The air in the bombing area can be 20 percent or more carbon monoxide [source: GlobalSecurity. This effect occurs because napalm partially combusts the oxygen in the air, turning CO 2 carbon dioxide into CO carbon monoxide. In some cases, people have been boiled to death in rivers made hot by the heat of napalm bombs. The raw ingredients of napalm can also be harmful, though certainly less so than when a napalm mixture is ignited as part of a bomb. If you've ever felt a little dizzy after breathing in fumes at a gas station, you can understand.
But when polystyrene , another common ingredient in napalm, burns at high temperatures, it becomes styrene , which is toxic [source: GlobalSecurity. Although one of napalm's early uses was agricultural -- Dr. Fieser found that it destroyed crabgrass by burning the invasive species' seeds while preserving other, necessary grasses -- it has largely proved destructive toward the environment.
In Vietnam, the U. The extensive use of napalm in Vietnam, along with Agent Orange , herbicides and a variety of unexploded landmines and munitions, are now believed to have contributed to that country's ongoing environmental and public health problems [source: King]. In the United States, the storage of unused napalm has proven a contentious issue.
In , protesters turned back trainloads of napalm on their way to recycling plants, perhaps fearful of napalm canisters leaking, as happened at the Weapons Support Facility, Fallbrook Detachment, in Southern California. This stockpile, supposedly the last batch of napalm in the U. The proposal was shot down out of concern over "very toxic compounds" produced by burning napalm [source: U.
Parliament ]. Napalm bombs, a type of firebomb, became a prominent part of aerial campaigns later in the war. In , Allied forces dropped the first napalm bombs on Tinian Island in , which is part of the Northern Mariana Islands in the northern Pacific Ocean. Napalm devastated Japanese cities, especially since many houses were made of wood. A napalm bombing campaign against Tokyo on March 9, , killed an estimated , people and burned 15 square miles 39 square kilometers of the city [source: Laney ].
Allied forces also used napalm in European fighting, with around 3. The bombing, immortalized in Kurt Vonnegut's "Slaughterhouse-Five," was part of a controversial campaign in which between 35, and , German civilians died [source: Encyclopaedia Britannica ]. If the blast didn't kill the soldiers inside, the heat likely did. Similar tactics were employed against Japanese soldiers occupying Pacific islands, who used extensive underground tunnel systems.
During the conflict, U. High-altitude bombers and dive-bombers unleashed them on enemy tanks and soldiers. After the Korean War, the United States developed a more advanced form of napalm. This type of napalm wasn't made from naphthenic and palmitic acids the source of the original napalm name.
By then, napalm had already become a catchall term encompassing a variety of incendiary weapons, like when people say "Coke" to mean soda or "Kleenex" to stand for all facial tissues.
Napalm-B, a napalm successor sometimes called super-napalm, NP2 or Incendergel, is made of 33 percent gasoline, 21 percent benzene and 46 percent polystyrene [sources: Browne , GlobalSecurity. The gasoline in napalm is generally the same as that found at most gas stations, and that gasoline already has some benzene in it, but the benzene level is increased for napalm. Napalm-B was considered safer than previous forms, although when the term "safe" is used in relation to napalm, it generally refers to those who deploy the weapon, not those against whom it's used.
One of Napalm-B's safety features was that it was rather difficult to ignite, decreasing the chances of an accidental ignition. Thermite , a chemical mixture that burns at very high temperatures, is often used with a fuse to ignite Napalm-B.
In World War II, the German word "bombenbrandschrumpfeichen" was created in response to napalm bombing of German bunkers. Soldiers in bunkers would be baked by the heat, and the word means "firebomb shrunken flesh" [source: GlobalSecurity. In movies or newsreels from the era, you may have seen shots of planes diving low, then suddenly rising as enormous fireballs explode below.
That's probably napalm in action. Napalm has come to be associated with its use by the American and South Vietnamese forces during the Vietnam War, but its origins go further back. Not long after that the Roman army used spears tipped by a mixture of burning pitch and sulphur as a weapon. By AD, the inhabitants of Constantinople had developed a fearsome substance that became known as Greek fire. Crude oil had been discovered long before that, and it was widely used as a source of naphtha, an ingredient in flaming projectiles.
To their mixture, Byzantines added further refinements. Today, the ingredients are a lost secret, but it looks as if they used naphtha, pine resin and other chemicals including sulphur, projecting it long distances by forcing it through a nozzle under pressure, the original flamethrower.
High-boiling chemicals like pine resin would enable the mixture to burn for longer and reach higher temperatures than one purely based on petrol-like molecules. It would also cause the burning mixture to adhere to any surface - or person - unlucky enough to be in its way. This was used twice successfully to fight off the Muslim navy besieging Constantinople. The escalation of violence that took place in Vietnam inspired terror and indignation not only in the eyes of the local population but also of a large part of American civil society and members of the United Nations.
Some of the latter denounced the US-Vietnam War as one that killed innocent people Vietnamese civilians but also young Americans. Napalm, largely because of the powerful impact of some images enshrined in the collective memory and the collective apprehension attached to the use of fire in war, became reframed and portrayed as the symbol of an illegitimate means of warfare. The negative symbolic charge attached to napalm coupled with the new legal constraints framing its use outweighed any tactical advantage potentially gained with the weapon.
The creation of napalm on 4 July by Louis Fieser crowned a succession of experiments on the Harvard campus beginning in under the direction of the National Defense Research Committee. This relegation can be explained by two facts. First, for a long time, incendiary weapons represented a major technical challenge, mostly because of the ineluctable trade-off between destruction and precision its users had to face. Second, the development and research on incendiary weapons were neglected, to the advantage of chemical weapons, which were perceived as far more efficient than incendiary weapons, such as flamethrowers.
Things changed with the development of napalm. First, it greatly increased the probability of igniting other inflammable materials in the target area. Second, napalm has great visco-elasticity, which extends the range of the jet of flaming fuel projected by flamethrowers. These factors explain why the US military deployed napalm shortly after its creation. Napalm was deployed for the first time in the battlefield of Papua New Guinea, on 15 December with flamethrowers.
The US military then delivered more and more napalm through aerial attacks, first in the Pacific 15 February near the Pacific Island of Ponhpei and six months later in Europe in the immediate aftermath of D-Day. Although napalm was used in several conflicts in the aftermath of WWII -- for instance in the Greek Civil War and Indochina 10 --, these utilizations did not equal the quantity of incendiary weapons deployed by US planes during the short but devastating Korean War Not only did the allies drop more bombs on Korea than in the Pacific theater during WWII — , tons versus , tons — more of what fell was napalm, in both absolute and relative terms.
At this time, napalm was regarded as a very efficient weapon to achieve area or strategic bombing, that is bombing which not only targeted a tactical infrastructure or position but covered the whole area surrounding the target. In the period following the Korean War and preceding the Vietnam War , napalm reappeared twice on the battlefield, in Algeria and in Cuba. There is no official record of this, but several testimonies of journalists, and even militaries on the ground, acknowledge that napalm was used and produced in the French bases during the Algeria War The French were trained by US pilots to deploy napalm from the air.
Incendiary weapons -- especially napalm -- became a weapon of choice for destroying infrastructure and resources to break the morale and undermine support for rebels. The first known deployment of napalm during the Vietnam War occurred on 27 February By , napalm was a core element of the bombing strategy. The peak of displayed napalm was reached in April Napalm, and with it America, had lost its first war.
After Vietnam, napalm was used in several wars, especially in the s in Afghanistan and Iraq. The US military acknowledged recently that many MK77 bombs had been used during these wars. Even though these bombs were not called napalm, their incendiary properties are very similar. If MK and napalm have a different name, only a slightly different distribution of constituents makes napalm different from the liquid contained in MK Effects and military advantage are considered identical.
First, the US military still uses napalm, but in much lower quantity: this supports the fact that the weapon — and the strategy of attrition which aims at massively destroying military but also civilian infrastructures and resources - is perceived as being tactically effective. This seems particularly true for counterinsurgency, where those who fight are hard to identify and hide among civilians.
The military prefers not to explicitly mention the name napalm out of concern for public opinion. The US Chemical Warfare Service added rubber to the gasoline to produce a jelly mixture which would burn longer, would be harder to put out and would stick to the victim, causing fatal injuries. This seemed like a solution to the US military, but when they entered the war in the Pacific, natural rubber was in short supply, and the Army was forced to find a suitable replacement.
This is how napalm was born. The weapon was first tested in bombing raids on Berlin and later on Tokyo, where it caused mass panic after the firestorm disintegrated over , people. Napalm became a necessary weapon of every modern military force, even though its consequences were among the most inhumane. The effectiveness of the weapon overruled its cruelty.
The effects of carbon monoxide were well known after the end of WWII, as it was one of the main gasses used for poisoning concentration camp victims. Out in the open, napalm caused severe burns all over the body, burns which were far worse than the ones caused by fire in general.
0コメント