Agent provocateur.

• Author: Krayewski, Ed
• Position: Chemical cleanup - Agent Orange cleanup - Brief article

THE U.S. Agency for International Development (USMD) will be spending more than $40 million to clean up the soil at Danang Airport in Vietnam. The Vietnamese government identifies the airport as a "hot spot," an area with unusually high levels of dioxins.

During the Vietnam War, the U.S. Air Force sprayed the country's jungles with defoliants to eliminate hiding places for the Viet Cong. One of the most commonly used defoliants was an herbicide-hormone mixture known as Agent Orange.

Some batches of Agent Orange, which was manufactured for the U.S. military by the companies Monsanto and Dow, contained extremely toxic dioxins because of slight temperature deviations in the process used to create the herbicide. The Air Force dropped up to 20 million gallons of Agent Orange as part of its Operation Ranch Hand, and the Vietnamese government says up to 4000,000 people were killed or injured and 500,000 children may...