ealth effects of chemical munitions can be long-lasting, as demonstrated by continuing burns of Chinese people by chemical munitions that were abandoned by the Japanese army in China during World War II. As one study of chemical munitions abandoned in China notes, abandoned chemical weapons (ACW):pose much greater hazards to civilians than military stockpiles of chemical weapons, such as those stored in depots in the United States and Russia. Military stockpiles are stored in special bunkers under lock and key, so that barring a catastrophe, ordinary citizens face no immediate threat. Since the location of many ACW is not known and civilians lack an understanding of their hazards, they risk being accidentally exposed to these weapons.69 (This and all subsequent endnotes can be found here.)
China asserts that Japan abandoned two million chemical munitions on its territory, most of them in Jilin Province. As recently as 1987, over 200 people were injured when workers attempted to set fire to a barrel of liquid mustard in order to determine what it was. In 1991, twenty people experienced dizziness, nausea and breathing problems after leaking phosgene mortars were discovered at a junior high school.70 Closer to home, World War II-era chemical rounds recovered at Edgewood Arsenal, Maryland in 1994 were still able to detonate, despite their age. In that case chemical rounds were misidentified as conventional munitions, which when detonated released 11 pounds of mustard agent into the environment.71
DOD treaty implementation director Richard McSeveney made a striking claim about chemical munitions -- "they have a short shelf life."72 His statement echoes another military officer's reported statement to Panamanian officials that chemical agent or munition in burial sites has "dissipated." However, neither official offered any substantiating data or precedent for their assertions.
Chemical agent that has been sprayed or exploded does dissipate, but agent that is stored or abandoned in canisters or drums can survive for decades. "Where nerve and other [chemical warfare] agents hydrolyze quite readily," writes John Hart, an expert on abandoned chemical weapons, "mustard does so only very slowly. Instead a hardened, protective gel forms around its exterior. The mustard in the interior can remain active for decades." This is why fishermen in the Baltic Sea are still sometimes injured by chemical weapons dumped there more than 50 years ago which they catch in their nets.73
According to Colonel Edmund W. Libby, the U.S. Army's Project Manager for Non-Stockpile Chemical Materiel:
Historical experience indicates that chemical warfare agents dispersed in the environment, as through detonation of chemical weapons, lose their unique agent toxic effects essentially completely over a period ranging from minutes to weeks or months, depending on the agents, weather, soil, and other factors. Stable agent breakdown products may remain, however, in generally very low concentrations, which may in turn retain some much lower level of toxic effects associated with their chemistry (as for industrial chemicals, organic solvents, etc.).Our experience indicates, however, that chemical warfare agents which remain in storage containers or munitions, or which are otherwise retained in bulk quantities, can retain essentially all of their toxic agent properties for many years. Even unexploded munitions recovered from the World War One era are often found to contain chemical warfare materiel that has been but little degraded in its toxic effects by the passage of time. For this reason, recovered suspect chemical warfare munitions and containers must be treated with extreme care, and handled and disposed of only by properly trained authorities.74
Moreover, when chemical warfare agents degrade, they often turn into compounds that are also very toxic to humans, particularly if exposed to drinking water. Finally, chemical munitions typically contain conventional munitions to burst the chemical filling. Buried or dud chemical rounds or bombs with these explosives can be as hazardous as other unexploded ordnance.
On San Jose Island, hazards from unexploded chemical rounds still remain. The island's owner in the 1970s, the inventor Earl Tupper, discovered this himself. "An [Explosive Ordnance Disposal] team was contacted by Mr. Tupper's son in 1974 with [a] report that one of the their workmen had been burned and requested assistance," the Pentagon wrote in 1979.75 Glenn Tupper recently confirmed that a worker on the island "suffered some sort of sever[e] skin irritation that seemed unrelated to commonly known rashes caused by local plants and/or insects."76
In addition to the acute symptoms from exposure to live chemical agents, ranging from temporary burns to death, exposure can cause chronic and delayed effects as well. Long-term injuries from exposure to mustard agents include respiratory and skin cancers, leukemia, asthma, chronic bronchitis, emphysema, chronic laryngitis, eye problems, conjunctivitis, traumatic stress disorder and sexual dysfunction. "There is no doubt that the long-term health consequences of exposure to mustard agents or Lewisite can be serious and, in some cases, devastating," the Institute of Medicine reported in 1993.77 In addition, because no one knows definitively the health effects of low-level exposure to chemical agents, the United States may not assume that burial sites are harmless.