Viet Cong insurgency.”(History.com,
Arnold & Porter chose to sue Pittston rather than the Buffalo Mining Company because the value of the corporation allowed for adequate compensation to the victims. Author and head lawyer for the plaintiffs, Gerald M. Stern, writes that the original goal was sue to sue for $21 million for the disaster to have a material effect on the cooperation (51). To avoid responsibility Pittston attempted to prove that the Buffalo Mining Company was an independent corporation with its own board of directors. The lawyers for the plaintiffs disproved this claim by arguing the Buffalo Mining Company never held formal meetings of the board of directors and was not independent of the parent company. During this case Pittston’s Oil division had applied to build an oil refinery in Maine. The ...
...elicopters, land mines, booby traps, and poison gases. Each weapon had a different use they could be used to kill people or to cause devastation to the land and the plant life in the area. The weapons of the Vietnam War had some off the most devastating weapons ever used in warfare and because of the devastation those weapon were never used again.
It was clear that the governments in America would not issue a permit to Union Carbide plant under such circumstances, which lacked severe environmental standards and permitted slum dwellers to live near the plant and so on. Such actions were the ones that led to more deaths. Before the major gas leakage from the MCI unit on December 3, 1984, some people were killed because of phosgene gas leakage. However, no one took it seriously, despite the media report. One of the reasons that people ignore this was because people didnt know the potential danger of the chemical plant.
The impact of the war was soon to leave a mark in history. The use of chemical weapons adversel...