Tuesday, November 26, 2019

Are U.S. Universities Helping DARPA Develop Weapons For Pentagon?--Part 3


In her 2015 book, The Pentagon's Brain: An Uncensored History of DARPA, America's Top Secret Military Research Agency, Annie Jacobsen described some of the weapons development work that the DARPA organization, for which some U.S. professors continue to do contract  research work for in the 21st century, did when the organization was still called "ARPA," prior to 1973:

"At Fort Detrick, in Maryland, ARPA ran a toxicology branch where it worked on chemical weapons-related programs with Dr. James W. Brown, deputy chief of the crops division of the Army Chemical Corps Biological Laboratories. ARPA had Dr. Brown working on a wide variety of defoliants...The classified program would be called `anticrop warfare research.'...In the field, operational activities were to be referred to as `CDTC Task Number 20,' or `Task 20' for short...ARPA's R&D field units would be dispatched to burn down all the resulting dead trees...On November 30, 1961, President Kennedy approved the chemical defoliation program in Vietnam...Between 2.1 million and 4.8 million Vietnamese were directly exposed to Agent Orange...

"...In December 1965, the Joint Chiefs of Staff and the Secretary of Defense authorized ARPA to research and develop `forest fire as a military weapon' in Vietnam.

"The secret program, called Project EMOTE, was developed by ARPA, ostensibly to study the use of `environmental modification techniques.'...The central premise of the program was to determine how to destroy large areas of jungle growth by firestorm...Project EMOTE called for millions of gallons of Agent Orange to be sprayed in the forests as one element of the `weather modification campaign.'...ARPA's final 170-page report, originally classified secret, is kept in the Special Collections of the U.S. Department of Agriculture in Maryland...

"By the winter of 1973...in keepng with the Mansfield Amendment, which required the Pentagon to research and develop programs only with a `specific military function,' the word `defense' was added to ARPA's name. From now on it would be called the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, or DARPA..."

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