This module examines various responses to the threat of biological warfare in Vietnamese territory in the early 1950s. Biological warfare means the intentional use of human, animal, and plant microbes, and the living and non-living vectors that carry them, to weaken or kill people considered enemies. This type of warfare involved unwanted border crossings, real and imagined. 

Traditional understandings of invasions in Vietnamese society have revolved around humans including Mongols, Chinese, and French armies. But biological warfare techniques developed in the twentieth century meant that non-human nature, and the environment itself, could become an invasive threat. During the Cold War, Vietnamese became concerned about insidious invasions that would go undetected until after it was too late to resist them.

During the Cold War, what was a biological invasion and how it would happen were questions that caused anxiety and fear. This fear of invasion has been explored in the US context but less so for other societies, especially in the “Third World,” which was the site of so many types of invasions. Viet Minh medical doctors and cadre had to grapple with several questions: What were the geographies of invasion? At what scale could they happen? What would an invasion look like? How could an invasion be differentiated from “natural” processes? Who, and what, would invade? How, in short, could invasions be mapped? And then, perhaps most importantly, how could these invasions be stopped?


In order to explore the mapping of invasions, this module is divided into three pathways, each of which explores a different theme in biological warfare. Path 1 encourages users to explore the charges of American biological warfare in North Korea and China beginning during the Korean War. Using a pamphlet produced by Việt Minh medical doctors, this path also provides some background to the development of biological weapons and shows how germ warfare in Northeast Asia was viewed in Vietnam. Path 2 encourages users to explore biological warfare in the Red River Delta during the First Indochina War. Drawing from Chinese posters produced during the Korean War, international conferences about US biological warfare, and Việt Minh reports about rural Red River Delta from 1952 to 1954, this path traces the steps that the Việt Minh took to produce knowledge about biological warfare. It also provides a map with suspected instances of biological weapons use in northern Vietnam. Path 3 encourages users to explore the experience of biological warfare and the efforts to counter it. This path looks at the life and work of Tôn Thất Tùng, one of the most famous Vietnamese medical doctors, and the part he played in attempts to deal with the threats of biological warfare. Finally, it reviews the attempts at a Vietnamese Patriotic Hygiene Movement.

By focusing on Vietnamese responses to biological warfare this module advances three arguments. The first is that the Cold War was a process that reformed conceptions of the Vietnamese body and its relationship to its environment. As Christian Lentz has shown for Dien Bien Phu, the Cold War was a process that shaped the relationship between the Vietnamese body and the geobody of Vietnam. Invasion of one was an invasion of the other as germs threatened to disrupt the normal functioning of both. The second argument is that biological, and later chemical, warfare was one of the roots of twentieth-century Vietnamese environmentalism. Being the target of environmental warfare made Vietnamese acutely aware of the ways that even "limited" war enmeshed bodies and their environments. The third argument is that Vietnamese responses to environmental warfare were inherently spatial. They depended, for example, on information gathered from sources spread out in space, from conferences held in Beijing to surveys of farmers in the Red River Delta. Moreover, this intellectual geography overlapped, and existed in tension, with the political geography of nation-states, the emotional geography of care, and the biological geography of microbes.

In addition to the written description of this module above, you can access this module visually through the roadmap to the right. You can either follow the paths linearly by going from path one to two to three, or focus on particular topics and tags using the Tag Map, the Geotagged Map, and the Grid Visualization.