Willy Peter (white phosphorus) - Democratic Underground

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Willy Peter (white phosphorus)

Willy Peter

This article examines the US military's use of white phosphorus, an incendiary weapon commonly known as "Willy Peter," in the November 2004 attacks on Fallujah. Though white phosphorous munitions are banned under the 1980 Geneva Convention on Biological and Chemical Weapons, the US has not signed the agreement and instead classifies white phosphorous as a "psychological" weapon. As ZMag points out, there is nothing psychological about a weapon that melts skin to the bone while damaging the nervous system and blocking the circulation of blood.

http://www.globalpolicy.org/security/issues/iraq/fallujah/2006/01willypeter.htm

Willy Peter
By Danny Mayer*
ZMag
January 2006

<snip>
While the Pentagon initially denied using white phosphorus in any capacity other than as an illumination round, reports from embedded U.S. journalists and a March 2005 Field Artillery magazine article published by the U.S. military said just the opposite. These two sources, coupled with Italian media and eyewitness accounts of civilians in Fallujah burned to the bone, forced the Pentagon to change from suggesting purity of motive (“we don’t use napalm or chemical weapons”) to a more nuanced and legalistic terminology. Now, it seems, white phosphorus was “used as an incendiary weapon against enemy combatants.”

Because the U.S. is not a signatory to the 1980 Geneva Convention and has challenged the legal definition of chemical weapons, the Pentagon now claims that white phosphorus is “not a chemical weapon” and therefore “not outlawed or illegal.” For the Pentagon, at least, the “shake and bake” missions are a “potent psychological weapon” that will drive the enemy “out of their holes.” The use of white phosphorus has a particularly brutal history. During the war in Vietnam, the U.S. used white phosphorous as an improved form of napalm, terrorizing enemies. Then, as now, it was touted as a psychological tool of warfare necessary to subdue enemy hamlets.

Unlike napalm, which in Vietnam left villagers and enemies alike with massive burns all over their bodies, white phosphorus burns down to the bone. Le The Thrung, a Vietnamese doctor studying white phosphorus burns in 1969, describes its effects on the skin: “burning phosphorus produces 800-1,000 degrees centigrade heat. Scattered phosphorus particles go on consuming themselves and deepen burn wounds.” Next, chemical compounds “create a chemical burn, like an acid, drawing water from the cells. This process generates great pain in the nervous system.” Finally, white phosphorus compounds oxygenate and penetrate “the blood stream and white blood cells in the dermis, subdermis, and deeper skin layers.” This creates what he calls an “organic toxicity that blocks off all blood circulation with the burn area.”

It wasn’t just medical professionals noting the brutal effects of white phosphorus. A U.S. serviceperson, at the height of the Vietnam War, remarked, “We sure are pleased with those backroom boys at Dow. The original product wasn’t so hot—if the gooks were quick they could scrape it off. So the boys started adding polystyrene—now it sticks like shit to a blanket. But then if the gooks jumped under water it stopped burning, so they started adding Willy Peter so’s to make it burn better. It’ll even burn under water now. And one drop is enough; it’ll keep on burning right down to the bone so they die anyway from phosphorus poisoning.”

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