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Politics : Foreign Affairs Discussion Group -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: alanrs who wrote (74235)	2/16/2003 2:42:50 AM
From: Bilow	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 281500

Hi alanrs; Re: "The U.S. destroys chemical weapons on an island in the Pacific. It's a relatively high tech process as one might expect in handling large quantities of hazardous material. There are lots of safe guards in place so as not to kill all the people working there, or badly contaminate the environment. I find the idea that Iraq disposed of many TONS of poisons (by flushing them down the toilet? Hiring David Cooperfield to "disappear" them?) without ANY records of the actual process or ANY of the support functions that such an operation would entail or ANY of the personnel records-job descriptions, payroll, health records, or ANY of the logistical records such as shipping records or location of the end products, or the identification of an actual place where all this occured lacks credibility." (1) The US did not dispose of all its chemical weapons in such fashion. Despite the fact that the US won WW2, it nevertheless disposed of tons of chemical weapons in pits dug in islands in the Pacific. More tons were tossed into the ocean. When these caches are discovered, a hazardous waste disposal problem is created. Here's a link: ... SOMETIMES the past comes back to haunt us. In the fall of 1982, workers were overcome by a mysterious white gas, rising ghostlike from a ditch they were digging at the Sonoma County Airport. For a few weeks, the gaseous specter remained unexplained. Then a backhoe operator who was working at the airport in the same area--and who happened to be a bottle collector--saw a glint in a ditch he was about to cover with dirt. He stopped his equipment and got out to pick up the object he thought might be an old bottle. ... Until around 1950, disposing of chemical warfare materials by burial was considered an acceptable practice. When the war was over, military personnel simply dug a hole, dumped the stuff in, and covered it up. This practice was accepted at military bases all over the country and in U.S. territories. ... THERE ARE 200 sites in 38 states, in the District of Columbia, and on Johnson Island in the Pacific Ocean, where U.S. military chemical-weapon matériel is buried. These buried weapons are designated as nonstockpile, as opposed to weapons in storage at military bases. ... metroactive.com (2) Contrary to popular thought, it is safe to dispose of chemical weapons by letting them dissipate into the atmosphere. The atmosphere is big, chemical weapons (even tons of them) are small. If you're going to do this in your backyard, I suggest that you only release small quantities at any one time, and I suggest you time it for when the wind is blowing in a convenient direction. (3) Iraq has provided records of their destruction of chemical weapons, but those records are not "proof" that the weapons truly were disposed of. It's easy as hell to fake the records involved. Where the Iraqis have been believed is when they're able to provide a dump site and the inspectors can go there and look through the remains. If, for example, the metal in the weapons are melted down and recycled, (as is done with obsolete US weapons), all physical evidence that the weapons were destroyed is also destroyed. -- Carl