The Korean War

The Korean War stands at a critical midpoint in the history of wartime environmental destruction. Fought between 1950 and 1953, it was one of the first truly industrial wars of the Cold War era. Air power, mechanized armies, and chemical and incendiary weapons were deployed on a scale that reshaped the Korean Peninsula’s landscape and civilian infrastructure. Yet unlike Vietnam, the war took place before the modern legal framework for environmental protection existed. As a result, it reveals how environmental destruction was normalized in mid-twentieth-century warfare and why later attempts at legal restraint would prove so difficult to enforce.

One of the defining environmental features of the Korean War was the United States’ strategic bombing campaign. U.S. air forces targeted not only military installations but also dams, reservoirs, and agricultural infrastructure—most notably targeting Sup’ung Dam. These attacks, however, would be postponed by the United Nations Command multiple times until June 1952. According to Su-kyoung Hwang, this campaign transformed the landscape of North Korea, flooding fields and destroying the agricultural systems that sustained civilian populations. The destruction of hydroelectric dams, including the Sup’ung, Toksan, and Sui-ho dams, caused massive downstream flooding and long-term ecological damage and civilian casualties, which would later be downplayed by the U.S. Air Force. This was not simply a byproduct of war. It was part of a deliberate strategy to undermine North Korea’s ability to feed and support itself, echoing the scorched-earth practices mentioned in Part II by targeting locations that had little to no military value after USAF pilots reportedly ran out of targets with such capacities. Even though by this point, environmental law protecting the environment in times of war had not yet been established, the deliberate targeting of dams and agricultural sites by the U.S. Air Force was in direct violation of Article 53 of the Geneva Convention of 1949, even though nobody was held accountable.

The Korean conflict also marked a significant escalation in the use of incendiary and chemical weapons. Napalm was used extensively by U.S. forces, not only against military targets but across forested and rural landscapes. Historians estimate that more napalm was dropped in Korea than in the entire Pacific theater during World War II. This tactic turned large swaths of forest and farmland into burned, barren terrain, demonstrating that by the early Cold War, the environment had become a direct target of industrial weaponry. The same technologies and strategic logic developed in Korea were not abandoned after the war. Instead, they became the foundation for the United States’ later approach to environmental warfare in Vietnam. In Korea, napalm and large-scale bombing had already demonstrated that fire and chemical agents could be used to strip away forests, expose enemy positions, and destroy the ecological systems that supported civilian life; the same philosophy that would be used during Operation Pink Rose during Vietnam.

By the early 1960s, this mindset evolved into far more systematic and technologically driven programs. Under Operation Ranch Hand, the U.S. Air Force sprayed millions of gallons of herbicides such as Agent Orange to defoliate jungles and eliminate crops, making the landscape itself easier to control, annihilating landscapes once covered in lush forests. At the same time, CINCPAC approved Operation Pink Rose, which directed the U.S. Forest Service and DARPA to research methods of drying and igniting dense Southeast Asian forests, essentially industrializing the scorched-earth tactics. These projects show that Vietnam was not simply another case of wartime environmental damage. It was the moment when earlier Cold War experimentation with environmental destruction became fully intentional, scientifically organized, and globally visible, which ultimately pushed the international community to begin drafting formal wartime environmental protections.

These impacts foreshadow the ecological devastation later seen in Vietnam, but without the same level of international backlash or legal reform. In Korea, the destruction of forests, croplands, and watersheds was largely interpreted through the lens of military necessity rather than humanitarian concern. As Hwang explains, environmental damage—and allegations of such—was understood as an unavoidable consequence of total war, especially in a conflict that was framed as a defense against communism. There was no widespread public or international conversation about whether this kind of destruction should be prohibited. That shift would only come later, in the 1960s and 1970s, when the scale of environmental modification in Vietnam became impossible for scientists, journalists, and policymakers to ignore. The Korean War therefore reveals the key pattern that continues throughout military history that environmental destruction in war was recognized and documented, but not treated as a legal or moral issue demanding accountability. Vietnam becomes the moment when that silence breaks, but it also shows how deeply rooted the practice already was in modern military strategy.

Despite the scale of this destruction, the Korean War produced little serious discussion of environmental protection in international law. The primary legal instruments in force at the time focused almost entirely on the regulation of weapons and the protection of civilian populations, not the protection of ecosystems themselves. While these frameworks prohibited certain forms of unnecessary destruction or chemical warfare, they did not address the broader ecological consequences of bombing campaigns, scorched-earth strategies, or the long-term degradation of land and water. As Katherine Kelly has argued in her study of the Gulf War, this reflects a larger structural problem in international law: environmental harm is often acknowledged, but it is rarely defined in ways that make it enforceable. Blake Lara similarly notes that even after Vietnam, the international legal system has continued to struggle with the transition of environmental norms into binding wartime obligations, revealing that this enforcement gap has deep historical roots.

The Korean War represents a moment when industrial warfare had clearly advanced far beyond the law’s ability to restrain it. Militaries possessed the technological capacity to reshape entire landscapes through fire, chemical agents, and infrastructure destruction, but international legal systems remained focused on the conduct of war between states rather than the environmental consequences of those actions. This imbalance is reminiscent of the same contradiction present in the Lieber Code of 1863, where environmental restraint was mentioned, yet always subordinated to military necessity. In the early 1950s, that tension remained unresolved. The destruction of forests, dams, cropland, and waterways in Korea was legally permissible so long as it could be justified as strategically necessary—a pattern that would repeat in Vietnam, Kuwait, Kosovo, Gaza, and Ukraine, and that ultimately explains why modern enforcement bodies such as the ICC and ICJ still struggle to prosecute wartime environmental destruction today.

Seen in this context, the Korean War functions as both a precedent and a warning. It demonstrates that large-scale environmental destruction was already built into modern military strategy well before Vietnam. The U.S. bombing of dams, the widespread use of napalm, and the clearing of forests for tactical purposes show that by the early Cold War, the environment had become something that could be intentionally altered or destroyed to achieve military goals. What makes Korea especially significant is that it happened before the international community had created a formal legal structure to address this kind of damage. In other words, the practices were already there, but the law had not yet caught up.

At the same time, Korea exposes a deeper pattern that continues after Vietnam: recognition does not equal accountability. Even though the environmental damage in Korea was visible and well documented, it did not result in any meaningful legal consequences for the states responsible. As Katherine Kelly, Blake Lara, and Eliana Cusato all show in different ways, international legal bodies consistently acknowledge environmental destruction—and the violation of the laws surrounding it—yet hesitate to prosecute it when doing so would challenge the military or political power of another state.

The environmental legacies of Korea therefore fit into a broader historical pattern that can be traced across time. From Vietnam’s defoliation campaigns, Iraq’s oil fires in the Gulf War, NATO’s bombing of industrial sites in Kosovo, the collapse of water and sanitation systems in Gaza, and the contamination of land and ecosystems in Ukraine all repeat the same dynamic: the damage is recorded, studied, and sometimes condemned, but rarely punished.