CHEMICAL AGENTS AT BALTIC’S BOTTOM

“American teams may be strug­gling to find chem­i­cal weapons and other poi­so­nous mate­ri­als in Iraq,” the New York Times reports, “but tens of thou­sands of bombs and bar­rels filled with blis­ter­ing agents and nerve gas lie scat­tered in the Baltic Sea and the east­ern Atlantic.“

American, British and Soviet mil­i­tary dumped them there after World War II. Entire ships full of weapons, most of them cap­tured from Nazi Germany, were scut­tled for dis­posal and for­got­ten. Now they have come back to haunt the envi­ron­ment.
Over time, sci­en­tists say, the weapon cas­ings have cor­roded in the sea­wa­ter and become brit­tle, allow­ing poi­sons like arsenic, lewisite, mus­tard gas and sarin to leach out. Scientists from the Baltic coun­tries and Russia have found lethal mate­r­ial mixed in with sed­i­ments, and highly toxic sul­fur mus­tard gas, trans­formed into brown-​​yellow clumps of gel, has washed ashore.
The prob­lem is com­pounded by fish­er­men who have gone into risky areas to chase depleted fish stocks, using increas­ingly aggres­sive meth­ods, includ­ing bot­tom tackle that snag the bombs. They rou­tinely find mus­tard gas clumps among their catch and haul up whole or dam­aged chem­i­cal bombs in their nets.

June 20th, 2003 | Chem-Bio | Comments Off Both comments and pings are currently closed.