Chemical Weapons Dumped in the Ocean Could Threaten Waters Worldwide

By Andrew Curry, Hakai Magazine, November 11, 2016

Just before 10:10 on a warm summer night in 1917, German soldiers loaded a new type of armament into their artillery and began bombarding enemy lines near Ypres in Belgium. The shells, each emblazoned with a bright yellow cross, made a strange sound as their contents partly vaporized and showered an oily liquid over the Allied trenches.

The fluid smelled like mustard plants, and at first it seemed to have little effect. But it soaked through the soldiers’ uniforms, and eventually it began burning the men’s skin and inflaming their eyes. Within an hour or so, blinded soldiers had to be led off the field toward the casualty clearing stations. Lying in cots, the injured men groaned as blisters formed on their genitals and under their arms; some could barely breathe.

The mysterious shells contained sulfur mustard, a liquid chemical-warfare agent commonly–and confusingly–known as mustard gas. The German attack at Ypres was the first to deploy sulfur mustard, but it was certainly not the last: Nearly 90,000 soldiers in all were killed in sulfur mustard attacks during the First World War. And although the Geneva Convention banned chemical weapons in 1925, armies continued manufacturing sulfur mustard and other similar armaments throughout the Second World War.

When peace finally arrived in 1945, the world’s military forces had a major problem on their hands: Scientists did not know how to destroy the massive arsenals of chemical weapons. In the end, Russia, the United Kingdom, and the United States largely opted for what seemed the safest and cheapest method of disposal at the time: Dumping chemical weapons directly into the ocean. Troops loaded entire ships with metric tons of chemical munitions–sometimes encased in bombs or artillery shells, sometimes poured into barrels or other containers. Then they shoved the containers overboard or scuttled the vessels at sea, leaving spotty or inaccurate records of the locations and amounts dumped.

Experts estimate that 1 million metric tons of chemical weapons lie on the ocean floor–from Italy’s Bari harbor, where 230 sulfur mustard exposure cases have been reported since 1946, to the U.S.’s East Coast, where sulfur mustard bombs have shown up three times in the past 12 years in Delaware, likely brought in with loads of shellfish. “It’s a global problem. It’s not regional, and it’s not isolated,” says Terrance Long, chair of the International Dialogue on Underwater Munitions (IDUM), a Dutch foundation based in the Hague, Netherlands.

Today, scientists are looking for signs of environmental damage, as the bombs rust away on the seafloor and potentially leak their deadly payloads. And as the world’s fishing vessels trawl for deep-diving cod and corporations drill for oil and gas beneath the ocean floor and install wind turbines on the surface, the scientific quest to locate and deal with these chemical weapons has become a race against the clock.

On a rainy day in April, I hop a tram to the outskirts of Warsaw to meet Stanislaw Popiel, an analytical chemist at Poland’s Military University of Technology. An expert on the world’s submerged chemical weapons, the graying researcher takes more than an academic interest in sulfur mustard: He has seen the dangers of this century-old weapon close up.

As we chat, the soft-spoken researcher explains that he started working on Second World War sulfur mustard after a major incident nearly 20 years ago. In January 1997, a 95-metric-ton fishing vessel named WLA 206 was trawling off the Polish coast, when the crew found an odd object in their nets. It was a five- to seven-kilogram chunk of what looked like yellowish clay. The crew pulled it out, handled it, and set it aside as they processed their catch. When they returned to port, they tossed it in a dockside trash can.

The next day, crew members began experiencing agonizing symptoms. All sustained serious burns and four men were eventually hospitalized with red, burning skin and blisters. The doctors alerted the authorities, and investigators took samples from the contaminated boat to identify the substance and then traced the lump to the city dump. They shut down the area until military experts could chemically neutralize the object–a chunk of Second World War sulfur mustard, frozen solid by the low temperatures on the seafloor and preserved by the below-zero winter temperatures onshore.

A sample made its way to Popiel’s lab, and he began studying it to better understand the threat. Sulfur mustard’s properties, Popiel says, make it a fiendishly effective weapon. It’s a hydrophobic liquid, which means it’s hard to dissolve or wash off with water. At the same time, it’s lipophilic, or easily absorbed by the body’s fats. Symptoms can take hours or, in rare instances, days to appear, so victims may be contaminated and not even realize they have been affected; the full extent of the chemical burn might not be clear for 24 hours or more.

A chemist in Popiel’s lab discovered firsthand how painful such a burn could be, after a fume hood pulled vapors from a test tube full of the stuff up over his unprotected hand. The gas burned part of his index finger, and it took two months to heal–even with state-of-the-art medical care. The pain was so severe that the chemist sometimes couldn’t sleep more than a few hours at a time during the first month.

Popiel explains that the more he read about sulfur mustard after the WLA 206 incident, the more he began to question why it had survived so long on the ocean floor. At room temperature in the lab, sulfur mustard is a thick, syrupy liquid. But under controlled lab conditions, pure sulfur mustard breaks down into slightly less toxic compounds like hydrochloric acid and thiodiglycol. Bomb makers reported that sulfur mustard evaporated from the soil within a day or two during warm summer conditions.

But it seemed to remain strangely stable underwater, even after the metal casing of the bombs corroded. Why? To gather clues, Popiel and a small group of colleagues began testing the WLA 206 sample to identify as many of its chemical constituents as they could. The findings were very revealing. Military scientists had weaponized some stocks of sulfur mustard by adding arsenic oil and other chemicals. The additives made it stickier, more stable, and less likely to freeze on the battlefield. In addition, the team identified more than 50 different “degradation products” that formed when the chemical weapon agent interacted with seawater, sediments and metal from the bomb casings.

All this led to something that no one had predicted. On the seafloor, sulfur mustard coagulated into lumps and was shielded by a waterproof layer of chemical byproducts. These byproducts “form a type of skin,” says Popiel, and in deep water, where temperatures are low and where there are few strong currents to help break down the degradation products, this membrane can remain intact for decades or longer. Such preservation in the deep sea had one possible upside: The coating could keep weaponized sulfur mustard stable, preventing it from contaminating the environment all at once.

Some of the world’s militaries did dump their chemical weapons in deep water. After 1945, the U.S. military required that dump sites be at least 1,800 meters below the surface. But not all governments followed suit: The Soviet military, for example, unloaded an estimated 15,000 tonnes of chemical weapons in the Baltic Sea, where the deepest spot is just 459 meters down and the seafloor is less than 150 meters deep in most places–a recipe for disaster.

On the day I arrive in the Polish resort town of Sopot, I take a short stroll along the seaside. Looking around, I find it hard to imagine that metric tons of rusting bombs packed with toxic chemicals lie less than 60 kilometers offshore. Restaurants on the town’s main drag proudly advertise fish and chips made with Baltic-caught cod on their menus. In the summer, tourists jam the white-sand beaches to splash in the Baltic’s gentle waves. Venders hawk jewelry made from amber that has washed ashore on local beaches.

I had taken the train from Warsaw to meet Jacek Beldowski, a geochemist at the Polish Academy of Science’s Institute of Oceanography in Sopot. From his cramped office on the second floor of this research center, Beldowski coordinates a team of several dozen scientists from around the Baltic and beyond, all working to figure out what tens of thousands of metric tons of chemical weapons might mean for the sea–and the people who depend on it.

Beldowski has a long ponytail and an earnest, if slightly distracted, manner. When I ask him if there’s anything to worry about, he sighs. With 4.7-million euro (U.S. $5.2-million) in funding, the project Beldowksi now leads is one of the most comprehensive attempts yet to evaluate the threat of underwater chemical munitions, and he’s spent the past seven years refereeing fractious scientists and activists from around the Baltic and beyond who argue over this very question.

On one side, he says, are environmental scientists who dismiss the risk altogether, saying that there’s no evidence the weapons are affecting fish populations in a meaningful way. On the other are advocates concerned that tens of thousands of uncharted bombs are on the verge of rusting out simultaneously. “We have the ‘time bomb and catastrophe’ approach versus the ‘unicorns and rainbows’ approach,” Beldowski says. “It’s really interesting at project meetings when you have the two sides fighting.”

Hans Sanderson, an environmental chemist and toxicologist based at the Aarhus University in Denmark, thinks it would be irresponsible to hit the panic button until more is known about these munitions on the seafloor and their effects. “There are still lots of questions about the environmental impact,” the Danish researcher says. “It’s difficult to do risk assessment if you don’t know the toxicity, and these are unknown chemicals that nobody’s ever encountered or tested.”

What is certain, however, is that the chemical weapons lying on the seafloor pose a serious threat to humans who come in direct contact with them. And as the world focuses more on the oceans as a source of energy and food, the danger presented by underwater munitions to unsuspecting workers and fishing crews is growing. “When you invest more in the offshore economy, each day the risk of finding chemical munitions increases,” Beldowski says.

Beldowski thinks that scientists need to remain vigilant and gather more data on what is happening in the seas around those dump sites. It took decades, he says, for scientists across many disciplines to understand how common chemicals such as arsenic and mercury build up in the world’s seas and soils, and poison both wildlife and people. The world’s seas are vast, and the data set on chemical weapons–so far–is tiny.

“Global collaboration made the study of other contaminants meaningful,” Beldowski says. “With chemical munitions, we’re in the same place marine pollution science was in the 1950s. We can’t see all the implications or follow all the paths yet.”

Dennis Edwards: The Bible tells us in the book of Revelation that ultimately Jesus comes back to save the world from total destruction. At the Battle of Armageddon Jesus will return to "destroy them which destroy the earth." The governments of man led by man's desire for power and greed have led us to the threshold of self annihilation. That's why global government will seem like a good solution. The Bible tells us all the world will admire the new One World leader who recovers from a seeming assassination attempt. But this leader will lead the world into the worst period of religious persecution and slaughter that mankind has ever witnessed which Jesus Himself called the Great Tribulation. We are moving in the direction predicted by the prophets, as man continues on his path of rejecting God's guiding principles laid out in His Word. We will reap what we have sowed.

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To Ousted Boss, Arms Watchdog Was Seen as an Obstacle in Iraq

By Marlise Simons, NY Times, October 13, 2013

PARIS—More than a decade before the international agency that monitors chemical weapons won the Nobel Peace Prize, John R. Bolton marched into the office of its boss to inform him that he would be fired.

"He told me I had 24 hours to resign," said José Bustani, who was director general of the agency, the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons in The Hague. "And if I didn’t I would have to face the consequences."

Mr. Bolton, then an under secretary of state and later the American ambassador to the United Nations, told Mr. Bustani that the Bush administration was unhappy with his management style.

But Mr. Bustani, 68, who had been re-elected unanimously just 11 months earlier, refused, and weeks later, on April 22, 2002, he was ousted in a special session of the 145-nation chemical weapons watchdog.

The story behind his ouster has been the subject of interpretation and speculation for years, and Mr. Bustani, a Brazilian diplomat, has kept a low profile since then. But with the agency thrust into the spotlight with news of the Nobel Prize last week, Mr. Bustani agreed to discuss what he said was the real reason: the Bush administration’s fear that chemical weapons inspections in Iraq would conflict with Washington’s rationale for invading it. Several officials involved in the events, some speaking publicly about them for the first time, confirmed his account.

Mr. Bolton insists that Mr. Bustani was ousted for incompetence. In a telephone interview on Friday, he confirmed that he had confronted Mr. Bustani. “I told him if he left voluntarily we would give him a gracious and dignified exit,” he said.

As Mr. Bustani tells the story, the campaign against him began in late 2001, after Iraq and Libya had indicated that they wanted to join the Chemical Weapons Convention, the international treaty that the watchdog agency oversees. To join, countries have to provide a list of stockpiles and agree to the inspection and destruction of weapons, as Syria did last month after applying. Inspectors from the agency were making plans to visit Iraq in late January 2002, he said.

"We had a lot of discussions because we knew it would be difficult," Mr. Bustani, who is now Brazil’s ambassador to France, said Friday in his embassy office in Paris. The plans, which he had conveyed to a number of countries, "caused an uproar in Washington," he said. Soon, he was receiving warnings from American and other diplomats.

"By the end of December 2001, it became evident that the Americans were serious about getting rid of me," he said. "People were telling me, ‘They want your head.’ "

Mr. Bolton called on Mr. Bustani a second time. “I tried to persuade him not to put the organization through the vote,” Mr. Bolton said.

But still Mr. Bustani refused, and his fate was sealed. The United States had marshaled its allies, and at an extraordinary session, Mr. Bustani was ousted by a vote of 48 to 7, with 43 abstentions. He was reportedly the first head of an international organization to be pushed out of office this way, and some diplomats said the pressure campaign had made them uneasy.

Mr. Bolton’s office had also circulated a document that accused Mr. Bustani of abrasive conduct and taking “ill-considered initiatives” without consulting with the United States and other member nations, diplomats said.

But Mr. Bustani and some senior officials, both in Brazil and the United States, say Washington acted because it believed that the organization under Mr. Bustani threatened to become an obstacle to the administration’s plans to invade Iraq. As justification, Washington was claiming that Saddam Hussein, the Iraqi leader, possessed chemical weapons, but Mr. Bustani said his own experts had told him that those weapons were destroyed in the 1990s, after the Persian Gulf war.

"Everybody knew there weren’t any," he said. "An inspection would make it obvious there were no weapons to destroy. This would completely nullify the decision to invade."

Mr. Bolton disputed that account. “He made that argument after we invaded,” he said. Twice during the interview, Mr. Bolton said, “The kind of person who believes that argument is the kind who puts tin foil on his ears to ward off cosmic waves.”

But diplomats in The Hague said officials in Washington had circulated a document saying that the chemical weapons watchdog under Mr. Bustani was seeking an “inappropriate role in Iraq,” which was really a matter for the United Nations Security Council.

Speaking from São Paulo, Brazil, on Saturday, Celso Lafer, the former Brazilian foreign minister, said that in early 2002, he was asked to meet privately with Secretary of State Colin L. Powell, who a year earlier had praised Mr. Bustani’s leadership in a letter.

Mr. Lafer said Mr. Powell told him, ” ‘I have people in the administration who don’t want Bustani to stay, and my role is to inform you of this.’ “

"It was a complicated process," Mr. Lafer recalled, "with the United States and particularly John Bolton and Donald Rumsfeld wanting the head of Bustani."

"My view," he continued, "is that the neocons wanted the freedom to act without multilateral constraints and, with Bustani wanting to act with more independence, this would limit their freedom of action."

Getting Mr. Bustani fired took some doing. Washington failed to obtain a no-confidence motion from the chemical weapons watchdog’s executive council. Then the United States, which was responsible for 22 percent of the agency’s budget at the time, threatened to cut off its financing and warned that several other countries, including Japan, would follow suit, diplomats have said.

Mr. Bustani recalled that the ambassador from Britain, one of the agency’s most committed member nations, told him that London had sent instructions to vote with Washington. With the United States and Japan covering almost half the budget, the organization ran the risk of collapsing, Mr. Bustani said.

On Friday, while fielding a flow of messages in his office, Mr. Bustani said he felt gratified about the Nobel Prize news and did not regret his days at the agency.

He reflected on the contrast between Iraq and Syria. Inspectors from the agency are there now, cataloging the government’s stockpiles of chemical weapons as a step forward in Syria’s civil war, now in its third year.

"In 2002, the U.S. was determined to oppose Iraq joining the convention against the weapons, which it did not even have," he said. "This time, joining the convention and having the inspectors present is part of the Syrian peace plan. It is such a fundamental shift."

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CIA Files Prove America Helped Saddam as He Gassed Iran

By Shane Harris and Matthew M. Aid, Foreign Policy, August 26, 2013

The U.S. government may be considering military action in response to chemical strikes near Damascus. But a generation ago, America’s military and intelligence communities knew about and did nothing to stop a series of nerve gas attacks far more devastating than anything Syria has seen, Foreign Policy has learned.

In 1988, during the waning days of Iraq’s war with Iran, the United States learned through satellite imagery that Iran was about to gain a major strategic advantage by exploiting a hole in Iraqi defenses. U.S. intelligence officials conveyed the location of the Iranian troops to Iraq, fully aware that Hussein’s military would attack with chemical weapons, including sarin, a lethal nerve agent.

The intelligence included imagery and maps about Iranian troop movements, as well as the locations of Iranian logistics facilities and details about Iranian air defenses. The Iraqis used mustard gas and sarin prior to four major offensives in early 1988 that relied on U.S. satellite imagery, maps, and other intelligence. These attacks helped to tilt the war in Iraq’s favor and bring Iran to the negotiating table, and they ensured that the Reagan administration’s long-standing policy of securing an Iraqi victory would succeed. But they were also the last in a series of chemical strikes stretching back several years that the Reagan administration knew about and didn’t disclose.

U.S. officials have long denied acquiescing to Iraqi chemical attacks, insisting that Hussein’s government never announced he was going to use the weapons. But retired Air Force Col. Rick Francona, who was a military attaché in Baghdad during the 1988 strikes, paints a different picture.

"The Iraqis never told us that they intended to use nerve gas. They didn’t have to. We already knew," he told Foreign Policy.

According to recently declassified CIA documents and interviews with former intelligence officials like Francona, the U.S. had firm evidence of Iraqi chemical attacks beginning in 1983. At the time, Iran was publicly alleging that illegal chemical attacks were carried out on its forces, and was building a case to present to the United Nations. But it lacked the evidence implicating Iraq, much of which was contained in top secret reports and memoranda sent to the most senior intelligence officials in the U.S. government. The CIA declined to comment for this story.

In contrast to today’s wrenching debate over whether the United States should intervene to stop alleged chemical weapons attacks by the Syrian government, the United States applied a cold calculus three decades ago to Hussein’s widespread use of chemical weapons against his enemies and his own people. The Reagan administration decided that it was better to let the attacks continue if they might turn the tide of the war. And even if they were discovered, the CIA wagered that international outrage and condemnation would be muted.

In the documents, the CIA said that Iran might not discover persuasive evidence of the weapons’ use—even though the agency possessed it. Also, the agency noted that the Soviet Union had previously used chemical agents in Afghanistan and suffered few repercussions.

It has been previously reported that the United States provided tactical intelligence to Iraq at the same time that officials suspected Hussein would use chemical weapons. But the CIA documents, which sat almost entirely unnoticed in a trove of declassified material at the National Archives in College Park, Md., combined with exclusive interviews with former intelligence officials, reveal new details about the depth of the United States’ knowledge of how and when Iraq employed the deadly agents. They show that senior U.S. officials were being regularly informed about the scale of the nerve gas attacks. They are tantamount to an official American admission of complicity in some of the most gruesome chemical weapons attacks ever launched.

Top CIA officials, including the Director of Central Intelligence William J. Casey, a close friend of President Ronald Reagan, were told about the location of Iraqi chemical weapons assembly plants; that Iraq was desperately trying to make enough mustard agent to keep up with frontline demand from its forces; that Iraq was about to buy equipment from Italy to help speed up production of chemical-packed artillery rounds and bombs; and that Iraq could also use nerve agents on Iranian troops and possibly civilians.

Officials were also warned that Iran might launch retaliatory attacks against U.S. interests in the Middle East, including terrorist strikes, if it believed the United States was complicit in Iraq’s chemical warfare campaign.

"As Iraqi attacks continue and intensify the chances increase that Iranian forces will acquire a shell containing mustard agent with Iraqi markings," the CIA reported in a top secret document in November 1983. "Tehran would take such evidence to the U.N. and charge U.S. complicity in violating international law."

At the time, the military attaché’s office was following Iraqi preparations for the offensive using satellite reconnaissance imagery, Francona told Foreign Policy. According to a former CIA official, the images showed Iraqi movements of chemical materials to artillery batteries opposite Iranian positions prior to each offensive.

Francona, an experienced Middle East hand and Arabic linguist who served in the National Security Agency and the Defense Intelligence Agency, said he first became aware of Iraq’s use of chemical weapons against Iran in 1984, while serving as air attaché in Amman, Jordan. The information he saw clearly showed that the Iraqis had used Tabun nerve agent (also known as “GA”) against Iranian forces in southern Iraq.

The declassified CIA documents show that Casey and other top officials were repeatedly informed about Iraq’s chemical attacks and its plans for launching more. “If the Iraqis produce or acquire large new supplies of mustard agent, they almost certainly would use it against Iranian troops and towns near the border,” the CIA said in a top secret document.

But it was the express policy of Reagan to ensure an Iraqi victory in the war, whatever the cost.

The CIA noted in one document that the use of nerve agent “could have a significant impact on Iran’s human wave tactics, forcing Iran to give up that strategy.” Those tactics, which involved Iranian forces swarming against conventionally armed Iraqi positions, had proved decisive in some battles. In March 1984, the CIA reported that Iraq had “begun using nerve agents on the Al Basrah front and likely will be able to employ it in militarily significant quantities by late this fall.”

The use of chemical weapons in war is banned under the Geneva Protocol of 1925, which states that parties “will exert every effort to induce other States to accede to the” agreement. Iraq never ratified the protocol; the United States did in 1975. The Chemical Weapons Convention, which bans the production and use of such arms, wasn’t passed until 1997, years after the incidents in question.

The initial wave of Iraqi attacks, in 1983, used mustard agent. While generally not fatal, mustard causes severe blistering of the skin and mucus membranes, which can lead to potentially fatal infections, and can cause blindness and upper respiratory disease, while increasing the risk of cancer. The United States wasn’t yet providing battlefield intelligence to Iraq when mustard was used. But it also did nothing to assist Iran in its attempts to bring proof of illegal Iraqi chemical attacks to light. Nor did the administration inform the United Nations. The CIA determined that Iran had the capability to bomb the weapons assembly facilities, if only it could find them. The CIA believed it knew the locations.

Hard evidence of the Iraqi chemical attacks came to light in 1984. But that did little to deter Hussein from using the lethal agents, including in strikes against his own people. For as much as the CIA knew about Hussein’s use of chemical weapons, officials resisted providing Iraq with intelligence throughout much of the war. The Defense Department had proposed an intelligence-sharing program with the Iraqis in 1986. But according to Francona, it was nixed because the CIA and the State Department viewed Saddam Hussein as “anathema” and his officials as “thugs.”

The situation changed in 1987. CIA reconnaissance satellites picked up clear indications that the Iranians were concentrating large numbers of troops and equipment east of the city of Basrah, according to Francona, who was then serving with the Defense Intelligence Agency. What concerned DIA analysts the most was that the satellite imagery showed that the Iranians had discovered a gaping hole in the Iraqi lines southeast of Basrah. The seam had opened up at the junction between the Iraqi III Corps, deployed east of the city, and the Iraqi VII Corps, which was deployed to the southeast of the city in and around the hotly contested Fao Peninsula.

The satellites detected Iranian engineering and bridging units being secretly moved to deployment areas opposite the gap in the Iraqi lines, indicating that this was going to be where the main force of the annual Iranian spring offensive was going to fall, Francona said.

In late 1987, the DIA analysts in Francona’s shop in Washington wrote a Top Secret Codeword report partially entitled “At The Gates of Basrah,” warning that the Iranian 1988 spring offensive was going to be bigger than all previous spring offensives, and this offensive stood a very good chance of breaking through the Iraqi lines and capturing Basrah. The report warned that if Basrah fell, the Iraqi military would collapse and Iran would win the war.

President Reagan read the report and, according to Francona, wrote a note in the margin addressed to Secretary of Defense Frank C. Carlucci: “An Iranian victory is unacceptable.”

Subsequently, a decision was made at the top level of the U.S. government (almost certainly requiring the approval of the National Security Council and the CIA). The DIA was authorized to give the Iraqi intelligence services as much detailed information as was available about the deployments and movements of all Iranian combat units. That included satellite imagery and perhaps some sanitized electronic intelligence. There was a particular focus on the area east of the city of Basrah where the DIA was convinced the next big Iranian offensive would come. The agency also provided data on the locations of key Iranian logistics facilities, and the strength and capabilities of the Iranian air force and air defense system. Francona described much of the information as “targeting packages” suitable for use by the Iraqi air force to destroy these targets.

The sarin attacks then followed.

The nerve agent causes dizziness, respiratory distress, and muscle convulsions, and can lead to death. CIA analysts could not precisely determine the Iranian casualty figures because they lacked access to Iranian officials and documents. But the agency gauged the number of dead as somewhere between “hundreds” and “thousands” in each of the four cases where chemical weapons were used prior to a military offensive. According to the CIA, two-thirds of all chemical weapons ever used by Iraq during its war with Iran were fired or dropped in the last 18 months of the war.

By 1988, U.S. intelligence was flowing freely to Hussein’s military. That March, Iraq launched a nerve gas attack on the Kurdish village of Halabja in northern Iraq.

A month later, the Iraqis used aerial bombs and artillery shells filled with sarin against Iranian troop concentrations on the Fao Peninsula southeast of Basrah, helping the Iraqi forces win a major victory and recapture the entire peninsula. The success of the Fao Peninsula offensive also prevented the Iranians from launching their much-anticipated offensive to capture Basrah. According to Francona, Washington was very pleased with the result because the Iranians never got a chance to launch their offensive.

The level of insight into Iraq’s chemical weapons program stands in marked contrast to the flawed assessments, provided by the CIA and other intelligence agencies about Iraq’s program prior to the United States’ invasion in 2003. Back then, American intelligence had better access to the region and could send officials out to assess the damage.

Francona visited the Fao Peninsula shortly after it had been captured by the Iraqis. He found the battlefield littered with hundreds of used injectors once filled with atropine, the drug commonly used to treat sarin’s lethal effects. Francona scooped up a few of the injectors and brought them back to Baghdad—proof that the Iraqis had used sarin on the Fao Peninsula.

In the ensuing months, Francona reported, the Iraqis used sarin in massive quantities three more times in conjunction with massed artillery fire and smoke to disguise the use of nerve agents. Each offensive was hugely successful, in large part because of the increasingly sophisticated use of mass quantities of nerve agents. The last of these attacks, called the Blessed Ramadan Offensive, was launched by the Iraqis in April 1988 and involved the largest use of sarin nerve agent employed by the Iraqis to date. For a quarter-century, no chemical attack came close to the scale of Saddam’s unconventional assaults. Until, perhaps, the strikes last week outside of Damascus.

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US starts landmark Agent Orange cleanup in Vietnam

By Mike Ives, AP, Aug 8, 2012 DANANG, Vietnam (AP)—Vo Duoc fights back tears while sharing the news that broke his heart: A few days ago he received test results confirming he and 11 family members have elevated levels of dioxin lingering in their blood. The family lives in a two-story house near a former U.S. military base in Danang where the defoliant Agent Orange was stored during the Vietnam War, which ended nearly four decades ago. Duoc, 58, sells steel for a living and has diabetes, while his wife battles breast cancer and their daughter has remained childless after suffering repeated miscarriages. For years, Duoc thought the ailments were unrelated, but after seeing the blood tests he now suspects his family unwittingly ingested dioxin from Agent Orange-contaminated fish, vegetables and well water. Dioxin, a persistent chemical linked to cancer, birth defects and other disabilities, has seeped into Vietnam’s soils and watersheds, creating a lasting war legacy that remains a thorny issue between the former foes. Washington has been slow to respond, but on Thursday the U.S. for the first time will begin cleaning up dioxin from Agent Orange that was stored at the former military base, now part of Danang’s airport. “It’s better late than never that the U.S. government is cleaning up the environment for our children,” Duoc said in Danang, surrounded by family members sitting on plastic stools. “They have to do as much as possible and as quickly as possible.” The $43 million project begins as Vietnam and the U.S. forge closer ties to boost trade and counter China’s rising influence in the disputed South China Sea. Although the countries’ economic and military ties are blossoming, progress on addressing the dioxin legacy has been slow. Washington still disputes a claim by Hanoi that between 3 million to 4 million Vietnamese were affected by toxic chemicals sprayed by U.S. planes during the war to eliminate jungle cover for guerrilla fighters, arguing that the actual number is far lower and other environmental factors are to blame for the health issues. That position irks Vietnamese, who say the United States maintains a double standard in acknowledging the consequences of Agent Orange. The U.S. has given billions of dollars in disability payments to American servicemen who developed illnesses associated with dioxin after exposure to the defoliant during the Vietnam War. In 2004, a group of Vietnamese citizens filed suit in a U.S. court against companies that produced the chemical, but the case was dismissed and the Supreme Court declined to take it up. Until a few years ago, Washington took a defensive position whenever Agent Orange was raised because no one had determined how much dioxin remained in Vietnam’s soil and watersheds, and the U.S. worried about potential liabilities, said Susan Hammond, director of the War Legacies Project, a U.S. nonprofit organization that mainly focuses on the Agent Orange legacy from the Vietnam War. “There was a lot of the blame game going on, and it led nowhere,” Hammond said by telephone from Vermont. “But now at least progress is being made.” Over the past five years, Congress has appropriated about $49 million for environmental remediation and about $11 million to help people living with disabilities in Vietnam regardless of cause. Experts have identified three former U.S. air bases—in Danang in central Vietnam and the southern locations of Bien Hoa and Phu Cat—as hotspots where Agent Orange was mixed, stored and loaded onto planes. The U.S. military dumped some 20 million gallons (75 million liters) of Agent Orange and other herbicides on about a quarter of former South Vietnam between 1962 and 1971. The defoliant decimated about 5 million acres (2 million hectares) of forest—roughly the size of Massachusetts—and another 500,000 acres (202,000 hectares) of crops. The Agent Orange issue has continued to blight the U.S.-Vietnam relationship because dioxin can linger in soils and at the bottom of lakes and rivers for generations, entering the food supply through the fat of fish and other animals. Vietnam’s Ministry of Defense and the U.S. now plan to excavate 73,000 cubic meters (2.5 million cubic feet) of soil from the airport and heat it to a high temperature in storage tanks until the dioxin is removed. The project is expected to be completed in four years. The U.S. is rolling out a $9 million project to address disabilities in Vietnam through 2015, but it continues to dispute Vietnam’s claim that dioxin has caused health problems there. Every penny counts for Nguyen Thi Hien, who directs three rehabilitation and vocational training centers for 150 children and young adults with disabilities in Danang on a budget of roughly 100 million dong ($5,000) per month. The children, busy drawing and making plastic flowers that are sold to raise funds, suffer from a range of physical and mental ailments that Hien says are linked to dioxin. Vo Duoc, the steel salesman, will travel to the capital, Hanoi, next month to receive treatment for his diabetes. But he says he’s more concerned about what will happen to his six grandchildren, who haven’t yet been tested for dioxin. “They had nothing to do with the war,” Duoc said. “But I live in fear that they’ll test positive like me.

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