What Goes Around Comes Around and Burns You Down (A Story of the Japanese Empire and Harvard's Chemistry Department)

While browsing today's Higher Ed newsletter (don't laugh, everyone needs to keep a few job irons in the fire in these uncertain times) I saw a book review that included this nugget:  

In 1967, in the midst of the Vietnam War, Harvard University English professor Neil Rudenstine intervened in a protest on campus, where a recruiter from Dow Chemical Company, which made napalm, had been surrounded by students upset about U.S. attacks on Vietnamese civilians. He helped defuse the tension by negotiating with students to release the recruiter.

Well, that immediately made me think about the history of napalm, which by a great irony was the brainchild of Harvard itself when it was doing war work for the USG in 1942. True story, which you can read all about in this Harvard Crimson article.

The first napalm experiments were even conducted right there on the Harvard campus, as you can see in the photo above. That came as an uncomfortable surprise to Vietnam War protestors on campus.

 

The great historical irony is that the USG was in need of a new incendiary in 1942 only because latex, which had been used in earlier incendiaries, became a scare commodity after the Japanese Empire invaded and occupied Malaya, Indonesia, Vietnam, and Thailand early in the war, thereby capturing most of the world's natural rubber sources.

Napalm was used in all theaters of the war, and was later used in Korea and Vietnam, but by far it's greatest concentration was in the U.S. fire-bomb campaign against 60-some Japanese cities. 

How's that for unintended consequences?