Where the Weapons of Mass Destruction REALLY Are

[Ted Striker]

THE OCEAN


DUH





Seriously, though, has anybody ever even considered that the damn things (if there were any left) would have been dumped into the ocean? Nobody would have ever found them.

The whole weapons shipped to Syria thing is a joke. "Hey, the Americans say they are going to blow us up unless we get rid of these things, would you mind hiding them for us??"


After all, there certainly is a historical precendent for this sort of thing:

Report: Army secretly dumped chemicals offshore
By John M.R. Bull, The (Newport News, Va.) Daily Press via AP
NEWPORT NEWS, Va. — The Army secretly dumped 64 million pounds of nerve and mustard agents into the ocean, along with 400,000 chemical-filled bombs, land mines and rockets — either tossed overboard or packed into the holds of scuttled vessels, according to an investigation by The (Newport News, Va.) Daily Press.

"We do not claim to know where they all are," said William Brankowitz, a deputy project manager in the Army Chemical Materials Agency and a leading authority on the Army's chemical weapons dumping. "We don't want to be cavalier at all and say this stuff was exposed to water and is OK. It can last for a very, very long time."

The weapons of mass destruction may still be deadly, and were dumped along with more than 500 tons of radioactive waste from World War II until 1970, after which Congress and international treaty banned the practice.

http://www.usatoday.com/news/nation/2005-11-01-weapons-ocean_x.htm

http://www.bradenton.com/mld/bradenton/news/nation/13070288.htm

[Dinner]

After WW1 the Army also buried large quantities of chemical weapons on military bases in order to dispose of them. The problem is in the last 80 years many of those bases have been closed and just last year a developer dug up canasters of rusted WW1 era stuff on a former base in Virgina (I believe it was Virgina). The military has a poor historical track record of properly disposing of hazardous stuff and not cleaning up their messes.

Here in San Diego MCAS Miramar used to be twice its current size and during WW1 was an Army artillery post/basic training post called Camp Kearny. Much of the former post has been redeveloped into track homes or turned into public open space and old unexploded artillery shells are found on a fairly regular basis. Every couple of years some kids find these shells and try to play with them resulting in some dead or maimed kids. This has been especially bad in the last year since a huge fire (the Cedar fire was the lagest wild fire ever in the continental US) has removed most of the brush and record rains (the most rain in 110 years) have combined to create huge amounts of erosion. That means more old shells then ever have eroded out of hillsides.

[Chemical Ollie]

Fishermen around here get mustard gas canisters in their nets almosts annually. German stuff dumped in the Baltic Sea after the wars. No one has been hurt recently though, as far as I know. They place it on the dock and let the police or military pick it up for destruction.

[Rufus T. Firefly]

I'm seein' Little Mermaid II:

The seaweed is always greener
In somebody else's lake
You dream about taking Baghdad
But that is a big mistake
Just look at the world around you
Right here on the ocean floor
Blix's WMDs surround you
What more is you lookin' for?

Under the sea
Under the sea
Dubya, it's better
Down where it's wetter
Take it from me
Up on the shore many thousands will die
That's why your daddy knew not to try
Saddam is sneaky
So take a peeky
Under the sea!

[Ted Striker]

Originally posted by Chemical Ollie
Fishermen around here get mustard gas canisters in their nets almosts annually. German stuff dumped in the Baltic Sea after the wars. No one has been hurt recently though, as far as I know. They place it on the dock and let the police or military pick it up for destruction.

It seems to have been standard practice world wide, I did not even think about that until just this week when I saw the article about the fishermen here finding shells. So the odds of sending a ship out and dumping weapons seems pretty good, after all the ships that were transporting oil didn't seem to be monitored all that well, our "intelligence" about weapons "sites" was completly faulty, so I can totally see some ships slipping out and dumping them. This is of course assuming that there still were actually weapons to dump after 1998.


But to scour the desert or try and blame Syria has seemed like a waste of time. Funny all that wasted effort looking in the wrong place the whole time, when there were better places like the ocean to hide them in.

Scuttle a ship loaded with weapons out in the middle of the Pacific and nobody will ever find it.

[Dr Strangelove]

Didn't coalition forces control the coast of Iraq for several years after the 1991 Gulf War?

[Solomwi]

Re: Where the Weapons of Mass Destruction REALLY Are

Originally posted by Ted Striker

The whole weapons shipped to Syria thing is a joke. "Hey, the Americans say they are going to blow us up unless we get rid of these things, would you mind hiding them for us??"

Assuming they were hidden in Syria. As Doc points out, Iraq's coastline was being patrolled (at least I think he's right on that). If so, and if you could arrange it, why not ship them to Syria for dumping into the Mediterranean?

Of course, the obvious flaw in that is the same as with any dumping scenario. If you're about to get into a fight for your life, why get rid of any actual weapons you might have?

The simplest explanation still seems to me that Saddam may have been gung ho to get all these wonderful weapons, but was so detached from reality that those in charge of the programs were telling him what he wanted to hear, at least for the most part, and manufacturing just enough "evidence" to keep him from killing their families.

[Dinner]

A decade of UN inspections determined that most of Iraq's supplies of chemical weapons were destroyed by Coalition Air attacks or captured (and later destroyed) during the invasion of southern Iraq and Kuwait in 1991.