open letter to Rex Tillerson
My name is Xavier Jones, and I am a student at Summit Shasta. In my English class, we have been completing a project about war. In this project, I have been learning about war’s effect on people by reading “The situation in Syria after chemical attack: what we know By Agence France-Presse”, as well as several additional articles about similar topics. This project asked us to consider the essential question, “is war worth it”. Through the project, I realized that chemical weapons do more unnecessary long term damage than normal bombs, and I wanted to research this, which eventually caused this letter.
I wanted to write to you, specifically, because you have a very important position regarding this problem, and I believed that you can help address this issue.
One reason that chemical weapon usage is so risky is because these weapons destroy habitats, animals die, and they have trouble repopulating. Agent orange, for example, destroys forests, doesn’t let them grow back, and it seeps into the soil and water supply, poisoning every plant and animal. In a 2010 article by Pamela S. King for the Georgetown University, about the dangerous levels of agent orange in Vietnam and what effect it has on people, and the environment “Dioxin infiltrated the country’s water supply and its soil, entering the food chain and accumulating in people’s tissues, even passing from mother to child through breast milk. Samples of fish, shrimp, and breast milk collected from Southern Vietnamese women in the early 1970s showed very high levels of dioxin.”
In the same article, King wrote about how Agent Orange can destroy miles of forest and prevent regrowth, even after 40 years. King wrote, “In the Mekong Delta, the agricultural heartland of Vietnam and one of the most heavily sprayed regions, half the mangrove forests were wiped out during these missions.” In heavily sprayed locations, almost all the wildlife was wiped out. However, if the American troops had simply burned the forests, they would probably have grown back far faster, as fires are unlikely to sterilize soil.
Unlike after Agent Orange’s use, after a forest fire, plants can usually regrow, but it takes different amounts of time them to grow back, depending on how hot the fire was. If it was a mild fire and mostly burns dead leaves and the occasional dead tree, then most plants will likely grow back in just about a year or so. On the other hand if a fire burns hot enough, it can have far more permanent effects, as author Mark Washburn writes in “After the fire, how does a forest grow?”. Washburn wrote, “[some] western wildfires […] can burn so hot they can sterilize the soil, leaving it bare for years.” This helps shows that even if napalm were to sterilize the soil by burning too hot, the forests could still grow back after a couple of years, as is true for forest fires, but when Agent Orange is used, it kills the population and keeps it down for long periods of time.
Despite this, some might say we should have chemical weapons as a defense because of how effective they can be, but I would argue that if we ever were to use our chemical weapons in defense, we will harm large amounts of our own country and risk contaminating our surrounding waters. For all these reasons, I would like to offer a solution: work in conjunction with other countries to safely dispose of chemical weapons.
Finally, I hope that you will negotiate a treaty with the UN focused on the disposal of chemical weapons in order to protect citizens, who will likely be harmed in the event chemical weapons attacks. This will make a difference because it will reduce the quantity of permanent damage dealt in wars.
Thank you for the time you spent reading this, and please take this into consideration.
Sincerely,
Xavier Jones
