GREAT LAKES TOO? Chemical Weapons Dumping Started Century Ago
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International Institute of Concern for Public Health (IICPH) released the Great Lakes Nuclear Hot Spots Map in 2013.
The shores of Lake Ontario and the Niagara River are the resting place for high-level radioactive waste left over from the World War II project to build the Hiroshima and Nagasaki atomic bombs, New York journalists have reported recently.
"Another astounding example of 'secret' history hiding in plain sight, one of the world's largest and most intractable nuclear waste dumps can be found beside the Niagara River in Lewiston, New York. Hardly anyone is aware of it, even though it stopped being a state secret long ago," says environmentalist Dennis Riches, adding:
"The site is described in Ginger Strand's 'Inventing Niagara: Beauty, Power, and Lies' (2008) and more recently in Tom Zoellner's 'Uranium: War, Energy and the Rock that Shaped the World' (2010, pages 289-294), but there is surprisingly little about it to be found in blogs and mainstream journalism."
A campaign is underway called "Stop the Great Lakes Nuclear Dump," focused on opposing the proposal to create a permanent storage site near Lake Huron for Canada's nuclear power plants.
A Canadian energy corporation, Ontario Power Generation, has proposed storing 52 million tons of radioactive waste underground in Kincardine, Ontario, less than a mile from the Great Lakes.
The plans include burying nuclear waste 2,200 feet underground that would remain radioactive for over 100,000 years.
Congressman Dan Kildee, D-Flint, has previously expressed concerns about the proposed nuclear waste site, writing a letter to the Canadian Nuclear Safety Commission, along with other members of Michigan's Congressional delegation from both parties, asking them to consider alternative locations for the permanent site.
Kildee's representatives have also met with officials from the Canadian Embassy to further express concern and advocate for an alternative site that doesn't pose such a threat.
A growing number of cities and municipalities in Canada and Michigan have passed resolutions in recent months opposing the proposed permanent nuclear waste site in Kincardine.
Meanwhile, the oceans' "dead zones" described today by U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry reflect callous government policies that allowed dumping chemical weapons made in Michigan and Ohio as far back as World War I.
Sec. Kerry is hosting about 80 countries over the next two days at a State Department conference.
Although Kerry has already been criticized for spending time on the oceans while the world is wracked with multiple crises, we must support his efforts as finally showing the U.S. government cares about the world's oceans.
Overfishing and pollution are the main topics of discussions between government officials, scientists and business leaders.
One of the factors relating to the pollution issue is addressed in the foreword to my recently published book, "The G-34 Paradox: Inside the Army's Secret Mustard Gas Project at Dow Chemical in World War I."
"The book also dramatizes the largely unpublicized environmental impact of dumping of poison gas and toxic chemical in the oceans over a number of years," notes Dr. Roger F. Pajak, former national security adviser for the U.S. Department of Treasury, an expert on international relations and an adjunct fellow with the Center for Strategic and International Studies.
Dr. Pajak, a native of Bay City, now lives in Arlington, Virginia, and consults with government and industry on strategic and defense issues.
Following World Wars I and II, a large volume of munitions, including conventional munitions such as bombs, grenades torpedoes and mines and chemical munitions containing mustard gases were dumped in the Northern Sea region off Ireland.
Seven recently identified dump sites are located in the Pacific Ocean off the California coast from San Francisco to Mexico.
The book, published by Historical Press L.L.C., of Bay City, reveals how mustard gas made by the Army at Dow Chemical in Midland in 1918, was dumped in the Atlantic Ocean at the end of World War I.
Likewise, methyl, also called Lewisite, an arsenic-based chemical weapon made in Willoughby, Ohio, under direction of Maj. James B. Conant, later Harvard University president, was disposed of the the Atlantic after proposals to put it in Lake Erie were rejected.
The New York Times observed on 20 April 1919: "almost enough was on hand to destroy the entire people of the United States, and some safe way must be found to dispose of it. The ocean was selected as its catch basin." The Times theorized: "Rust will eat pinholes into those containers, and there will be minute and gradual inter-mixture of water with their fatal contents. Experts do not believe even that fish will perish from the presence on the ocean bed of this vast quantity of poison.
"When the salt water of the Atlantic embraced the last of these iron tanks, finis was written to a chapter in American war effort which, until now, has been a secret scrupulously guarded."
One of the major sources of information on chemical weapons dumping comes from Terrance Long, of Nova Scotia, founder of a group called International Dialog on Underwater Munitions. Mr. Long claims there are 3,000 dump sites in the Atlantic off Nova Scotia and sunken munitions in the Baltic Ocean, dating to World War I.
The discarded weapons cause injuries when fishermen dredge up decades-old munitions. For example, the Centers for Disease Control noted three cases from the Atlantic Coast in the past decade.
According to the James Martin Center for Nonproliferation Studies, 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.
http://cns.miis.edu/stories/090806_cw_dumping.htm
Kerry Monday called for a global strategy to save the world's oceans, saying everyone had a "shared responsibility" to protect the seas covering 75 percent of the planet.
"Let's develop a plan" to combat over-fishing, climate change and pollution, Kerry urged as he opened a ground-breaking two-day conference of world leaders, scientists and industry captains.
He warned that there were already 500 "dead zones" around the world where marine life can no longer be sustained, adding that a third of the world's fish stocks were also "overexploited."
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