256. Memorandum From the Deputy Assistant Secretary of State for Far Eastern Affairs (Rice) to the Assistant Secretary of State for Far Eastern Affairs (Harriman)1
SUBJECT
- Crop Destruction
I am firmly opposed to letting crop destruction be tried out. The Task Force memo2 takes one over the jumps on a well-laid course: If the pros and cons were only those dealt with in the memo, I too would go along. They deal with an experimental first use—which would impose some costs—but do not deal adequately with the costs implicit in the wider use which probably would follow. If we make chemicals available for crop destruction we would not be able long to deny it to the world. This would hurt us everywhere:
The way to win a guerrilla war, basically, is to win the people. Crop destruction runs counter to this basic rule. The problem of identifying fields on which the Viet Cong depend is hardly susceptible to solution so long as the Viet Cong and the people are co-mingled. The Government will gain the enmity of people whose crops are destroyed and whose wives and children will either have to stay in place and suffer hunger or become homeless refugees living on the uncertain bounty of a not-too-efficient government.
Other people, who merely sympathize with them, will also hate the government for crop destruction. The use of strange chemical agents, to destroy crops, strikes at something basic implanted in human beings (even if the people do not—as many will—fear that the chemical agents are also directly harmful to people).
Those relatively few of us who study the means of warfare run a risk of forgetting how the mass of people are likely to feel about those means. It is only natural for Cott and Ben3 to be in favor of crop destruction just as it is natural—at the other end of the spectrum—for SAC generals to be for atomic bombs. The people who may prospectively or actually be at the receiving end will feel differently, and the best way to achieve their estrangement is to lose sight of their very human reactions. Obviously, it is for this reason that politicians must control those whose technical job is the waging of war.