Event: North Vietnamese

AdvertisementSKIP ADVERTISEMENTYou have a preview view of this article while we are checking your access. When we have confirmed access, the full article content will load.He used a geographer’s tools to demonstrate that North Vietnamese civilian infrastructure had been deliberately attacked, threatening millions of lives.Yves Lacoste in 1992. The month after he had published his findings, the U.S. halted Operation Linebacker, a massive bombing campaign on the Red River Delta in North Vietnam.Credit... Louis MONIER/Gamma-Rapho via Getty ImagesJune 26, 2026Yves Lacoste, a French geographer who showed that the United States was deliberately bombing diked areas of North Vietnam during the Vietnam War, putting millions at risk of drowning, and who, in the process, founded a modern school of geopolitics in his country, died on June 20 at his home in Bourg-la-Reine, outside Paris. He was 96.His death was announced by Hérodote, an influential quarterly periodical about geopolitics and geography that he started in 1976.Four years earlier, Mr. Lacoste had infuriated American authorities by offering conclusive proof that the bombing in Vietnam had deliberately targeted civilian infrastructure. They denied it and barred him from the U.S. in retaliation.In the summer of 1972, he had visited the Red River Delta in North Vietnam to inspect the fallout from the massive U.S. bombing campaign known as Operation Linebacker.A geography professor at the University of Paris whose work had attracted the attention of the North Vietnamese government, Mr. Lacoste deployed a geographer’s standard techniques, along with some nascent ideas about geography as a tool of war and politics. He mapped the terrain and the pattern of the bombing, inspected the damage and interviewed local residents.ImageThe bombing of Hai Duong Bridge in North Vietnam in 1972, during Operation Linebacker.Credit...Pictures From History/Universal Images Group, via Getty ImagesThank you for your patience while we verify access. If…