7 - A Curtain of Silence: Asia's Fauna in the Cold War

Summary

The Cold War, the longest war of the twentieth century, not only devastated those environments where combat actually took place but also was highly detrimental in terms of the unprecedented preparation for warfare that both consumed and destroyed so many resources on a truly global scale. Although the Iron Curtain and, to a lesser extent, the Bamboo Curtain were lifted in 1989 following the fall of the Berlin Wall and the economic opening of the People's Republic of China, another curtain still remains very much in place, a curtain of silence that shrouds the fate of Asia's fauna over the past four decades. Without attempting to minimize in any way the extent of human immiseration wrought particularly on the peoples of Korea, Indochina, and Afghanistan, animals and their habitats, too, were very much the victims of superpower rivalries and the conflicts that they generated.

Asia was a major arena of the Cold War. Armed struggles ranged across the spectrum of conflict types from the more conventional confrontation in Korea to widespread guerrilla warfare in the jungles of Indochina and the mountains of Afghanistan to the lower-intensity asymmetrical struggles of the Malayan Emergency. The negative consequence of warfare on the environment has long been recognized, but recent changes in modern military tactics that emphasize widespread interdiction have escalated the intensity of environmental destruction.