The Asia-Pacific Journal | Japan Focus Volume 13 | Issue 17 | Number 3 | Article ID 4313 | Apr 27 2015

1

Making More Enemies than We Kill Calculating US BombTonnages Dropped on Laos and Cambodia and WeighingTheir Implications 我々は殺すよりも多くの敵を産み出してきたのだろうか 　ラオスカンボジアに投下された爆弾のトン数とその意味を考える

Taylor Owen Ben Kiernan

Debate over the nature and impact of civiliancasualties from US aerial attacks continuesldquoAre we creating more terrorists than wersquorekillingrdquo Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeldonce asked of the US invasion of Iraq1 Therise of Al Qaeda in Iraq and of its offshoot ISISsuggests the answer there2 Reflecting in 2012on US drone strikes in Yemen the formerdirector of the CIArsquos Counter-Terrorism CenterRobert Greiner wrote ldquoOne wonders howmany Yemenis may be moved in future toviolent extremism in reaction to carelesslytargeted missile strikes and how many Yemenimilitants with strictly local agendas willbecome dedicated enemies of the West inresponse to US military actions against themrdquo3

That same month a Yemeni lawyer warnedldquoDEAR OBAMA when a US drone missile killsa child in Yemen the father will go to war withyou guaranteed Nothing to do with AlQaedardquo4

In 2013 David Rohde of Reuters reported thatldquoDrone strikes do kill senior militants at timesbut using them excessively and keeping themsecret sows anti-Americanism that jihadists useas a recruiting toolrdquo5 As discussion continuedover ldquoHow Drones Create More TerroristsrdquoHassan Abbas remarked that in targeted areasldquoPublic outrage against drone strikescircuitously empowers terroristsrdquo6 Thehumanitarian impact and the politicalldquoblowbackrdquo can be serious -- even fromrelatively restricted tactical air campaigns

What of sustained strategic carpet bombing Isthere any correlation between bomb tonnageand political blowback During World War TwoUnited States aircraft dropped 16 million tonsof bombs in the European theater andapproximately 500000 tons in the Pacifictheater Some 160000 tons of bombs fell onJapan nearly all of it in the final six months ofthe war Much of it targeted civilian industrialareas beginning with the March 10 1945firebombing of Tokyo and including the atomicbombs dropped that August on the cities ofHiroshima and Nagasaki

Decisive victory proved more elusive inregional conflicts of the postwar era evenwhen the US continued to deploy massivebomb tonnages During the Korean War of1950-53 the US dropped 635000 tons ofbombs and 32000 tons of napalm mostly onNorth Korea 7 And from 1961 to 1972American aircraft dropped approximately onemillion tons of bombs on North Vietnam andmuch more on rural areas of South Vietnam --approximately 4 million tons of bombs 400000tons of napalm and 19 million gallons ofherbicides8

On a per capita basis Laos with its muchsmaller and dispersed population may havesuf fered a ye t h igher ra te o f aer ia lbombardment during 1964-73 ndash ldquonearly a tonfor every person in Laosrdquo according to the NewYork Times9 The late Fred Branfman wholearned Lao and worked with refugees

APJ | JF 13 | 17 | 3

2

displaced in the country in 1967-69 was one ofthe first to publicize the human toll of thatsecret US bombing in his 1972 Voices fromthe Plain of Jars Life under an Air WarBranfmanrsquos book was reprinted in 2013 with aforeword by Alfred W McCoy that terms theLaos campaign ldquohistoryrsquos longest and largestair warrdquo10 Meanwhile in 2008 anthropologistHolly High even suggested that the estimatedtonnage of US bombs dropped on Laos duringthe Second Indochina War needed dramaticupward revision

The conventional history booksusually place the total tonnagedropped over Laos at two milliontonnes making Laos the mostheavily bombed nation on earthThis figure [ has] becomeiconic in describing the destructionand loss wrecked on Laos However this tonnage tally hasonly ever been an estimate Currently emerging evidencesuggests that the actual figure maybe more than two and a half timesthis figure some 57 milliontonnes11

However six years later in the Journal ofVietnamese Studies (JVS) High revised backdownward that suggested ldquoactual figurerdquo of 57million tonnes of US bombs dropped on LaosShe now confirms ldquothe conventional figure ofaround two million tonsrdquo12

During 2000-2010 various estimates includingours of the US bombing tonnage dropped onCambodia from 1969 to 1973 followed atrajectory similar to Highrsquos up-down estimatesfor Laos And for similar reasons thedifficulties of technical analysis of thePentagonrsquos enormous but antiquated SoutheastAsia bombing databases In 1989 one of us(Kiernan) had published an article calculating afigure of 539000 tons dropped on Cambodia13

But in 2000 just as High did for Laos eightyears later the Phnom Penh Post reported anew Cambodia total a dramatic upwardrevision ldquoThe [data] tapes show that 43415bombing raids were made on Cambodiadropping more than 2 million tons of bombsand other ordinancerdquo14 This figure hadsignificant implications for the continuing workto clear the Cambodian countryside of the stillwidespread deadly unexploded ordnance(UXO) as well as for a historical understandingof the wartime humanitarian and politicalimpact of the US carpet bombings

Our 2006 article ldquoBombs over Cambodiardquousing the same database and analysiscalculated a figure of 27 million tons droppedon Cambodia in 1965-7515 Our estimatepublished in the Canadian magazine TheWalrus and in 2007 in The Asia-Pacific Journalwas widely quoted16

But in 2010 we corrected that estimate here inThe Asia-Pacific Journal We revised it backdown to around 500000 tons17 In doing so wetook account of the mistaken technical analysisthat had impacted bombing tonnage estimatesfor both Laos and Cambodia Holly High hadwritten to Kiernan on January 4 2010 ldquoI havebeen working with computer scientists here atSydney and we have managed to make a fairlyresponsive database and also account for theanomalies in the data The database coversall of Southeast Asia and contains many morefields than the data that you were workingwith from what I can tell from the data on theCambodian Genocide Project website It lookslike the data you and others in the UXObusiness were provided with was a simplifieddistilled version of the original SEADAB andCACTA files [combined Pentagon databasesentitled ldquoRecords About Air Sorties Flown inSoutheast Asiardquo and ldquoCombat Air Activitiesrdquo]sorted country by country so that each nationreceived only ldquoitsrdquo records The originaldatabase is much larger indeed it is simplymassive It is also deeply flawed (some of the

APJ | JF 13 | 17 | 3

3

data appears to have been corrupted and thereare omissions in certain months)rdquo

Kiernan wrote back to High on January 182010 stating that ldquowe would urgently like toincorporate corrections of mistakes that werebased on faulty Pentagon data and show wherethat data is inaccurate If it is okay with youwe would of course like to credit you and yourskilled research assistant at Sydney UnirsquosFaculty of Information Technology who hasworked on this with you for bringing thedatabase errors to our attention Obviously thesooner we correct those the betterrdquo In anemail of March 1 2010 High asserted that inthe Pentagonrsquos SEADAB database the originalentries for each sortie under the field ofbombing ldquoLoad Weightrdquo had been incorrectlykeyed in with a zero mistakenly added to eachfigure Those bombing tonnages thus had to bedivided by ten

In June 2010 therefore we published ourdownward correction of our 2006 estimate of27 million tons We stated that ldquothis tonnagedata may be incorrect In new work using theoriginal Air Force SEADAB and CACTAdatabases Holly High and others have re-analyzed the total Cambodia tonnage figuresand argue in a forthcoming article that the totaltonnage dropped on Cambodia was at least472313 tons or somewhat higherrdquo Weconcluded ldquoIt remains undisputed that in1969-73 alone around 500000 tons of USbombs fell on Cambodiardquo18

Angkor-era Khmer temple at PhnomChisor Takeo province Cambodia PhotoBen Kiernan 1988

Now in their JVS article published in 2014High and two co-authors cite precisely thatparagraph of ours19 But they neither quotefrom it nor reveal to readers the fact that in it ndashin 2010 ndash we had publicly revised our estimateback downward and acknowledged theirassistance in doing so Instead in 2014incomprehensibly they create the exactopposite impression ldquoOwen and Kiernanrsquosrevised figure [sic] is nearly five times higherthan conventional estimates hellip Owen andKiernanrsquos reassessment of the air war overCambodia has also been uncritically cited by anumber of other scholarshellip The idea thatCambodia was the victim of 27 million tons ofordnance rather than 05 million is becomingthe ldquonew normalrdquo in Cambodian studies Thisupward revision has serious implications forthe reading of regional military and globalhistoryrdquo20

We of course find that statement surprisinggiven that in 2010 we actually wrote theopposite as High knows Not only fromKiernanrsquos prior emails to her but her note 26specifically cites our ldquonote 38rdquo where amongother places in our 2010 publication weadvocated the figure of 500000 tons Highrsquos

APJ | JF 13 | 17 | 3

4

own 2008 exaggeration of the Laos bombing at5 7 m i l l i o n t o n n e s w a s e n t i r e l yunderstandable but she has corrected that onlyin 2014

The most important outstanding issue concernspublic access to the different databases we allhave been working on For some years we havemade our Cambodia bombing data filesaccessible through the Cambodian GenocideProgram at Yale University21 On January 42010 High had written to Kiernan ldquoI would behappy to help you access the database that wehave created Let me know if you would liketo access this any timerdquo Kiernan thanked herfor that offer and posed several questions aboutthe data On January 28 she wrote again ldquoIthink the best course of action is for JamesGareth and I to continue to finalize our piece ofwriting and then share it with you when it is ina near final state (close to final draft)rdquo Kiernandid not hear from High again but on February19 2010 she kindly sent Owen a draft of ldquowhatI have written for Cambodia so far (work inprogress)rdquo It included none of the assertionsabout us published in 2014 quoted aboveDespite further requests neither of us heardany more from High after June 2010 ndash untilMarch 2015 when the co-authored articlepublished in JVS in 2014 first came to ourattention

In an email to Kiernan on January 7 2010 Highwrote that ldquothe database is wildly inaccurateitself if only because it was based on all-too-human data entry and was also subjected tofalsification as Shawcross notes [in his 1979book Sideshow] So I think the databaseprobably underestimates the scale of thebombing but the database itself canrsquot tell us byhow much or how to account for thisrdquo Wesuggest that High and her co-authors nowmake publicly accessible the database that isthe subject of their 2014 JVS publication as wedid for our 2006 and 2010 articles

In addition in the interest of the full

transparency of a process that is complex buthistorically important the public record wouldalso benefit from a more detailed accounting ofhow High and her colleagues processed theoriginal data files they obtained In whatfollows we outline some of our exchanges withHigh because they document the researchexercise at the core of the debate over the useof archived bombing data and ultimately overthemdashby all accountsmdashmassive bombardment ofCambodia

Our work and that of High and her co-authorson this topic are based on data originallycollected by the US government The databasesare huge they represent what was at the timean unprecedented data collection effort andthey contain significant ambiguity concerningthe collection methodology and the precisenature of the data fields In order for these datato be analyzed they had to be converted tomodern database formats In the version weand the Phnom Penh Post obtained forCambodia this had already been done Highand her colleagues on the other hand used theoriginal archived data and working withcomputer scientists conducted the datacleaning and conversion themselves Theversion of the database that they built appearsto be similar but not identical to the one weused for our analysis

The insights that High and her co-authors drewfrom this process and shared with us in emailexchanges provided a substantial contributionto our understanding Of particular relevanceto our analysis they found errors in what weread to be the total tonnage field in theCambodia database High detailed theiranalysis to us via email and based on this werevised our tonnage figure downward Forexample on March 1 2010 in response to ourquestion about how they had derived theirtonnage figures High explained theirprocedures for each of the two Pentagondatabases in turn

APJ | JF 13 | 17 | 3

2

displaced in the country in 1967-69 was one ofthe first to publicize the human toll of thatsecret US bombing in his 1972 Voices fromthe Plain of Jars Life under an Air WarBranfmanrsquos book was reprinted in 2013 with aforeword by Alfred W McCoy that terms theLaos campaign ldquohistoryrsquos longest and largestair warrdquo10 Meanwhile in 2008 anthropologistHolly High even suggested that the estimatedtonnage of US bombs dropped on Laos duringthe Second Indochina War needed dramaticupward revision

The conventional history booksusually place the total tonnagedropped over Laos at two milliontonnes making Laos the mostheavily bombed nation on earthThis figure [ has] becomeiconic in describing the destructionand loss wrecked on Laos However this tonnage tally hasonly ever been an estimate Currently emerging evidencesuggests that the actual figure maybe more than two and a half timesthis figure some 57 milliontonnes11

However six years later in the Journal ofVietnamese Studies (JVS) High revised backdownward that suggested ldquoactual figurerdquo of 57million tonnes of US bombs dropped on LaosShe now confirms ldquothe conventional figure ofaround two million tonsrdquo12

During 2000-2010 various estimates includingours of the US bombing tonnage dropped onCambodia from 1969 to 1973 followed atrajectory similar to Highrsquos up-down estimatesfor Laos And for similar reasons thedifficulties of technical analysis of thePentagonrsquos enormous but antiquated SoutheastAsia bombing databases In 1989 one of us(Kiernan) had published an article calculating afigure of 539000 tons dropped on Cambodia13

But in 2000 just as High did for Laos eightyears later the Phnom Penh Post reported anew Cambodia total a dramatic upwardrevision ldquoThe [data] tapes show that 43415bombing raids were made on Cambodiadropping more than 2 million tons of bombsand other ordinancerdquo14 This figure hadsignificant implications for the continuing workto clear the Cambodian countryside of the stillwidespread deadly unexploded ordnance(UXO) as well as for a historical understandingof the wartime humanitarian and politicalimpact of the US carpet bombings

Our 2006 article ldquoBombs over Cambodiardquousing the same database and analysiscalculated a figure of 27 million tons droppedon Cambodia in 1965-7515 Our estimatepublished in the Canadian magazine TheWalrus and in 2007 in The Asia-Pacific Journalwas widely quoted16

But in 2010 we corrected that estimate here inThe Asia-Pacific Journal We revised it backdown to around 500000 tons17 In doing so wetook account of the mistaken technical analysisthat had impacted bombing tonnage estimatesfor both Laos and Cambodia Holly High hadwritten to Kiernan on January 4 2010 ldquoI havebeen working with computer scientists here atSydney and we have managed to make a fairlyresponsive database and also account for theanomalies in the data The database coversall of Southeast Asia and contains many morefields than the data that you were workingwith from what I can tell from the data on theCambodian Genocide Project website It lookslike the data you and others in the UXObusiness were provided with was a simplifieddistilled version of the original SEADAB andCACTA files [combined Pentagon databasesentitled ldquoRecords About Air Sorties Flown inSoutheast Asiardquo and ldquoCombat Air Activitiesrdquo]sorted country by country so that each nationreceived only ldquoitsrdquo records The originaldatabase is much larger indeed it is simplymassive It is also deeply flawed (some of the

APJ | JF 13 | 17 | 3

3

data appears to have been corrupted and thereare omissions in certain months)rdquo

Kiernan wrote back to High on January 182010 stating that ldquowe would urgently like toincorporate corrections of mistakes that werebased on faulty Pentagon data and show wherethat data is inaccurate If it is okay with youwe would of course like to credit you and yourskilled research assistant at Sydney UnirsquosFaculty of Information Technology who hasworked on this with you for bringing thedatabase errors to our attention Obviously thesooner we correct those the betterrdquo In anemail of March 1 2010 High asserted that inthe Pentagonrsquos SEADAB database the originalentries for each sortie under the field ofbombing ldquoLoad Weightrdquo had been incorrectlykeyed in with a zero mistakenly added to eachfigure Those bombing tonnages thus had to bedivided by ten

In June 2010 therefore we published ourdownward correction of our 2006 estimate of27 million tons We stated that ldquothis tonnagedata may be incorrect In new work using theoriginal Air Force SEADAB and CACTAdatabases Holly High and others have re-analyzed the total Cambodia tonnage figuresand argue in a forthcoming article that the totaltonnage dropped on Cambodia was at least472313 tons or somewhat higherrdquo Weconcluded ldquoIt remains undisputed that in1969-73 alone around 500000 tons of USbombs fell on Cambodiardquo18

Angkor-era Khmer temple at PhnomChisor Takeo province Cambodia PhotoBen Kiernan 1988

Now in their JVS article published in 2014High and two co-authors cite precisely thatparagraph of ours19 But they neither quotefrom it nor reveal to readers the fact that in it ndashin 2010 ndash we had publicly revised our estimateback downward and acknowledged theirassistance in doing so Instead in 2014incomprehensibly they create the exactopposite impression ldquoOwen and Kiernanrsquosrevised figure [sic] is nearly five times higherthan conventional estimates hellip Owen andKiernanrsquos reassessment of the air war overCambodia has also been uncritically cited by anumber of other scholarshellip The idea thatCambodia was the victim of 27 million tons ofordnance rather than 05 million is becomingthe ldquonew normalrdquo in Cambodian studies Thisupward revision has serious implications forthe reading of regional military and globalhistoryrdquo20

We of course find that statement surprisinggiven that in 2010 we actually wrote theopposite as High knows Not only fromKiernanrsquos prior emails to her but her note 26specifically cites our ldquonote 38rdquo where amongother places in our 2010 publication weadvocated the figure of 500000 tons Highrsquos

APJ | JF 13 | 17 | 3

4

own 2008 exaggeration of the Laos bombing at5 7 m i l l i o n t o n n e s w a s e n t i r e l yunderstandable but she has corrected that onlyin 2014

The most important outstanding issue concernspublic access to the different databases we allhave been working on For some years we havemade our Cambodia bombing data filesaccessible through the Cambodian GenocideProgram at Yale University21 On January 42010 High had written to Kiernan ldquoI would behappy to help you access the database that wehave created Let me know if you would liketo access this any timerdquo Kiernan thanked herfor that offer and posed several questions aboutthe data On January 28 she wrote again ldquoIthink the best course of action is for JamesGareth and I to continue to finalize our piece ofwriting and then share it with you when it is ina near final state (close to final draft)rdquo Kiernandid not hear from High again but on February19 2010 she kindly sent Owen a draft of ldquowhatI have written for Cambodia so far (work inprogress)rdquo It included none of the assertionsabout us published in 2014 quoted aboveDespite further requests neither of us heardany more from High after June 2010 ndash untilMarch 2015 when the co-authored articlepublished in JVS in 2014 first came to ourattention

In an email to Kiernan on January 7 2010 Highwrote that ldquothe database is wildly inaccurateitself if only because it was based on all-too-human data entry and was also subjected tofalsification as Shawcross notes [in his 1979book Sideshow] So I think the databaseprobably underestimates the scale of thebombing but the database itself canrsquot tell us byhow much or how to account for thisrdquo Wesuggest that High and her co-authors nowmake publicly accessible the database that isthe subject of their 2014 JVS publication as wedid for our 2006 and 2010 articles

In addition in the interest of the full

transparency of a process that is complex buthistorically important the public record wouldalso benefit from a more detailed accounting ofhow High and her colleagues processed theoriginal data files they obtained In whatfollows we outline some of our exchanges withHigh because they document the researchexercise at the core of the debate over the useof archived bombing data and ultimately overthemdashby all accountsmdashmassive bombardment ofCambodia

Our work and that of High and her co-authorson this topic are based on data originallycollected by the US government The databasesare huge they represent what was at the timean unprecedented data collection effort andthey contain significant ambiguity concerningthe collection methodology and the precisenature of the data fields In order for these datato be analyzed they had to be converted tomodern database formats In the version weand the Phnom Penh Post obtained forCambodia this had already been done Highand her colleagues on the other hand used theoriginal archived data and working withcomputer scientists conducted the datacleaning and conversion themselves Theversion of the database that they built appearsto be similar but not identical to the one weused for our analysis

The insights that High and her co-authors drewfrom this process and shared with us in emailexchanges provided a substantial contributionto our understanding Of particular relevanceto our analysis they found errors in what weread to be the total tonnage field in theCambodia database High detailed theiranalysis to us via email and based on this werevised our tonnage figure downward Forexample on March 1 2010 in response to ourquestion about how they had derived theirtonnage figures High explained theirprocedures for each of the two Pentagondatabases in turn

APJ | JF 13 | 17 | 3

3

data appears to have been corrupted and thereare omissions in certain months)rdquo

Kiernan wrote back to High on January 182010 stating that ldquowe would urgently like toincorporate corrections of mistakes that werebased on faulty Pentagon data and show wherethat data is inaccurate If it is okay with youwe would of course like to credit you and yourskilled research assistant at Sydney UnirsquosFaculty of Information Technology who hasworked on this with you for bringing thedatabase errors to our attention Obviously thesooner we correct those the betterrdquo In anemail of March 1 2010 High asserted that inthe Pentagonrsquos SEADAB database the originalentries for each sortie under the field ofbombing ldquoLoad Weightrdquo had been incorrectlykeyed in with a zero mistakenly added to eachfigure Those bombing tonnages thus had to bedivided by ten

In June 2010 therefore we published ourdownward correction of our 2006 estimate of27 million tons We stated that ldquothis tonnagedata may be incorrect In new work using theoriginal Air Force SEADAB and CACTAdatabases Holly High and others have re-analyzed the total Cambodia tonnage figuresand argue in a forthcoming article that the totaltonnage dropped on Cambodia was at least472313 tons or somewhat higherrdquo Weconcluded ldquoIt remains undisputed that in1969-73 alone around 500000 tons of USbombs fell on Cambodiardquo18

Angkor-era Khmer temple at PhnomChisor Takeo province Cambodia PhotoBen Kiernan 1988

Now in their JVS article published in 2014High and two co-authors cite precisely thatparagraph of ours19 But they neither quotefrom it nor reveal to readers the fact that in it ndashin 2010 ndash we had publicly revised our estimateback downward and acknowledged theirassistance in doing so Instead in 2014incomprehensibly they create the exactopposite impression ldquoOwen and Kiernanrsquosrevised figure [sic] is nearly five times higherthan conventional estimates hellip Owen andKiernanrsquos reassessment of the air war overCambodia has also been uncritically cited by anumber of other scholarshellip The idea thatCambodia was the victim of 27 million tons ofordnance rather than 05 million is becomingthe ldquonew normalrdquo in Cambodian studies Thisupward revision has serious implications forthe reading of regional military and globalhistoryrdquo20

We of course find that statement surprisinggiven that in 2010 we actually wrote theopposite as High knows Not only fromKiernanrsquos prior emails to her but her note 26specifically cites our ldquonote 38rdquo where amongother places in our 2010 publication weadvocated the figure of 500000 tons Highrsquos

APJ | JF 13 | 17 | 3

4

own 2008 exaggeration of the Laos bombing at5 7 m i l l i o n t o n n e s w a s e n t i r e l yunderstandable but she has corrected that onlyin 2014

The most important outstanding issue concernspublic access to the different databases we allhave been working on For some years we havemade our Cambodia bombing data filesaccessible through the Cambodian GenocideProgram at Yale University21 On January 42010 High had written to Kiernan ldquoI would behappy to help you access the database that wehave created Let me know if you would liketo access this any timerdquo Kiernan thanked herfor that offer and posed several questions aboutthe data On January 28 she wrote again ldquoIthink the best course of action is for JamesGareth and I to continue to finalize our piece ofwriting and then share it with you when it is ina near final state (close to final draft)rdquo Kiernandid not hear from High again but on February19 2010 she kindly sent Owen a draft of ldquowhatI have written for Cambodia so far (work inprogress)rdquo It included none of the assertionsabout us published in 2014 quoted aboveDespite further requests neither of us heardany more from High after June 2010 ndash untilMarch 2015 when the co-authored articlepublished in JVS in 2014 first came to ourattention

In an email to Kiernan on January 7 2010 Highwrote that ldquothe database is wildly inaccurateitself if only because it was based on all-too-human data entry and was also subjected tofalsification as Shawcross notes [in his 1979book Sideshow] So I think the databaseprobably underestimates the scale of thebombing but the database itself canrsquot tell us byhow much or how to account for thisrdquo Wesuggest that High and her co-authors nowmake publicly accessible the database that isthe subject of their 2014 JVS publication as wedid for our 2006 and 2010 articles

In addition in the interest of the full

transparency of a process that is complex buthistorically important the public record wouldalso benefit from a more detailed accounting ofhow High and her colleagues processed theoriginal data files they obtained In whatfollows we outline some of our exchanges withHigh because they document the researchexercise at the core of the debate over the useof archived bombing data and ultimately overthemdashby all accountsmdashmassive bombardment ofCambodia

Our work and that of High and her co-authorson this topic are based on data originallycollected by the US government The databasesare huge they represent what was at the timean unprecedented data collection effort andthey contain significant ambiguity concerningthe collection methodology and the precisenature of the data fields In order for these datato be analyzed they had to be converted tomodern database formats In the version weand the Phnom Penh Post obtained forCambodia this had already been done Highand her colleagues on the other hand used theoriginal archived data and working withcomputer scientists conducted the datacleaning and conversion themselves Theversion of the database that they built appearsto be similar but not identical to the one weused for our analysis

The insights that High and her co-authors drewfrom this process and shared with us in emailexchanges provided a substantial contributionto our understanding Of particular relevanceto our analysis they found errors in what weread to be the total tonnage field in theCambodia database High detailed theiranalysis to us via email and based on this werevised our tonnage figure downward Forexample on March 1 2010 in response to ourquestion about how they had derived theirtonnage figures High explained theirprocedures for each of the two Pentagondatabases in turn

APJ | JF 13 | 17 | 3

4

own 2008 exaggeration of the Laos bombing at5 7 m i l l i o n t o n n e s w a s e n t i r e l yunderstandable but she has corrected that onlyin 2014

The most important outstanding issue concernspublic access to the different databases we allhave been working on For some years we havemade our Cambodia bombing data filesaccessible through the Cambodian GenocideProgram at Yale University21 On January 42010 High had written to Kiernan ldquoI would behappy to help you access the database that wehave created Let me know if you would liketo access this any timerdquo Kiernan thanked herfor that offer and posed several questions aboutthe data On January 28 she wrote again ldquoIthink the best course of action is for JamesGareth and I to continue to finalize our piece ofwriting and then share it with you when it is ina near final state (close to final draft)rdquo Kiernandid not hear from High again but on February19 2010 she kindly sent Owen a draft of ldquowhatI have written for Cambodia so far (work inprogress)rdquo It included none of the assertionsabout us published in 2014 quoted aboveDespite further requests neither of us heardany more from High after June 2010 ndash untilMarch 2015 when the co-authored articlepublished in JVS in 2014 first came to ourattention

In an email to Kiernan on January 7 2010 Highwrote that ldquothe database is wildly inaccurateitself if only because it was based on all-too-human data entry and was also subjected tofalsification as Shawcross notes [in his 1979book Sideshow] So I think the databaseprobably underestimates the scale of thebombing but the database itself canrsquot tell us byhow much or how to account for thisrdquo Wesuggest that High and her co-authors nowmake publicly accessible the database that isthe subject of their 2014 JVS publication as wedid for our 2006 and 2010 articles

In addition in the interest of the full

transparency of a process that is complex buthistorically important the public record wouldalso benefit from a more detailed accounting ofhow High and her colleagues processed theoriginal data files they obtained In whatfollows we outline some of our exchanges withHigh because they document the researchexercise at the core of the debate over the useof archived bombing data and ultimately overthemdashby all accountsmdashmassive bombardment ofCambodia

Our work and that of High and her co-authorson this topic are based on data originallycollected by the US government The databasesare huge they represent what was at the timean unprecedented data collection effort andthey contain significant ambiguity concerningthe collection methodology and the precisenature of the data fields In order for these datato be analyzed they had to be converted tomodern database formats In the version weand the Phnom Penh Post obtained forCambodia this had already been done Highand her colleagues on the other hand used theoriginal archived data and working withcomputer scientists conducted the datacleaning and conversion themselves Theversion of the database that they built appearsto be similar but not identical to the one weused for our analysis

The insights that High and her co-authors drewfrom this process and shared with us in emailexchanges provided a substantial contributionto our understanding Of particular relevanceto our analysis they found errors in what weread to be the total tonnage field in theCambodia database High detailed theiranalysis to us via email and based on this werevised our tonnage figure downward Forexample on March 1 2010 in response to ourquestion about how they had derived theirtonnage figures High explained theirprocedures for each of the two Pentagondatabases in turn

APJ | JF 13 | 17 | 3

5

Local farmers at Phnom Chisor in 1988pointed out what they said was 1973 USbomb damage to the historic sites modernBuddhist wat still unrepaired in 1988Photo Ben Kiernan 1988

First the CACTA database High wroteldquocontains the field lsquoLoadQuantityrsquo which iscomposed of [three parts namely] loaddelivered jettisoned and returned We made asum ofjettisoned and returned[] to calculatehow many bombs were dropped It also has afield labelledlsquoLoad Weightrsquo This lists theweight of each bomb not the total of the loadIt also has a fieldnumber of aircraft Wedetermined that the load quantity referred tothe total of all the aircraft noteach onerdquo

ldquoFor SEADABrdquo she went on ldquothe sum isdifferent Its lsquoLoad weight column representsthe total of all bombs fornumber of aircraft soin effect the sum was already done for us Theonly hitch was that allfigures ended in zero Avery unlikely scenario We did some checkingand deduced thatsomehow the entire field hadbeen multiplied by ten So we had to divide byten to get the realfigure The figures producedhave matched beautifully with other publishedfigures such as thetonnage reported forLinebacker II [the 1972 ldquoChristmas bombingrdquoof North Vietnam]rdquo

This is a valuable insight into the nature of thedatabase and the thoughtful analysis that HighCurran and Robinson have conducted But it issimply a window into the process We do nothave access to the details of the process thatthey used to build their database nor to thecomplete database on which they have madethese final calculations Without furtherinformation we do not know for instance whya zero erroneously added to each bombing loadweight could have produced an approximatelyfivefold tonnage over-estimate (from c 05 to27 million tons) rather than a tenfold errorBut we do have here a glimpse into some of theprocess of the data analysis that it would bevaluable to have fully entered into the publicrecord This would allow us to compare thedatabase they built with the one we used forour analysis which to the best of ourknowledge are similar in structure To get thisimportant historical analysis right we ask Highand her colleagues to release their databaseand more fully explain the process by whichthey created it from the Pentagonrsquos originalfiles

In 1988 farmers at Phnom Chisor pointedto an unexploded US bomb still lyingwhere it had fallen in 1973 Photo BenKiernan 1988

The complexity of this technical discussion

APJ | JF 13 | 17 | 3

6

should not obscure the fact that whatever theprecise US bombing tonnage dropped onCambodia it was massive And as we havedocumented in three studies much of it fellindiscriminately on populated rural areas Thebombardmentrsquos humanitarian and politicaleffects are clear We stand by the conclusionswe have published on these issues over manyyears of research

ldquoThe evidence of survivors frommany parts of [Cambodia] suggeststhat at least tens of thousandsprobably in the range of 50000 to150000 deaths resulted from theUS bombing campaigns ThePol Pot leadership of the KhmerR o u g e c a n i n n o w a y b eexonerated from responsibility forcommitting genocide against theirown people But neither can Nixonor Kissinger escape judgement fortheir role in the slaughter that wasa prelude to the genociderdquo(1989) 2 2

ldquoThe still-incomplete [Pentagon]database (it has several ldquodarkrdquoperiods) reveals that over 10per cent of this bombing wasindiscriminate with 3580 of thesites listed as having ldquounknownrdquotargets and another 8238 siteshaving no target listed at all hellipTheCambodian bombing campaign hadtwo unintended side effects thatultimately combined to producethe very domino effect that theVietnam War was supposed toprevent First the bombing forcedthe Vietnamese Communistsdeeper and deeper into Cambodiabringing them into greater contactwith Khmer Rouge insurgentsSecond the bombs drove ordinaryCambodians into the arms of the

Khmer Rouge a group that seemedinitially to have slim prospects ofrevolutionary successrdquo (2006)23

ldquoCambodia became in 1969-73 oneof the most heavily-bombardedcountries in history (along withNorth Korea South Vietnam andLaos)Then in 1975-79 it sufferedgenocide at the hands of Pol PotrsquosKhmer Rouge communists whohad been military targets of theUS bombing but also became itspolitical beneficiariesrdquo (2010)24

Unknown US Bombing Targets Cambodia

During the four years of United States B-52bombardment of Cambodia from 1969 to 1973the Khmer Rouge forces grew from possiblyone thousand guerrillas to over 200000 troopsand militia25

Writing about Yemen in 2013 Albert Huntreported in the New York Times on a smaller-scale recurrence of such expansion ldquoThere ismuch evidence that the drone strikes arecreating more terrorists In a report this yearfor the Council on Foreign Relations the

APJ | JF 13 | 17 | 3

7

national security scholar Micah Zenko said thatin Yemen the Pentagon had conducted dozensof drone strikes killing more than 700 peopleIn 2009 the Obama administration said therewere lsquoseveral hundredrsquo Qaeda members in thatcountry by 2012 the group had lsquoa fewthousand membersrsquordquo26

Dropping vast tonnages of bombs has to bedestructive and carpet bombing can inflictcomprehensive damage But understanding thehuman toll requires study of the impact onpeople on the ground and as Fred Branfmandid in Laos over 45 years ago listening to theirvoices And understanding the politicalconsequences requires taking account of theirresponses Recruiters propagandizing amongbombing victims have adopted varied politicalstrategies including genocide in the case of theKhmer Rouge Al Qaeda and ISIS The questionwhether the United States ldquocreates moreterrorists than it killsrdquo has not gone away27

Ben Kiernan is the author of How Pol Pot Cameto Power (1985) The Pol Pot Regime (1996)Blood and Soil A World History of Genocideand Extermination from Sparta to Darfur(2007) and Genocide and Resistance inSoutheast Asia (2008) He is Whitney GriswoldProfessor of History and Chair of the Councilon Southeast Asia Studies at Yale University

Taylor Owen is the author of Disruptive PowerThe Crisis of the State in the Digital Age(2015) He is Assistant Professor of DigitalMedia and Global Affairs at the University ofBritish Columbia

Recommended citation Ben Kiernan and TaylorOwen Making More Enemies than We KillCalculating US Bomb Tonnages Dropped onLaos and Cambodia and Weighing TheirImplications The Asia-Pacific Journal Vol 13Issue 17 No 3 April 27 2015

Related articles

bull Ben Kiernan and Taylor Owen Roots of US

Troubles in Afghanistan Civilian BombingCasualties and the Cambodian Precedent

bull Sahr Conway-Lanz The Ethics of BombingCivilians After World War II The Persistence ofNorms Against Targeting Civilians in theKorean War

bull Mark Selden Bombs Bursting in Air Stateand citizen responses to the US firebombingand Atomic bombing of Japan

bull B r e t F i s k a n d C a r y K a r a c a s TheFirebombing of Tokyo and Its LegacyIntroduction

bullTaylor Owen and Ben Kiernan Bombs OverCambodia New Light on US Air War

Notes

1 Albert R Hunt ldquoKilling Terrorists CreatingM o r e rdquo N e w Y o r k T i m e s A p r i l 1 6 2013(accessed April 25 2015)

2 The New York Times reports that by 2007 AlQaeda ldquohad taken control of several majorcities and provincesrdquo in Iraq Michael SSchmidt and Matt Apuzzo ldquoPetraeus ReachesPlea Dealhelliprdquo March 4 2015 p A15

3 Robert Greiner ldquoYemen and the US Down aFamil iar Pathrdquo Al - Jazeera May 102012 (accessed April 25 2015)

4 Ibrahim Monthana ldquoHow Drones Help AlQaedardquo New York Times June 13 2012(accessed April 25 2015)

5 David Rohde ldquoObamarsquos Overdue Step onDronesrdquo Reuters May 24 2013 (accessedApril 25 2015)

6 Hassan Abbas Atlantic August 23 2013(accessed April 25 2015)

7 Bruce Cumings The Korean War New York

APJ | JF 13 | 17 | 3

6

should not obscure the fact that whatever theprecise US bombing tonnage dropped onCambodia it was massive And as we havedocumented in three studies much of it fellindiscriminately on populated rural areas Thebombardmentrsquos humanitarian and politicaleffects are clear We stand by the conclusionswe have published on these issues over manyyears of research

ldquoThe evidence of survivors frommany parts of [Cambodia] suggeststhat at least tens of thousandsprobably in the range of 50000 to150000 deaths resulted from theUS bombing campaigns ThePol Pot leadership of the KhmerR o u g e c a n i n n o w a y b eexonerated from responsibility forcommitting genocide against theirown people But neither can Nixonor Kissinger escape judgement fortheir role in the slaughter that wasa prelude to the genociderdquo(1989) 2 2

ldquoThe still-incomplete [Pentagon]database (it has several ldquodarkrdquoperiods) reveals that over 10per cent of this bombing wasindiscriminate with 3580 of thesites listed as having ldquounknownrdquotargets and another 8238 siteshaving no target listed at all hellipTheCambodian bombing campaign hadtwo unintended side effects thatultimately combined to producethe very domino effect that theVietnam War was supposed toprevent First the bombing forcedthe Vietnamese Communistsdeeper and deeper into Cambodiabringing them into greater contactwith Khmer Rouge insurgentsSecond the bombs drove ordinaryCambodians into the arms of the

Khmer Rouge a group that seemedinitially to have slim prospects ofrevolutionary successrdquo (2006)23

ldquoCambodia became in 1969-73 oneof the most heavily-bombardedcountries in history (along withNorth Korea South Vietnam andLaos)Then in 1975-79 it sufferedgenocide at the hands of Pol PotrsquosKhmer Rouge communists whohad been military targets of theUS bombing but also became itspolitical beneficiariesrdquo (2010)24

Unknown US Bombing Targets Cambodia

During the four years of United States B-52bombardment of Cambodia from 1969 to 1973the Khmer Rouge forces grew from possiblyone thousand guerrillas to over 200000 troopsand militia25

Writing about Yemen in 2013 Albert Huntreported in the New York Times on a smaller-scale recurrence of such expansion ldquoThere ismuch evidence that the drone strikes arecreating more terrorists In a report this yearfor the Council on Foreign Relations the

APJ | JF 13 | 17 | 3

7

national security scholar Micah Zenko said thatin Yemen the Pentagon had conducted dozensof drone strikes killing more than 700 peopleIn 2009 the Obama administration said therewere lsquoseveral hundredrsquo Qaeda members in thatcountry by 2012 the group had lsquoa fewthousand membersrsquordquo26

Dropping vast tonnages of bombs has to bedestructive and carpet bombing can inflictcomprehensive damage But understanding thehuman toll requires study of the impact onpeople on the ground and as Fred Branfmandid in Laos over 45 years ago listening to theirvoices And understanding the politicalconsequences requires taking account of theirresponses Recruiters propagandizing amongbombing victims have adopted varied politicalstrategies including genocide in the case of theKhmer Rouge Al Qaeda and ISIS The questionwhether the United States ldquocreates moreterrorists than it killsrdquo has not gone away27

Ben Kiernan is the author of How Pol Pot Cameto Power (1985) The Pol Pot Regime (1996)Blood and Soil A World History of Genocideand Extermination from Sparta to Darfur(2007) and Genocide and Resistance inSoutheast Asia (2008) He is Whitney GriswoldProfessor of History and Chair of the Councilon Southeast Asia Studies at Yale University

Taylor Owen is the author of Disruptive PowerThe Crisis of the State in the Digital Age(2015) He is Assistant Professor of DigitalMedia and Global Affairs at the University ofBritish Columbia

Recommended citation Ben Kiernan and TaylorOwen Making More Enemies than We KillCalculating US Bomb Tonnages Dropped onLaos and Cambodia and Weighing TheirImplications The Asia-Pacific Journal Vol 13Issue 17 No 3 April 27 2015

Related articles

bull Ben Kiernan and Taylor Owen Roots of US

Troubles in Afghanistan Civilian BombingCasualties and the Cambodian Precedent

bull Sahr Conway-Lanz The Ethics of BombingCivilians After World War II The Persistence ofNorms Against Targeting Civilians in theKorean War

bull Mark Selden Bombs Bursting in Air Stateand citizen responses to the US firebombingand Atomic bombing of Japan

bull B r e t F i s k a n d C a r y K a r a c a s TheFirebombing of Tokyo and Its LegacyIntroduction

bullTaylor Owen and Ben Kiernan Bombs OverCambodia New Light on US Air War

Notes

1 Albert R Hunt ldquoKilling Terrorists CreatingM o r e rdquo N e w Y o r k T i m e s A p r i l 1 6 2013(accessed April 25 2015)

2 The New York Times reports that by 2007 AlQaeda ldquohad taken control of several majorcities and provincesrdquo in Iraq Michael SSchmidt and Matt Apuzzo ldquoPetraeus ReachesPlea Dealhelliprdquo March 4 2015 p A15

3 Robert Greiner ldquoYemen and the US Down aFamil iar Pathrdquo Al - Jazeera May 102012 (accessed April 25 2015)

4 Ibrahim Monthana ldquoHow Drones Help AlQaedardquo New York Times June 13 2012(accessed April 25 2015)

5 David Rohde ldquoObamarsquos Overdue Step onDronesrdquo Reuters May 24 2013 (accessedApril 25 2015)

6 Hassan Abbas Atlantic August 23 2013(accessed April 25 2015)

7 Bruce Cumings The Korean War New York

APJ | JF 13 | 17 | 3

7

national security scholar Micah Zenko said thatin Yemen the Pentagon had conducted dozensof drone strikes killing more than 700 peopleIn 2009 the Obama administration said therewere lsquoseveral hundredrsquo Qaeda members in thatcountry by 2012 the group had lsquoa fewthousand membersrsquordquo26

Dropping vast tonnages of bombs has to bedestructive and carpet bombing can inflictcomprehensive damage But understanding thehuman toll requires study of the impact onpeople on the ground and as Fred Branfmandid in Laos over 45 years ago listening to theirvoices And understanding the politicalconsequences requires taking account of theirresponses Recruiters propagandizing amongbombing victims have adopted varied politicalstrategies including genocide in the case of theKhmer Rouge Al Qaeda and ISIS The questionwhether the United States ldquocreates moreterrorists than it killsrdquo has not gone away27

Ben Kiernan is the author of How Pol Pot Cameto Power (1985) The Pol Pot Regime (1996)Blood and Soil A World History of Genocideand Extermination from Sparta to Darfur(2007) and Genocide and Resistance inSoutheast Asia (2008) He is Whitney GriswoldProfessor of History and Chair of the Councilon Southeast Asia Studies at Yale University

Taylor Owen is the author of Disruptive PowerThe Crisis of the State in the Digital Age(2015) He is Assistant Professor of DigitalMedia and Global Affairs at the University ofBritish Columbia

Recommended citation Ben Kiernan and TaylorOwen Making More Enemies than We KillCalculating US Bomb Tonnages Dropped onLaos and Cambodia and Weighing TheirImplications The Asia-Pacific Journal Vol 13Issue 17 No 3 April 27 2015

Related articles

bull Ben Kiernan and Taylor Owen Roots of US

Troubles in Afghanistan Civilian BombingCasualties and the Cambodian Precedent

bull Sahr Conway-Lanz The Ethics of BombingCivilians After World War II The Persistence ofNorms Against Targeting Civilians in theKorean War

bull Mark Selden Bombs Bursting in Air Stateand citizen responses to the US firebombingand Atomic bombing of Japan

bull B r e t F i s k a n d C a r y K a r a c a s TheFirebombing of Tokyo and Its LegacyIntroduction

bullTaylor Owen and Ben Kiernan Bombs OverCambodia New Light on US Air War

Notes

1 Albert R Hunt ldquoKilling Terrorists CreatingM o r e rdquo N e w Y o r k T i m e s A p r i l 1 6 2013(accessed April 25 2015)

2 The New York Times reports that by 2007 AlQaeda ldquohad taken control of several majorcities and provincesrdquo in Iraq Michael SSchmidt and Matt Apuzzo ldquoPetraeus ReachesPlea Dealhelliprdquo March 4 2015 p A15

3 Robert Greiner ldquoYemen and the US Down aFamil iar Pathrdquo Al - Jazeera May 102012 (accessed April 25 2015)

4 Ibrahim Monthana ldquoHow Drones Help AlQaedardquo New York Times June 13 2012(accessed April 25 2015)

5 David Rohde ldquoObamarsquos Overdue Step onDronesrdquo Reuters May 24 2013 (accessedApril 25 2015)

6 Hassan Abbas Atlantic August 23 2013(accessed April 25 2015)

7 Bruce Cumings The Korean War New York

APJ | JF 13 | 17 | 3

8

Modern Library 2010

8 James P Harrison ldquoHistoryrsquos HeaviestBombingrdquo in The Vietnam War Vietnameseand American Perspectives ed Jayne SWerner and Luu Doan Huynh Armonk NYME Sharpe 1993 131-32

9 William Yardley ldquoFred Branfman WhoExposed Bombing of Laos Dies at 72rdquo NewYork Times Oct 6 2014(accessed April 252015)

10 Fred Branfman Voices from the Plain of JarsLife under an Air War Madison University ofWisconsin Press 2013 xiii

11 Holly High ldquoViolent Landscape GlobalExplosions and Lao Life-Worldsrdquo GlobalEnvironment 11 2008 56-79 at 67wwwwhp-journalscoukGEhighpdf Highcites her source in note 35 ldquoJohn DingleySenior Technical Advisor at UXO Lao personalcommunication This figure is based on US AirF o r c e d a t a p r o v i d e d t o U X O L a o Unfortunately the data has many errors andexact figures are still unclearrdquo

12 Holly High James R Curran and GarethRobinson ldquoElectronic Records of the Air WarOver Southeast Asia A Database AnalysisrdquoJournal of Vietnamese Studies 84 (Fall 2013)pp 86-124 at 104 110 This article firstappeared in 2014 here note 26 cites a URLldquoaccessed November 2013rdquo

13 Ben Kiernan ldquoThe US Bombardment ofKampuchea 1969-1973rdquo Vietnam Generation11 Winter 1989 pp 4-41 Table 1 p 6

14 Phnom Penh Post April 14 2000

15 Taylor Owen and Ben Kiernan ldquoBombs overCambodiardquo Walrus magazine October 200662-69

16 Taylor Owen and Ben Kiernan ldquoBombs OverCambodiardquoAsia-Pacific Journal May 12 2007 17 Ben Kiernan and Taylor Owen ldquoRoots of USTroubles in Afghanistan Civilian BombingCasualties and the Cambodian Precedentrdquo TheAsia-Pacific Journal 26-4-10 June 28 2010box inset and note 38

18 Kiernan and Owen ldquoRoots of US Troubles inAfghanistan Civilian Bombing Casualties andthe Cambodian Precedentrdquo Asia-PacificJournal June 28 2010 note 38

19 High et al ldquoElectronic Records of the AirWarrdquo note 26

20 High et al ldquoElectronic Records of the AirWarrdquo 92

2 1 The CGP geograph ic da ta may bedownloaded here

22 Kiernan ldquoUS Bombardmentrdquo 32 36

23 Owen and Kiernan ldquoBombs over Cambodiardquo62-3

24 Kiernan and Owen ldquoRoots of US Troubles inAfghanistanrdquo

25 Kiernan ldquoUS Bombardment of Kampucheardquo6

26 Hunt ldquoKilling Terrorists Creating Morerdquo

2 7 ldquoJimmy Carter Drones Create MoreTerroristsrdquo Huffington Post March 252014 (accessed April 25 2015)