newsweek.com By Ellie Cook Security & Defense Reporter
Resurfaced maps showing the heavy Cold War bombardment of Laos have fed the controversial legacy of diplomatic giant Henry Kissinger following his death.
Kissinger, a former secretary of state and national security adviser who is credited with shaping decades of U.S. foreign policy, died at his Connecticut home aged 100 on Wednesday.
Kissinger “played central roles in the opening to China, negotiating the end of the Yom Kippur War in the Middle East, and helping to bring America’s role in the Vietnam War to a close,” the diplomat’s international geopolitical consulting firm said in a statement on his passing.
The influential diplomat won the 1973 Nobel Peace Prize along with Vietnamese diplomat Le Duc Tho “for jointly having negotiated a cease-fire in Vietnam in 1973.” The latter declined the prize.
But as tens of thousands of U.S. soldiers died in Vietnam, anger in the U.S. was also spurred on by the extensive bombing of neighboring countries Laos and Cambodia.
The U.S. was attempting to disrupt a logistics chain — known as the Ho Chi Minh trail — running from Laos into Vietnam, which was used by North Vietnamese forces.
Laos is the most bombed country in the world. Between 1964 and 1973, the U.S. dropped more than 270 million bombs on the country, which had a population of around 3 million at the time.
U.S. aircraft dropped a new wave of bombs on Laos every eight minutes for nearly 10 years on average.
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