Thread: Mustard Gas, Shells, Old Bombs Sitting in Gulf of Mexico, Pacific and Atlantic

Old Bombs Sitting in Gulf of Mexico


Posted Friday, August 21st 2015 @ 5am by iHeartMedia’s Corey Olson

More than five years after the Deepwater Horizon oil spill, the biggest threat to the Gulf of Mexico may be lurking on the ocean floor. Researchers at Texas A&M's Department of Oceanography have spotted tons of unused military munitions that were dumped into the Gulf after World War II.

"Canisters--big containers of mustard gas, and a lot of shells, big bombs too...they're distributed pretty evenly over the sea floor," says Dr. William Bryant, oceanographer at A&M.

The military dumped millions of pounds of unused bombs and other weapons into the ocean between the 1940s and 1960s, until the practice was banned in 1970.

The dump sites are across the Pacific and Atlantic, including off the east and west coasts, as well as in the Gulf of Mexico.

But Dr. Bryant warns the unused chemical weapons and bombs in the Gulf may pose the biggest danger because of all the oil exploration that takes place there.

"In the Gulf of Mexico, the whole seafloor is laid with pipelines and everything else, so I think it's much more crucial in the Gulf than any other place," he says.

There's increased evidence of all the old military junk on the ocean floor. Recently, an old bomb washed up on shore near Tampa, Florida.

And Dr. Bryant says the old munitions have affected oil pipeline construction in the Gulf.

"They had to have someone go down there with a manipulator and actually pick these materials--these bombs and stuff--out of the way of the pipeline, and throw them out to the side."

Bryant and his fellow researchers have brought the issue to the attention of the Pentagon, which he says has mostly focused on the leftover munitions off the east and west coasts.

"They've kind of just ignored the Gulf of Mexico, which kind of upset us," he says. "Because of all the activity in the Gulf of Mexico."

Read more: http://www.ktrh.com/articles/houston-news-121300/old-bombs-sitting-in-gulf-of-13875898/#ixzz3jmOsZXj

8 Nuclear Weapons the U.S. Has Lost


IMAGE CREDIT:
GETTY IMAGES


During the Cold War the United States military misplaced at least eight nuclear weapons permanently. These are the stories of what the Department of Defense calls "broken arrows"�—America's stray nukes, with a combined explosive force 2,200 times the Hiroshima bomb.

STRAY #1: INTO THE PACIFIC

February 13, 1950. An American B-36 bomber en route from Alaska to Texas during a training exercise lost power in three engines and began losing altitude. To lighten the aircraft the crew jettisoned its cargo, a 30-kiloton Mark 4 (Fat Man) nuclear bomb, into the Pacific Ocean. The conventional explosives detonated on impact, producing a flash and a shockwave. The bomb's uranium components were lost and never recovered. According to the USAF, the plutonium core wasn't present.

STRAY #2 & 3: INTO THIN AIR

March 10, 1956. A B-47 carrying two nuclear weapon cores from MacDill Air Force Base in Florida to an overseas airbase disappeared during a scheduled air-to-air refueling over the Mediterranean Sea.

After becoming lost in a thick cloud bank at 14,500 feet, the plane was never heard from again and its wreckage, including the nuclear cores, was never found. Although the weapon type remains undisclosed, Mark 15 thermonuclear bombs (commonly carried by B-47s) would have had a combined yield of 3.4 megatons.

STRAYS #4 & 5: SOMEWHERE IN A NORTH CAROLINA SWAMP

January 24, 1961. A B-52 carrying two 24-megaton nuclear bombs crashed while taking off from an airbase in Goldsboro, North Carolina. One of the weapons sank in swampy farmland, and its uranium core was never found despite intensive search efforts to a depth of 50 feet. To ensure no one else could recover the weapon, the USAF bought a permanent easement requiring government permission to dig on the land.

STRAY #6: THE INCIDENT IN JAPAN

December 5, 1965. An A-4E Skyhawk attack aircraft carrying a 1-megaton thermonuclear weapon (hydrogen bomb) rolled off the deck of the U.S.S. Ticonderoga and fell into the Pacific Ocean. The plane and weapon sank in 16,000 feet of water and were never found. 15 years later the U.S. Navy finally admitted that the accident had taken place, claiming it happened 500 miles from land the in relative safety of the high seas. This turned out to be not true; it actually happened about 80 miles off Japan's Ryuku island chain, as the aircraft carrier was sailing to Yokosuka, Japan after a bombing mission over Vietnam.

These revelations caused a political uproar in Japan, which prohibits the United States from bringing nuclear weapons into its territory.

STRAYS #7 & 8: 250 KILOTONS OF EXPLOSIVE POWER

Spring, 1968. While returning to home base in Norfolk, Virginia, the U.S.S. Scorpion, a nuclear attack submarine, mysteriously sank about 400 miles to the southwest of the Azores islands. In addition to the tragic loss of all 99 crewmembers, the Scorpion was carrying two unspecified nuclear weapons—either anti-submarine missiles or torpedoes that were tipped with nuclear warheads. These could yield up to 250 kilotons explosive power (depending which kind of weapon was used).

NOTE: WHAT ABOUT TYBEE?

The United States lost a warhead off of Tybee Island, Georgia, in 1958. According to the U.S. Air Force, it did not contain a plutonium core and therefore could not be considered a functional nuclear weapon, though that has been debated. Whether you believe the U.S. Air Force on this matter is a personal call.

http://mentalfloss.com/article/17483...ns-us-has-lost

There are many in the ocean off of New Jersey dumped after The Great War. Each year some are found in the sand dredged up to rebuild the beaches.

Chemical Weapon Munitions Dumped at Sea:
An Interactive Map

CNS has located 127 CW disposal and human exposure sites. CNS created a Google Earth map and presentation in hopes of garnering further interest.
Authors:
Caroline Ong, Tamara Chapman, M.A.,Raymond Zilinskas, Ph.D., Benjamin Brodsky, Ph.D., Joshua Newman, M.A.Posted: August 6, 2009

Overview

In the decades following World War I, and even more so after World War II, at least three major powers disposed of massive quantities of captured, damaged, and obsolete chemical warfare (CW) material by dumping them in the oceans. According to U.S. Department of Defense reports, the U.S military alone dumped CW agents in waters worldwide on at least 74 occasions between 1918 and 1970.[1,2] The jettisoned material consisted either of munitions containing chemicals (such as artillery and mortar shells or bombs) or chemicals encased in some manner in, for example, bulk containers made out of metals or cement. Shells and bombs sometimes were jettisoned unfettered, but more often were loaded as cargo into ships that were sunk by opening sea cocks or holed by artillery fire or torpedoes. Sunken ships tended to settle on the ocean floor largely intact, with the result that the CW material they contained remained within a small area. Unfettered material could settle within a small area, but also might become widely dispersed by currents, tides, and other forces. As can be realized, not much consideration was given at the time to the safety and environmental implications of employing ocean-dumping disposal techniques.

Some dumping operations were carefully undertaken, including the keeping of records of where the dumping occurred, a listing of the material that was dumped, and the quantities of dumped material. Other dumping was done haphazardly with no or minimal records being written and kept. In particular, the USSR (and now Russia) has provided hardly any records to the international community of its sizeable chemical dumping activities. The potentially enormous problem posed by Soviet ocean-dumped chemical material is demonstrated by Russia having admitted that "at least 160,000 tons of chemical weapons may be buried in Russian seas, posing a grave threat to ecology and the health of man."[3] For these reasons, the total quantity of CW material discarded at sea will never be known precisely, but most likely is on the order of several hundreds of thousands of tons.[4]

To demonstrate the quantities involved, after World War II 302,857 tons of CW ammunitions were left over in just Germany and the United Kingdom, most of which were eventually dumped in the oceans.[5]

As public environmental concerns rose in the 1960s, national and international environmental protection legislation emerged causing the disposal of CW agents at sea to become increasingly rare. A major development in this regard occurred in 1969, when the U.S. National Academy of Science recommended that ocean dumping be discontinued as a method of chemical agent and munition disposal.[6] However, legal CW ocean dumping did not end until after the "Convention on the Prevention of Marine Pollution by Dumping of Wastes and Other Matter 1972", a multilateral treaty concluded in 1972, banned the practice of ocean-dumping of CW materials.[7]
CW agents present three types of threats to the world.

First, many contain energetic material for explosive dispersion that can self-detonate without warning.

Second, by design chemical weapons can cause human casualties, thus some human activities, such as fishing, dredging, and pipe-laying in areas laden with dumped CW agents, may result in humans being exposed to chemicals whose powers to burn skin, injure the naso-pharyngeal and gastrointestinal tracts, and close down the nervous system are very high (see below). Third, CW agents and their degradation products can cause direct and indirect damage to the environment. There is little data on how and to what extent CW agents may cause environmental harm, though it appears likely that CW agents would be able to maim and kill marine organisms in a similar fashion to terrestrial beings. If so, the damage to primary producers in the marine environment, as well as the food webs of which they are members, could be very high.

CW agent disposal sites have created a latent public health hazard with unknown but potentially serious environmental consequences. In areas of substantial dumping, such as off the coast of Japan and in the Baltic and Adriatic Seas, a large number of injuries have resulted from exposures to accidentally recovered CW agents. In most cases, CW materials are ensnared in fishing nets or accidentally disturbed during dredging operations. For example, Italian scientists have documented 232 instances of mustard-related injuries, including five deaths, suffered by Italian fishermen in the waters off Molfetta (near Bari) between 1946 and 1997.[8]

Bioaccumulation of hazardous levels of arsenical chemicals in the local fish population, likely derived from the World War I-era blister agent Lewisite, has also been observed as recently as 2005.[9]

The Italian experiences in the Adriatic demonstrate that a better understanding of the locations of the dumpsites, as well as the status of the materials within them, is needed to gauge the risk posed by undersea CW munitions. Due to decades of advances in ocean science and technology, human oceanic activity is increasing and expanding to deeper waters.

Consequently, CW dumpsites once thought impossibly remote are becoming increasingly accessible and dangerous to unaware explorers and workers. The issue has drawn considerable attention, and concern, by both the public and its elected representatives, resulting in the commissioning of research activities and the publication of official reports documenting the extent of dumping activities undertaken in the 20th century and their potential for causing harm. For example, in 2006 the U.S. Congress enacted legislation requiring the Secretary of Defense to review historical records and report annually on "the number, size, and probable sites where the Armed Forces disposed of military munitions in coastal waters."[10]

Always keeping in mind that information about most ocean dump sites is incomplete and that many dump sites, especially Russian ones, there is information about an unknown percentage of them; we estimate between 40 and 50%. The sites that are best known, and mapped, are those located in the Baltic Sea and North Atlantic, mostly because those who undertook the dumping did record their actions and, more recently, these areas have been surveyed for such reasons as natural products exploitation and the laying of cables and pipelines. Chemical dump sites in the rest of the oceans, particularly the Pacific Ocean, are hardly known at all, so we think of this project as one that will continue with new information being continually unearthed and periodically used to update the global map.
Chemical Arms Control and Disposal

Major powers, including the US, UK, USSR, Germany, and France, manufactured massive quantities of CW agents throughout much of the 20th century.

Their widespread use in World War I resulted in hundreds of thousands of casualties. The horrors of CW use during the war stimulated diplomats to negotiate the 1925 Geneva Protocol, a multilateral treaty banning the use of CW agents in armed conflict.

However, the Geneva Protocol has since its inception been considered a weak arms control treaty since it has no provisions for verification or levying sanctions. Further, it makes no mention whatever of eliminating chemical weapons.

In the 1980s, countries began to draft a stronger chemical arms control convention, which was realized in 1993 as the Convention on the Prohibition of the Development, Production, Stockpiling and Use of Chemical Weapons and on Their Destruction, more generally known as the Chemical Weapons Convention (CWC), which entered into force in 1997. One of its main provisions requires its State Parties (currently 188 with an additional 2 signatories) to destroy all existing CW stockpiles and renounce any future development, production, stockpiling, or use of chemical weapons.[11] Notably, the CWC is silent with respect to the remediation of CW agents and munitions dumped at sea prior to 1972.

With few exceptions, nations that in the past possessed a CW program now belong to the CWC and thus are faced with the problem of disposing the remnants of their programs. As this is written, only one CW-possessing country, Albania, has declared complete disposal of its chemical weapons. The major possessors, Russia and the United States, are not likely to be in Albania's position until the early 2020s.

All chemical weapons and related facilities in current and former possessor countries are located on terrestrial sites, hence are relatively easy to access.

(Japanese chemical weapons buried in China are the major exception to this statement.)

The situation regarding marine dump sites is completely different. These sites are dealt with in CWC's Article III, which gives State Parties the option of declaring and/or destroying chemical weapons "dumped at sea" before January 1, 1985. Further, State Parties are obligated to declare chemical weapons "dumped at sea" on or after January 1, 1985.

John Hart notes that as of January 2000, "no formal declaration of dumping of CW in the high seas or in territorial waters have been submitted to the OPCW [Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapon].[12] As far as we know, no such declaration has been made as of January 2008.

Nevertheless, the countries that in the past chose to take the "easy" way out by disposing their CW material by ocean dumping are now realizing the unpleasant fact that this material, although out of sight, is not out of mind because it presents threats to public health and the environment as discussed above. Therefore, countries responsible for past disposals of CW material in the oceans must now consider how they might act to undo the damaging actions authorized by past leaders that from hindsight appear foolish. By publishing the maps [13] containing information about chemical dump sites in the ocean, we hope to alert the world community about the large scope and seriousness of the problem and make clear that it is indeed global. While it is beyond the scope of our consideration, we note that options for approaches for addressing the problem of CW materials resting on ocean floor has been discussed by Hart.[12]
Conclusion

Most of the information present in the open literature regarding the location of CW agent dumpsites in the oceans is specific to a unitary actor (e.g. the U.S. military) or a particular geographic region.[14] No comprehensive database encompassing all available marine disposal information has been compiled. Data on casualties due to accidental exposure to chemicals populating these dumpsites is even more fragmentary and data on environmental damage is almost entirely lacking. In view of this lack of information, the James Martin Center for Nonproliferation Studies is attempting here to make available all-inclusive information regarding the locations of undersea CW dumpsites and the contents they hold in order to facilitate the analysis of public health risks and environmental hazards posed by such sites, including the determination of susceptible human populations, coastal industries, and marine ecosystems. Further, a readily accessible database hopefully will serve to call public attention to a poorly understood yet significant issue, and also highlight knowledge gaps (such as incomplete or inaccurate geographic coordinate data) that require further study. Because the CWC is virtually silent with respect to the issue of undersea CW dumpsites, the opportunity exists for the initiation of a new multilateral effort to address the problem outside the treaty. This project thus seeks to provide a unified, nonpartisan data source to stimulate and support the efforts of national and international endeavors to address the serious threats posed to public health and the environment by CW material resting on the ocean floor in locations throughout the world.

Initial Investigation performed by: Caroline Ong, while interned at the CBWNP through the Davis United World College Scholars Program.
Co-Principal Investigator (co-PI): Tamara Chapman, M.A.
Co-Principal Investigator (co-PI): Raymond Zilinskas, Ph.D.
Assistant Investigator: Benjamin Brodsky, Ph.D.
Drafting & Technical Development: Joshua Newman, M.A.
View the Map

Explore the CWMDS Interactive MapRuns the beta edition of the CWMDS.Take a Video Tour[7 MIN, YOUTUBE]
A video outlining significant locations and describing the CWMDS.Through this tour, we hope to highlight the global nature of this problem by showing you example disposal sites located around the globe; in locations ranging from the Bay of Bengal to areas west of San Francisco.Download the Latest Version of the CWMDS Map Data[KML FORMAT]
This keyhole markup file is coded for use withGoogle Earth.The file tracks known incidents of chemical weapons disposed at sea.
Related Resources

Chemical and Biological Weapon topics
NukeTube.TV: Nonproliferation Videos and Multimedia
More Feature Stories


Notes

[1] Program Executive Officer-Program Manager for Chemical Demilitarization, Chemical Stockpile Disposal Program: Chemical Agent and Munition Disposal. Summary of the U.S. Army's Experience, SAPEO-CDE-IS-87005, (Aberdeen Proving Ground, Maryland, September 21, 1987).
[2] U.S. Army Research, Development, and Engineering Command, Off-Shore Disposal of Chemical Agents and Weapons Conducted by the United States(Aberdeen Proving Ground, MD, 2001).
[3] Interfax, "Ministry: 'Tonnes' of chemical weapons 'buried' at sea," Moscow, December 7, 1995.
[4] David M. Bearden, U.S. Disposal of Chemical Weapons in the Ocean: Background and Issues for Congress (Washington, D.C.: Congressional Research Service, May 24, 2006).
[5] Fredrick Laurin, "Scandinavia's underwater time bomb," Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, Vol. 47(2), p. 11.
[6] National Academy of Sciences, Disposal Hazards of Certain Chemical Warfare Agents and Munitions(Washington, D.C.: National Academy Press, 1969).
[7] International Maritime Organization, "London Convention 1972" available at <www.imo.org>.
[8] G. Assennato, D. Sivo and F. Lobuono, "Health Effects of Sulfur Mustard Exposure among Apulian Fisherman," Noblis Inc. (1995), <www.noblis.org>.
[9] E. Amato, L. Alcaro, I. Corsi, C. Della Torre, C. Farchi, S. Focardi, G. Marino, and A. Tursi, "An Integrated Ecotoxicological Approach to Assess the Effects of Pollutants Released by Unexploded Chemical Ordnance Dumped in the Southern Adriatic (Mediterranean Sea)," Marine Biology, Vol. 149 (2006), pp. 17-23.
[10] 109th US Congress, "John Warner National Defense Authorization Act for Fiscal Year 2007," Public Law 109-364, Section 314, October 17, 2006.
[11] The text of the CWC may be read at: <www.opcw.org>.
[12] John Hart, "A review of sea-dumped chemical weapons," paper presented at the "The Environment and the Common Fisheries Policy, Threats to and Constraints on Sustainability" forum, 27 January 2000, The Royal Society, London, Great Britain.
[13] The mapping relies on a Keyhole Markup Language (KML) file, which utilizes features and programs created by Google™.
[14] J. Beddington and A.J. Kinloch, Munitions Dumped at Sea: A Literature Review, (London: Imperial College Consultants, June 2005).

http://cns.miis.edu/stories/090806_cw_dumping.htm

Originally Posted by artclam

There are many in the ocean off of New Jersey dumped after The Great War. Each year some are found in the sand dredged up to rebuild the beaches.

Fishermen around the world sometimes snag them in their nets.

Dangers of Unexploded WWII Munitions in North and Baltic ...
www.spiegel.de › ... › Germany › World War II Munitions
Der Spiegel
Apr 11, 2013 - Dangerous Depths: German Waters Teeming with WWII Munitions ... If the UXO is washed onto land, is caught in fishing nets or is merely ...


[PDF]Munitions at Sea, A Guide for Commercial Maritime Industries
www.greateratlantic.fisheries.noaa.gov/.../munitions/MunitionsAtSeaPRI...
place aboard the fishing vessel (FV). Snoopy. The FV Snoopy was trawling for scallops off the coast of North Carolina when it caught a large cylinder in her net.


[PDF]Munitions At Sea - USARPAC - U.S. Army
www.usarpac.army.mil/.../MunitionsAtSeaPRI...
United States Army Pacific
A Munition Caught in a Net. DON'T FORGET. Munitions are dangerous, and may not be easily recognizable! ...During commercial fishing, clamming,.


Discarded War Munitions Leach Poisons Into the Baltic ...

www.nytimes.com/.../discarded-war-munitions-leac...
The New York Times
Jun 20, 2003 - The problem is compounded by fishermen who have gone into risky ... their catch and haul up whole or damaged chemical bombs in their nets.


[PDF]Chemical munition dump sites in coastal environments
www.vliz.be/imisdocs/publications/215172.pdf
Flanders Marine Institute
by T MISSIAEN - ‎Cited by 10 - ‎Related articles
Local fishermen in the Irish Sea also regularly bring up munition in their nets. .... mustard gas can be caught in bottom trawl nets, hauled on board and thus ...


Sea-Dumped Chemical Weapons: Aspects, Problems and Solutions
https://books.google.com/books?isbn=9401587132
A.V. Kaffka - 2013 - ‎Science
Introduction Information on chemical munition dumped in the Baltic Sea until 1947 ... and other military equipment parts caught in fishing nets are still coming up.


The Routledge Handbook of Security Studies - Google Books Result

https://books.google.com/books?isbn=1135239061
Thierry Balzacq, ‎Myriam Dunn Cavelty - 2009 - ‎Political Science
Stockpiles of chemical weapons are being destroyed, but the US and Russia will ... ago are caught in fishing nets or resurface from shallow-water dumping sites, ...


Destructive Fishing Practices and Bycatch - Slow Food

www.slowfood.com/slowfish/pagine/eng/pagina.lasso?-id...
Slow Food
The biggest nets used for bottom trawling have a mouth the size of a rugby pitch ... to all the forms of marine life caught unintentionally while catching other fish. ... In many regions, explosives are extracted from old munitions from past wars or ...

Guidelines for fishermen - HELCOM
helcom.fi/baltic-sea...munitions/guidelines-for-fishermen
HELCOM
When fishing with bottom tackle or nets permanently placed on the sea bed in ... Contact the national contact point if chemical munition is caught and give all the ...


[PDF]Report on Chemical Munitions Dumped in the ... - helcom
www.helcom.fi/.../Report%20on%20chemical%20munitions%.
HELCOM
Mar 11, 1994 - viscous mustard gas or chemical munitions are caught in bottom ..... the positions where fishermen have caught munitions in their nets and the.

Researchers find sunken military vessel missing for decades

Published August 30, 2015 Associated Press

Navy ships are anchored in the waters of Joint Base Pearl Harbor-Hickam on July 14, 2011, at the entrance to the Pacific Ocean. (Credit: MC2 Daniel Barker/Navy)


JOINT BASE PEARL HARBOR-HICKAM, Hawaii – Researchers made a surprising find when diving in the waters off Hawaii: a large US naval tanker that had been sitting unseen in 80 feet of water for nearly 60 years.

"I turn around, and this giant, looming structure, so eerie," Melissa Price, a maritime archaeologist, told Hawaii News Now.

Price was one of three divers to discover the Mission San Miguel on Aug. 3 off the coast of Hawaii. During 1957 trip from Seattle to Guam, it hit a reef in the area and sank.

The crew was able to escape, but the ship went down.

"I had to stare at it for a little bit, then I started freaking out under water, screaming and motioning," said Rebecca Weible, a UH Manoa Marine Biology student who was diving with Price.

As a U.S. naval tanker in World War II and the Korean War, Mission San Miguel transported fuel for military machines. It received several commendations for its service.

"This is a ship that wasn't a glamorous part of World War II history, but was an important part," said Kelly Keogh, Maritime Heritage Coordinator for the Papahanaumokuakea Marine National Monument.

The Mission San Miguel is now in the protected waters of the Papahanaumokuakea monument. It will be mapped and studied on the ocean's floor.

"It's really very, very exciting discovery for the monument," Jason Raupp, who led the dive team that discovered the vessel.

http://www.foxnews.com/science/2015/...?intcmp=hplnws