Chemical weapons under the sea

[Janic]

Tonight on arte at 20 pm "chemical weapons under the sea"
More than a million and a half tonnes of unused chemical weapons lie on the planet's seabed. Again, this is an estimate, since the secret defense that surrounds them around the world prevents any precise evaluation. The poisons they contain (mustard gas, sarin gas, arsenic ...) escape slowly, inexorably, from the barrels corroded by decades of immersion. These weapons are one of the terrible legacies of the two world wars. Until the early 1970s, with a peak between 1917 and 1945, the armies of the great powers systematically dumped their almost indestructible chemical arsenal at the bottom of the sea, in the lakes or buried it. At the Potsdam conference in 1945, the Allies gathered all the chemical weapons collected from belligerents and submerged them in the Baltic Sea, in the North Atlantic, in the Adriatic and in the Mediterranean (not far from Saint-Tropez especially). The seabed off Japan and the United States, as well as the Indian Ocean, are also affected.

Time bombs

Declassified documents and independent research, against a background of scientific and technological progress, have made it possible to lift part of the secrecy surrounding these landfills. For several years, in Italy, Germany, the United States, Canada or Japan, individuals have been fighting to locate and eliminate these time bombs. But the obstacles are colossal: the concealment and imprecision of the archives, military secrecy, the cost of cleaning operations and the fear of harming fishing or tourism. It is therefore difficult to assess the extent of the threat to populations and ecosystems, all the more so since States turn a deaf ear. Hope comes from a handful of scientists who have seized the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons to take hold of the problem. This captivating documentary, fueled by interviews and archive footage, reviews risk areas and shows that solutions are possible to clean up landfills. Provided that the States agree to put the price there.
http://www.arte.tv/guide/fr/048909-000/ ... ous-la-mer