Re: old weapons, remember this? Immediately after the invasion of Iraq, over a year ago, pretty much all of the Iraqi military changed into civilian clothes and walked home, leaving all kinds of scary things, like old vats of nuclear waste, unguarded. Then, everybody in the neighborhood came in and grabbed anything and everything of potential value and took it home. Radiation everywhere.
I just have this mental image of photos I saw a decade or two ago, taken of a US military arms dump, showing rusty drums of nasty chemicals, unguarded, half covered with dirt.
My husband at one point was transferred to a position that would have required him to put on what he calls a "moon suit" and open rusty drums and take samples so they could determine what was in it, and dispose of it. Lucky for him, he got another job handling environmental waste for the Strategic Petroleum Reserve instead. At any rate, we live in a country that takes chemical waste seriously, and Iraq is not a place like this.
So, no, finding stray dangerous crap doesn't impress me. I assume it was stuff that wasn't properly guarded and was scavenged, who knows when, who knows where. Just about every man I've ever known has had a stray shell or two as a paperweight, this one was just nastier than most. |
