Yellow rain

Yellow rain was a 1981 political incident in which the United States Secretary of State Alexander Haig accused the Soviet Union of supplying T-2 mycotoxin to the communist states in Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia for use in counterinsurgency warfare.[1] Refugees described many different forms of "attacks", including a sticky yellow liquid falling from planes or helicopters, which was dubbed "yellow rain". The U.S. government alleged that over ten thousand people had been killed in attacks using these supposed chemical weapons.[2] The Soviets denied these claims and an initial United Nations investigation was inconclusive.

Samples of the supposed chemical agent that were supplied to a group of independent scientists turned out to be honeybee feces, suggesting that the "yellow rain" was due to mass defecation of digested pollen grains from large swarms of bees.[3] Although the majority of the scientific literature on this topic now regards the hypothesis that yellow rain was a Soviet chemical weapon as disproved,[4][5] the U.S. government has not retracted its allegations,[6] arguing that the issue has not been fully resolved.[2] Many of the U.S. documents relating to this incident remain classified.[1]

  1. ^ a b Jonathan Tucker (Spring 2001). "The Yellow Rain Controversy: Lessons for Arms Control Compliance" (PDF). The Nonproliferation Review.
  2. ^ a b Cite error: The named reference Wannemacher was invoked but never defined (see the help page).
  3. ^ "Yellow Rain Falls". New York Times. September 3, 1987. Retrieved 2009-01-02. Yellow rain is the excrement of jungle bees. It's yellow from digested pollen grains, and it rains down from swarms of bees too high to be seen. His theory turns out to be exactly right. The Government's own studies, still unpublished, prove that the source is bees, not bombs.
  4. ^ Cite error: The named reference Madden was invoked but never defined (see the help page).
  5. ^ Christopher GW, Cieslak TJ, Pavlin JA, Eitzen EM (August 1997). "Biological warfare. A historical perspective". JAMA. 278 (5): 412–17. doi:10.1001/jama.278.5.412. PMID 9244333.
  6. ^ Guillemin, Jeanne (2002–2003). "The 1979 Anthrax Epidemic in the USSR: Applied Science and Political Controversy". Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society. 146 (1): 18–36. ISSN 0003-049X. JSTOR 1558154. PMID 12068904.