Yves Lacoste, a renowned French geographer who revealed that the United States deliberately bombed diked areas of North Vietnam during the Vietnam War, endangering millions of lives, and in doing so, pioneered a modern school of geopolitics in France, passed away on June 20 at his home in Bourg-la-Reine, near Paris. He was 96 years old.
His demise was announced by Hérodote, the influential quarterly journal on geopolitics and geography that he founded in 1976.
Four years earlier, Mr. Lacoste had enraged American authorities by providing conclusive evidence that the bombing in Vietnam was intentionally targeting civilian infrastructure. The U.S. denied the accusations and, in retaliation, barred him from entering the country.
In the summer of 1972, he traveled to the Red River Delta in North Vietnam to assess the aftermath of the extensive U.S. bombing campaign known as Operation Linebacker.
As a geography professor at the University of Paris, whose work had caught the attention of the North Vietnamese government, Lacoste employed standard geographical methods, alongside emerging ideas about geography as a tool for war and politics. He meticulously mapped the terrain and bombing patterns, inspected the damage, and interviewed local residents.