The Most TERRIFYING Landmine Of The Vietnam War You've Never Heard Of

The Most TERRIFYING Landmine Of The Vietnam War You've Never Heard Of In September 1966, Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara signed a directive ordering roughly 20 million tiny mines. Not in total. Per month. They were sown by aircraft over Laos, a country the United States was never officially at war with, and almost nobody today has heard of them. This is the story of the Gravel mine and the BLU-43 Dragontooth, the air-scattered weapons at the heart of the McNamara Line and Operation Igloo White. A billion dollar electronic battlefield built to strangle the Ho Chi Minh Trail, run by Task Force Alpha from a wall of computers at Nakhon Phanom, Thailand, and seeded by Navy squadron VO-67 flying treetop level over some of the most heavily defended jungle on earth. It was beaten by monsoon humidity, herds of oxen and buckets of urine. And then the idea crossed the Cold War, because the American mine failed, but the Soviet PFM-1 Butterfly that followed it into Afghanistan did not. Along the way, this video corrects three myths that almost every retelling gets wrong, including the claim that these mines were deliberately shaped like toys to lure children. A note on numbers. No reliable casualty figure specific to these mines exists in official, academic or demining sources, and this video does not invent one. The 37 million production figure is a reported figure from the 1971 Senate hearing and is presented as such. 📕 We put everything we had into this book, for the men and for the families who never got the story: The Documented History of MACV-SOG in Vietnam. Every claim sourced. $11.99: https://truevietnamdocs.com SOURCES Primary and official Foreign Relations of the United States, 1964 to 1968, Volume IV, Document 233. The McNamara directive of 15 September 1966 and the 20 million mines per month requirement. https://history.state.gov/historicaldocuments/frus1964-68v04/d233 Investigation into the Electronic Battlefield Program. Senate Armed Services Subcommittee, hearings November 1970, published 1971. The anti-personnel testimony and the reported production figures. Bernard C. Nalty, Air Power and the Fight for Khe Sanh. Office of Air Force History, United States Air Force. National Research Council, Alternative Technologies to Replace Antipersonnel Landmines, 2001, Chapter 2. https://www.nationalacademies.org/read/10071/chapter/3 Human Rights Watch and VVAF, In Its Own Words: The U.S. Army and Antipersonnel Mines in the Korean and Vietnam Wars, 1997. Landmine and Cluster Munition Monitor, Lao PDR country profile. https://the-monitor.org/country-profile/lao-pdr/2023/impact Reporting and NGO data John T. Correll, Igloo White. Air Force Magazine, November 2004. https://www.airandspaceforces.com/article/1104igloo/ Peter Brush, The Story Behind the McNamara Line. https://msuweb.montclair.edu/~furrg/pbmcnamara.html David Hambling, Forbes, March 2022. The PFM-1 lineage and the toy design myth. https://www.forbes.com/sites/davidhambling/2022/03/10/russia-reportedly-blocks-ukrainian-evacuation-route-with-air-dropped-butterfly-mines/ Legacies of War. Tonnage and submunition figures for the bombing of Laos. Mines Advisory Group. Unexploded ordnance casualty estimates for Laos. Norwegian People's Aid, Lao PDR programme. The clearance breakdown of mines versus other explosive items. https://www.npaid.org/mine-action-and-disarmament/where-we-work/lao-pdr ABC News, The Bombing of Laos: By the Numbers. https://abcnews.com/International/bombing-laos-numbers/story?id=41890565 Interview Sera Koulabdara, Chief Executive Officer of Legacies of War, speaking with the United States Institute of Peace. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VYa5boERN30 This is a history documentary made for educational purposes. It contains no graphic imagery and no instructions of any kind. If you would rather have the documented version of history than the version a content farm invented last week, subscribe. It keeps the archive work going. #VietnamWar #MilitaryHistory #ColdWar