Chemical security

Nazi Chemical Weapons Freely Leaking in Baltics, Prompting Panic Alarm

Several decades after tons upon tons of Nazi chemical weapons including mustard gas, arsenic bombs and a host of other toxins were dumped into the sea, the casings have eroded and the chemicals are now leaking freely, poisoning fish and various aquatic organisms.

Chemical weapons dumped into the Baltic Sea in the aftermath of WWII are presenting a greater and greater problem. Salvaging all of them is impossible for practical and economic reasons, and researchers are now working on a mechanism for determining which areas need to be addressed, the Finnish newspaper Hufvudstadsbladet reported, predicting that the sea will never get totally rid of the carelessly discarded arms.

With the axis powers defeated, the allies found a total of 300,000 netric tons of chemical weapons in Germany and Nazi-occupied areas. To address this problem as quickly as possible, partly to demilitarize and partly to prevent them from getting into unruly hands, a large proportion of these were dumped at sea. Most such dumping took place in the wake of WWII itself, but some continued on a smaller scale until the 1970s. The dumps took place as part of the 1945 Potsdam agreement.

All in all, hundreds of thousands of tons of mustard gas, arsenic bombs and a host of other toxins were dumped at various locations in the Baltic and the North Sea.