Two milestones
The actual situation
Next steps
The Chemical Weapons Convention (CWC)
The second CFE (Conversion For the Environment) conference was held in Italy at the Bellagio Study and Conference Centre from 22 to 26 April 1996. It was supported by The Rockefeller Foundation. Academics, scientists, representatives of the military, specialists of the industry and journalists gathered in a one-week seminar on Sea-dumped Chemical Munitions. The nature of the problem had already been defined during the first CFE conference, a NATO-sponsored workshop which took place at Kaliningrad near Moscow in January 1995. This year's follow-on conference provided the opportunity to further elaborate the topic and to assess the progress achieved so far. An action program was drafted in order to overcome the inertia and reluctance of governments and international organisations to tackle the problem of sea-dumped chemical munitions which is a potential ecological time bomb.
After the end of World War II, thousands of tons of conventional and
chemical munitions of the defeated Wehrmacht had to be disposed of by the
victorious Allies. For lack of expertise and technical means, the hazardous
waste was dumped in the - mostly shallow - waters of the Baltic Sea, the
Skagerrak, the English Channel, off the west coast of Scotland and in the
White Sea. These practices and facts were revealed and publicised
in the media over the past few years. However, differently from the hazards
of radioactive waste, the potential risks and dangers of this post-war
legacy have hardly entered public awareness. Whereas the Chernobyl disaster
made clear that radioactive pollution does not stop at national boundaries,
the sea dumps continue to be ignored as a regional problem, albeit in international
waters and thus beyond any particular nation's responsibility.
In a world in which former enemies proclaim to be partners, the fear that
mankind might be bombed back into stone age in an all-out nuclear confrontation
has given way to the awareness that radioactive waste may render entire
regions of the world uninhabitable for generations. In comparison
with the "radioactive threat", the long-term effects of chemical warfare
agents are less spectacular, but by no means negligible. In recent years,
the lethality of CWs was demonstrated during the Iran-Iraq war when 4,000 Kurds were killed by poison gas in the Iraqi town of Halabja in March 1988. And the mysterious "Gulf syndrome" of thousands of US soldiers who
had participated in the 1991 Gulf War is now being reluctantly attributed
to the effects of chemical warfare agents which were burned together with
stocks of conventional munitions in Iraq.
Although the risk of sea-dumped munitions does not meet the eye, the corrosion
of the shells and rounds which were dumped five decades ago is progressing
fast now. It is feared that major quantities of chemical agents will leak
into the sea by the year 2005. Beyond the immediate impact of a further
depletion of the world's endangered fish stocks, poisonous agents will
enter the food chain via plankton. Toxic effects with possible genetic
consequences would not be confined to the countries of the region, but
might become a world-wide concern.
The documentary film "Cain's Smoke"("The Echo of War") by Victor Lisakovich
of the XXth Century Documentary Film Studio in Moscow, was shown at the
conference in Bellagio. It is a milestone in the effort to rouse public
awareness of the risks and dangers of chemical warfare agents. In a historical
overview, Lisakovich reminds spectators of the massive use of CWs during
World War I and of the horrors of the NAZI gas chambers. Pictures of more
recent incidents serve as a warning of dormant dangers: Danish fishermen
who had to be treated in hospital for mustard gas injuries after they had
trawled old ammunitions in their nets.
The publication of the conference papers of the first CFE conference by
Kluwer Academic Publishers constitutes another milestone. The book, which
was introduced at the Bellagio conference by its editor Dr. Alexander Kaffka,
chairman of the board of CFE, is meanwhile available in bookstores. It
provides the essential technical and scientific information needed as a
basis for future action.
Social problems, especially the issue of long-term unemployment, seem
to have priority over other security concerns in post-Cold War Europe.
Thus the "offshore" risk of possible maritime pollution by sea-dumped chemical
munitions continues to be neglected despite an increasing number of warning
signals. Phosphor flares are swept ashore in the Beaufort Dyke where 20,000
tons of ammunition were dumped annually between 1945 and 1950. There is
an increasing number of accidents in which in particular children are involved.
But just as diseases cannot be cured by dealing with symptoms, this environmental
hazard cannot be addressed by cleaning the beaches. What is most urgently
needed is precise and reliable information on the dump sites and the condition
of the munitions. Participants therefore stressed the need to establish
data banks on the location of the dumps, indicating the quantities and
the nature of the chemical munitions, and to monitor these dumps. Samples
have to be taken to determine the state of the ammunition shells and the
risk of pollution.
It was pointed out that the required surveillance technology is available,
such as side-scanning sonars, laser technology and the detection of magnetic
anomalies. Once the scientific parameters have been established, the dumps
will have to be neutralised. Proposals ranged from burying the dumps underneath
sarcophagi at the bottom of the sea to environmentally safe disposal methods
on maritime platforms, however, excluding incineration. New methods like
the analytic de-activation of CWs or the decomposition of organic compounds
should be investigated.
Given the cuts in defence spending, the reduction of armed forces and the
fact that armament has become a negative-growth industry, both know-how
and personnel could be used profitably for dealing with this problem. In
the true sense of CFE, military know-how and former military engineers
and technicians could be recruited from the defence sector and employed
within the framework of a conversion project that restores and protects
the environment.
The participants of the second CFE conference agreed on the urgency
to undertake concrete steps in the very near future. Since CFE as an non-governmental
organisation does not have the funds and the technical means to address
the problem, public support has to be secured from governments and non-governmental
organisations such as the Green Cross which has endorsed the cause of CFE
from the outset.
In the Final Document of the
conference, it was stated that the public awareness of the problem has
to be increased in order to spur the necessary political response. An international
working group is to be established which will have the task to channel
and manage information on the subject and to initiate future measures to
address the problem. The proposed risk assessment has to include the dynamics
of the sites, both in space and over time. For this purpose, constant monitoring
of the most hazardous dumps will be necessary. Once the risk assessment
has been remedial action will have to be taken.
The most appropriate methods of neutralising the agents could be selected
in the form of an international competition. Once the funding has been
secured for the risk assessment phase, requests for proposals could be
addressed to defence manufacturers specialising in maritime surveillance,
sonar technology and ammunition disposal. While the measures proposed by
CFE will not solve the problem of unemployment, jobs would be created for
highly qualified specialists of the defence sector who were made redundant,
both in the East and in the West, after the end of the Cold War.
The Chemical Weapons Convention (CWC)
The destruction of all chemical warfare agents is already high on the disarmament agenda since the Chemical Weapons Convention (CWC) was signed in January 1993. In fact, the CWC is the most comprehensive disarmament agreement that has been reached so far. It bans the use, the storage and the future production of chemical warfare agents. But it does not cover the sea-dumped CWs. The parties of the Treaty are under the obligation to destroy the chemical weapons and the CW production facilities that they own or which are located anywhere under their jurisdiction or control or which they may have abandoned on another party's territory. Pending the entry into force of the CWC, the destruction of CW stocks, which pose an increasing environmental hazard, is to be carried out unilaterally by the two main possessors of CW stockpiles, the United States and Russia. While the destruction of CWs is already well underway in the USA, it had to be postponed in Russia due to environmental, technical and financial difficulties. But the state of stockpiles is such that action needs to be taken urgently which was reflected by the Russian Duma's approval in March 1996 of a 15-year program for the complete elimination of the Russian CWs. The commitment of CWC signatories to destroy all CW stockpiles should be extended, under a collateral agreement, to include the dumps on the seabed - where the state of the ammunition can hardly be expected to be less hazardous than above ground.
Dr. Brigitte Sauerwein is a security analyst living in Geneva. She is the co-author of thebook: European Security in the 1990s: Challenges and Perspectives, UNIDIR, 1995.