During the Vietnam War, U.S. leaders, including President Lyndon Johnson, forbade an invasion of North Vietnam, so the military relied on massive aerial bombardment as its main way to attack the North and its supply routes. This strategy expanded into neighboring, officially neutral Laos, where the United States secretly dropped about two million tons of bombs between 1964 and 1973, averaging roughly eight bombs every minute for nine years. The campaign made Laos the most heavily bombed country in history and left the landscape littered with unexploded ordnance that still endangers civilians today.
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