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The ticking time-bomb at the bottom of the Baltic Sea

economist.com

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Re: The ticking time-bomb at the bottom of the Baltic Sea

#13

Post by danohuiginn »

The shelf life of most chemical weapons is fairly short -- and tends to be shorter the nastier they are.

We're mainly talking mustard gas. Germany did use nerve gases tabun, sarin, and soman [1]. But nerve gases degrade after a period of a few weeks to a few years. I'm not sure what they degrade into, admittedly, and I doubt it's nice.

Mustard gas lasts longer, but is also much less potent. Military use is about 1 tonne for 2.6 square kilometres [2]. So if it were just leaking into the open sea -- even one as small as the Baltic -- it wouldn't be an issue. The problem is really if something re-concentrates it -- currents, or location, or possibly going up the food chain (does that happen?)

So my initial feeling is it's not quite as catastrophic as it sounds. Would love to hear from somebody better-informed, though.

1 - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Germany_and_weapons_of_mass_de...

2 - http://www.iraqwatch.org/perspectives/rangwala-powell-020503...

Re: The ticking time-bomb at the bottom of the Baltic Sea

#15

Post by tomelders »

Is there something missing from the article or am I going mad? I don't understand how people came to the rational conclusion that it would be ok to dump thousands of tons of this stuff into the sea. It seems to me that people collectively agreed to create a guaranteed disaster.

Re: The ticking time-bomb at the bottom of the Baltic Sea

#16

Post by danohuiginn »

neverminder wrote: post #10

Some more detailed information: http://www.mir.gdynia.pl/wp-content/uploads/2013/11/BST-NATO...

Thanks for adding this. It's much, much more informative than the Economist article

In fact, I think it deserves to be posted by itself, so I've submitted it as https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7620544

Re: The ticking time-bomb at the bottom of the Baltic Sea

#18

Post by jmpe »

TeMPOraL wrote: post #3
[deleted] wrote: post #2

[deleted]

I read an article about it years ago. According to it, the Allies were supposed to dump those weapons into the ocean, but they didn't care to go so far, so they dropped them into the Baltic instead.

I remember reading somewhere that this practice still exists today. That jets dump their payload in the sea before landing. As I recall it was a landing area in/around Italy during the Iraq conflict. Makes sense if you think about it, takeoff and landing are risky. Anyone care to chime in with some knowledge?

Re: The ticking time-bomb at the bottom of the Baltic Sea

#19

Post by morsch »

There used to be -- and really still is -- this cavalier attitude about dumping stuff into the sea, because it gets diluted so much. Disposing nuclear waste this way has only been banned since 1993[0]. And of course more recently, the ocean was where much of the pollution from the Fukushima incident was directed.

Or take sea-faring ships, who dump both grey and black water (ie. untreated sewage) into the sea; I understand this is slowly being subject to some regulation. Ships also run with heavy oil which has its own set of issues (mostly sulfur content and NOx); in terms of CO2 emissions shipping is super efficient though.

[0] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ocean_disposal_of_radioactive_w...

Re: The ticking time-bomb at the bottom of the Baltic Sea

#20

Post by grumblepeet »

My father, who was in the Royal Engineers at the end of WWII and for a few years after, was always worried about the "tons" of mustard gas and explosives that he and his colleagues were ordered to dump into the Irish Sea. He told me that some of the explosives were so unstable that they "sweated" nitroglycerine, and they used to run their finger down the sides of the explosives and flick it at each other to make small bangs. Bear in mind that although they had explosives training they were basically kids.

He also mentioned that the seas were often so rough that they did "dump and run" as soon as they were out of sight of land. It was supposed to go into the deepest sections of the Irish Sea, but he claims a lot of it was closer to Scotland.

It was the mustard gas, and other nasties that he wouldn't talk about, that worried him right up until he passed away in his eighties. They knew it wasn't the right thing to do, but at that time you followed orders and did as little as possible until you got demobbed.

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