An incendiary substance developed by the United States in 1942, used extensively in the Second World War, Korea, and Vietnam. Its use in Vietnam — including the burning of villages and the famous photograph of a napalm-burned girl — became a defining symbol of the war’s moral cost.
Napalm — a gel formed from naphthenic and palmitic acids mixed with petroleum — was developed at Harvard University in 1942 and first used in the Pacific War. It was employed extensively in the Korean War, burning North Korean towns and contributing to the extraordinary civilian death rate of that conflict. In Vietnam, napalm became the symbol of American technological brutality partly because of Nick Ut’s Pulitzer Prize-winning photograph of nine-year-old Kim Phuc running naked and burning along a road after a South Vietnamese napalm strike on her village in June 1972. The image circulated worldwide and became one of the most important photographs of the twentieth century, humanising the war’s consequences in a way that statistics could not. The United States dropped approximately 388,000 tons of napalm in Vietnam between 1963 and 1973. The substance was also used in ‘Operation Ranch Hand’ herbicide campaigns (which used different agents) and in direct close air support of ground operations. Its use against civilian populations, while legal under the laws of armed conflict as understood at the time, became a focus of the international campaign to ban incendiary weapons, resulting in Protocol III of the 1980 Convention on Certain Conventional Weapons.
Napalm’s significance in twentieth-century military history goes beyond its physical effects. It became the symbol of a particular kind of asymmetric brutality: a technologically advanced military power applying massive destructive force against populations unable to protect themselves, in pursuit of political objectives that the weapons themselves could not achieve. The destruction of Vietnamese villages did not win the war; it alienated the civilian population whose support was essential for any government claiming to defend South Vietnam. The counterproductive relationship between means and ends — that the more destructive the weapons employed, the more they undermined the political objectives they were meant to serve — was visible throughout the American Vietnam strategy, and the napalm photograph crystallised this contradiction for a global audience. Kim Phuc’s subsequent life — including her work as a UNESCO Goodwill Ambassador — transformed the photograph from a symbol of victimhood into a more complex symbol of survival and reconciliation.
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