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

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

#71

Post by mathattack »

jonnathanson wrote: post #62
mathattack wrote: post #49

This may be a dumb question, but why were they tossed into the ocean? Was it because there was no alternative? Or they just wanted them away from potential users of them?

Where else should they have dumped this stuff? That's not meant to be a glib response. It was (and perhaps still is) a serious quandary. Should they have buried these munitions in a field somewhere? In mine shafts? In a remote section of the Alps or Pyrenees? I'd imagine that all of these alternatives would have placed the weapons in closer proximity to humans and civilization, with an accordingly greater risk of cat…

Interesting. I had thought of "We may have to fight another war" but not that it would be too hard to dig a very big hole and bury them under a mile of concrete. (Do with them whatever we do with nuclear waste - granted we didn't have much nuclear waste in 1945)

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

#72

Post by saneshark »

On a related note, the Syrian chemical weapons that are being dismantled and destroyed will be dumped in none other than the Mediterranean if United Nations carries out its current proposal as planned, "turning one of the most popular holiday hot spots in Europe into a potential graveyard of drifting, highly toxic agents."

http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/she-the-people/wp/2014/0...

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

#73

Post by toomuchtodo »

shubb wrote: post #40
Shivetya wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Gulf of Mexico is a big dumping ground too http://usnews.nbcnews.com/_news/2012/09/28/14141378-world-wa... thirty plus million pounds of assorted weaponary

My favourite is the sunken ship packed with explosives in the Thames estuary. As it rusts, it could explode at any time, sending a small tidal wave up the river and into London. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SS_Richard_Montgomery

Some very dark part of me wants to dive this ship.

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

#74

Post by rdl »

jeffreyrogers wrote: post #48
morsch wrote: post #19

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 under…

I recall reading some proposal for dumping nuclear waste in the Marianas Trench. The rational had something to do with tectonic shifting eventually pushing the waste into the Earth's mantle.

The subduction zone off Vancouver, BC is also a place for this, and off Chile is even better.

The problem is the subduction zones are very slow -- on the order of 25 meters per 100 years, at most. The waste isn't particularly threatening past 10-20k years.

I still believe in reprocessing as the best solution.

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

#75

Post by duskwuff »

Luc wrote: post #8

Not just in the Baltic Sea. There's a dump of WWI poison gas grenades 2km off the Belgian coast, buried in the sand. You can see the marker buoys from the beach. Here's a little map of the area: http://www.wereldoorlog1418.nl/gasoorlog/paardenmarkt.html EDIT: Then there's the stuff on land. In Belgium they still recuperate between 100 and 200 tons of ammunition per year. Farmers post them by the side of the road for…

Re. EDIT: This phenomenon is common enough that it's got a name -- it's known as the "iron harvest".

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iron_harvest

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

#77

Post by jonnathanson »

mathattack wrote: post #71
jonnathanson wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Where else should they have dumped this stuff? That's not meant to be a glib response. It was (and perhaps still is) a serious quandary. Should they have buried these munitions in a field somewhere? In mine shafts? In a remote section of the Alps or Pyrenees? I'd imagine that all of these alternatives would have placed the weapons in closer proximity to humans and civilization, with an accordingly greater risk of cat…

Interesting. I had thought of "We may have to fight another war" but not that it would be too hard to dig a very big hole and bury them under a mile of concrete. (Do with them whatever we do with nuclear waste - granted we didn't have much nuclear waste in 1945)

We should also note that a lot of these weapons -- particularly, the ones seized from the Nazis -- were advanced beyond the technical understanding of the generals who'd seized them.

These bombs and rockets, including their chemical propellants, oxidizers, and payloads, were designed by the world's top rocket scientists, in an era where perhaps a few dozen of those people even existed. Disposing of these things safely and securely would have been a bit like disposing of some alien death ray that turned up in the Arctic permafrost.

Add to this the fact that most of Europe was a bombed-out husk in the aftermath of the war. We're talking entire countries reduced to Third World status. We're talking nonexistent transportation infrastructure. Civil unrest. The threat of riots, uprisings, and invasion on all sides. Factories and assembly plants blown to rubble. Millions of the Continent's best, brightest, and most capable workers annihilated or driven off. Most of the Continent's brain trust being frantically courted by either side of the emerging Cold War battle lines. Total chaos, more or less.

Even getting our hands on enough cement to bury the weapons might have been difficult, given resource and time constraints.

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

#79

Post by Steve44 »

grumblepeet wrote: post #20

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 smal…

My dad worked out of Stranraer at that time, the dumping area was called Beaufort's Dyke. If you search for the name there are all sorts of interesting documents, especially if you get the PDFs.

I heard similar stories from him, including one where a some of the 'goods' ignited whilst still on the barge and a couple of very brave men dumped the burning cases to sage the barge. Likewise, there are things he didn't talk about too.

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