I'm with Biden on the cluster bombs

[Celerity]

69. The last US stockpiles of napalm were destroyed over 22 years ago.

Military Says Goodbye to Napalm / Pentagon recycles remaining stock of a notorious weapon

Michael Taylor

April 4, 2001

https://www.sfgate.com/news/article/Military-Says-Goodbye-to-Napalm-Pentagon-2935601.php



If any one picture symbolizes the horror of the Vietnam War, it's the photo of a naked 9-year-old named Kim Phuc fleeing her village and screaming in pain from the napalm unleashed by a South Vietnamese plane minutes before. The girl survived, after 17 operations. Napalm didn't. As of today, the Pentagon says it is gone from the U.S. arsenal.

Napalm, a syrupy kind of jellied gasoline, was used in Vietnam to burn forests and villages and people, without discrimination. It burned through everything, at more than 5,000 degrees, and it stuck to people and then burned some more, sometimes down to the bone. And the TV images stuck, too: jets zooming in, almost on the deck, and, in their wake, whole tracts of jungle erupting in enormous orange fireballs, the oily smoke roiling upwards.

"Napalm is a push-button word," said Michael Blecker, executive director of the San Francisco veterans rights organization Swords to Plowshares. "Everything you think about Vietnam and the insanity of that war, and there are certain terms for it -- Agent Orange, Tet, Khe Sanh, My Lai. And napalm."

At a low-key ceremony this morning at the Fallbrook Naval Weapons Station in San Diego County, the final two canisters of Vietnam-era napalm will be recycled and sent on their way to Texas and Louisiana, where they will be blended into fuel used in industrial furnaces.

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