Bomb Harvest (ATOM Study Guide)

During the Vietnam War, more than two million tonnes of bombs were dropped on Laos. This exceeds the number of bombs dropped by all the Allied forces during World War Two. With a population of only three million, there was almost half a tonne of bombs dropped for every man, woman and child living in Laos. The country endured nine years of this heavy and relentless bombardment, with the US dropping a planeload of bombs every eight minutes, day and night, from 1964 to 1973. About a third of the population was killed, injured or rendered homeless by the air war. The statistics are horrifying – 580,000 bombing missions in nine years, with one mission, one B52, equating to more than one hundred bombs. From this background, it is all too clear that Laos deserves the terrible title of the 'most heavily bombed country on the face of the planet'. But as Kim Mordaunt's harrowing documentary Bomb Harvest reveals, the horror and suffering did not come to an end with the departure of the B52s. Thirty percent of the bombs failed to explode on impact and remain alive and deadly today. In excess of 13,000 people have been killed or injured by this lethal detritus since the end of the war, and people continue to die on a weekly basis from explosions.

Bomb Harvest critically examines the far-reaching consequences of foreign policy decisions from another era. Bombs litter the Lao landscape and have made it all but impossible to farm in some areas. It would seem the poor of Laos are left with two unpalatable choices: hunt for food in the jungle or hunt for metal to sell. Many of the villagers pick and scrape at their land, harvesting the new cash crop of scrap metal and feeding the dangerous industry of bomb scrap dealers.