Featured Image Credit: Hossam el-Hamalawy
By Emily Persico
In the aftermath of World War II, the Allies sent out a call for peace on land while simultaneously declaring a war on the seas. Chemical weapons, although banned at the Geneva Convention of 1925, had continued to be produced and used en masse. The Allies knew they had to rid all nations of these chemical weapons once the war ended, and they decided to do so in the cheapest way they could think to: Dumping them into the ocean.
“[This] is a global problem,” says Terrance Long of the International Dialogue on Underwater Munitions (IDUM). “”It’s not regional, and it’s not isolated.”
In the fashion of the 1940s, countries around the world have decided not to act—that, they say, would be too expensive.
“A lot of governments and militaries think it’s more cost effective to leave them,” explains Diana S. Pyrikova, IDUM’s Executive Director.
But wait. Don’t panic yet. These munitions were dropped into our oceans methodically. Nations were advised to choose dump sites that were at least a mile deep and, for the most part, they followed this guideline. The Soviet military, however, keen as always to the break rules, tossed about 16,000 tons of chemical weapons into the Baltic Sea, which only gets as deep as 1,500 feet.
So just how dangerous are these weapons? Let’s take a walk through history.
It’s a summer night in 1917, and soldiers are under German attack. An unfamiliar armament befalls them, and a goopy, seemingly harmless liquid soaks the Allies in their trenches. An hour later, the blisters start burning, blinding some and suffocating others. The liquid is called mustard gas.
It’s 1997, eight years after the first deployment of mustard gas. A 15 pound chunk of a yellow, clay-like material shows up in the nets of a fishing vessel off the Polish coast. The next day, the vessel’s crew members are in agony, burns and blisters coating their skin. Four men are sent to the hospital.
Fast forward to the 21st century. So far, three sulfur mustard bombs have been discovered along Delaware’s coast. In 2016, the Danish have discovered four contaminated boats in just one year. And now, in 2017, scientists are beginning to see a significant and disquieting occurrence of cancer in deep-dwelling Baltic fish.
In the Baltic and North Seas alone, there is an estimated 1.8 million tons of munitions rusting and degrading on the seafloor, containing chemicals such as mustard gas, phosgene, and arsenic. One of the species of fish exposed to this chemical sludge is the flatfish, and German researchers have discovered tumors in 25 percent of one local population. Prevalence in three nearby areas is about 5 percent.
“I would not advise people to go swimming in the Baltic Sea,” warned Pyrikova. Meanwhile, people in the region continue to eat Baltic cod and, in some occasions, even the tumorous flatfish.
As the protective shells around this sunken weaponry continues to rust and expose the toxins within, scientists scurry to collect more research on the World War II which continues to rage on in the depths of our oceans.