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Pentagon Assaults the Environment by Tyrone Savage
Failing to maximize the opportunities opened up by the end of the Cold War, the United States continues to ravage the world ecosystem by creating, testing and deploying enough deadly weaponry to destroy any enemy many times over (incidentally spending more on its military than the combined total spent by “rogue” nations Iran, Iraq, Libya, Syria, Cuba, Sudan and North Korea). The impact on the environment of the Pentagon’s activities is terrifying: • The U.S. military produces nearly a ton of toxic pollution a minute. The Government Accounting Office estimates that the Department of Defense generates 500,000 tons of toxics annually—more than the five leading chemical companies combined. • The Pentagon reported to Congress in 1990 that more than 17,484 military sites violate federal environmental laws. At least 97 are on the Superfund list, which designates the cleanup of certain areas to be a national priority. • U.S. military activities—excluding the manufacture of weapons—consume enough energy in one year to run the entire U.S. urban mass transit system for 22 years. • A conventionally powered aircraft carrier consumes 150,000 gallons of fuel per day. In less than an hour’s flight, a jet launched from its flight deck consumes as much fuel as a U.S. motorist uses in two years. • 40,000 underground tanks used to store chemicals and fuels threaten nearby communities. In New Jersey alone, Lakehurst Naval Air Station has acknowledged that 3.2 million gallons of aviation fuel and other chemicals contaminated an aquifer that provides much of the tap water for the southern half of the state. Three different tests indicated toxic substances 10,000 times the levels the government considers safe. What’s more, U.S. spending on an environmentally abusive military creates massive global disparities between military expenditure and commitment to the environment and development. Military spending across the globe costs approximately $1.9 million per minute—three to five times more than that spent on environmental repair or protection. Two days’ worth of military spending could halt desertification of the world’s threatened areas; four days’ worth could fund a five-year plan to protect remaining tropical forests; and just five minutes’ worth could protect endangered species and combat ocean pollution for one year. Globalizing
Environmental Abuse The Pentagon’s policy for domestic military sites features early and accurate identification of toxic sites as an essential component of effective, cost- efficient cleanup. But U.S. overseas bases have structural disincentives for cleanup; after the bases close, military-produced problems are dumped on the host countries—without the documentation necessary for cleanup. In the Philippines, after the 1992 evacuation of Subic Naval Station and Clark Air Base by the U.S. military, residents found that tons of toxic chemicals had been dumped on the ground and in the water or buried in uncontrolled landfills. The Navy accepted bids for cleaning up over 200 tons of hazardous waste, but the Filipino decision not to renew the Clark and Subic leases has, according to the Government Accounting Office, rendered U.S. liability a moot point. In Germany, industrial solvents and other hazardous waste have destroyed local ecosystems near a number of U.S. military bases. Current restoration is being funded by German taxpayers. On the Puerto Rican island of Vieques, which the U.S. Navy has used as a bombing range for half a century, the cancer incidence is 28 percent more than that of the main island (NVA, July-August 1999). Moreover, military activities—which killed a civilian in 1999—have included the firing of depleted uranium munitions into the Vieques training range in blatant violation of both the Nuclear Regulatory Commission rules and the Navy’s own official training regulations, which specify that DU ammunition is to be used only during combat or approved tests and is banned for peacetime or training use. Further, only 57 of 263 DU shells were recovered! Military activities have also included the establishment of nuclear facilities in numerous bases, such as Roosevelt Roads, in flagrant violation of the 1967 Treaty of Tlateloco, which declared the Carribean and Latin America a nuclear-free zone. In Panama, artillery ranges currently hold more than 120,000 pieces of unexploded ordnance. The United States conducted an active chemical weapons program in Panama for more than 40 years, focusing on canal defense from the early 1920s to 1946 and on testing munitions under various conditions from 1943 through the 1960s. Chemical warfare agents remain buried in the Panama Canal area, and present Department of Defense cleanup plans would leave 8,000 acres of the three artillery ranges in the canal area untouched, despite the proximity of the 60,000 people who live in adjacent communities. The DoD has ignored requests from the Panamanian government to disclose documents essential to Panama’s public safety and plans for land use, including one listing suspected burial sites for chemical warfare agents. In April 1997 the United States ratified the Chemical Weapons Convention, which requires member states to declare any chemical weapons they have abandoned outside of their borders within 30 days of signing, but the government has since violated the convention by continuing to declare that the United States has not abandoned chemical weapons in other countries. Disastrous
and Undemocratic Exporting deadly waste subverts democracy because those most affected don’t get the chance to vote for or against U.S. legislators who (at least nominally) oversee Pentagon programs. The result is a kind of reverse pork-barreling in Congress, in which cleanup responsibilities—and funding for them—are easily ignored. Current overseas cleanup policy promulgated by the Department of Defense in October 1995 is contradictory, vastly weaker than domestic law and profoundly unfair to host countries. The department is obligated to remedy only hazards that are “imminent and substantial.” Any additional cleanup is required only if doing so helps military operations; if required by international agreements in order to protect human health and safety; or if funded by the host country. During the 1990s, U.S. expenditure on overseas base cleanups averaged approximately one percent of that spent on domestic base cleanups. The Pentagon also excludes host nations and communities affected by the military’s overseas activities from the processes that indicate and analyze the toxic sites. This adds insult to the injury, which violates the generally accepted principle that the polluter pays, a principle currently being codified internationally and already accepted as law within the United States. Finally, the process—or lack of one—discourages development in host countries. Given that many of the bases are located in developing regions, host countries may lack the financial or technical resources to clean up after the military leaves, or at least be forced to give environmental hazards lower priority than issues of more immediate concern, such as basic health care, literacy, maternal mortality, and housing. Dirty
Wars Though efforts have been made to reduce the U.S. stockpile of nuclear warheads by dismantling weapons, the less soluble problem has emerged of what to do with the dangerous parts of the weapons, most notably plutonium pits—with their half-life of 24,000 years—and highly enriched uranium. Depleted uranium, the radioactive waste left over when the isotope uranium-235 is extracted from naturally occurring uranium, can deliver a lethal exposure in seconds to someone standing unshielded three feet away. After half a century of using DU, the United States has more than one billion pounds of its waste—and no safe method of disposing of it. Instead, it sells the DU to industries that produce superdense anti-tank shells that have been used in two wars fought by the U.S. over the past decade. During the Gulf War, at least 70 percent of the 100,000 tons of Allied bombs dropped missed their targets. Among the strays were a significant portion of the 630,000 pounds of armor-piercing depleted uranium rounds fired into Iraqi armaments and positions, leaving enough DU in Kuwait and Iraq to cause tens of thousands of deaths. Further, the strategy of deliberately bombing water and sewage plants resulted in water-borne diseases that may have doubled or tripled the early tallies of 125,000 deaths among Iraqi troops and civilians and Kurdish rebels. The Iraqi people, especially the children, are still suffering and dying from the combined effects of the bombing and the economic sanctions imposed after the war (NVA, November-December 1999). During the bombing of Yugoslavia, U.S. Joint Chiefs of Staff confirmed that DU was used in the shell casings fired against Serbian forces by A-10 Warthog jets and as nose cones in Tomahawk missiles. The British newspaper The Guardian called the bombing, “in environmental terms … the dirtiest war the West has ever fought. … [A] war which targets chemical factories and oil installations, which deploys radioactive weapons in towns and cities, is a war against everyone: civilians as well as combatants, the unborn as well as the living.” The drastic environmental impact of the U.S. military’s activities around the world may be relatively unknown in this country, but other nations are painfully aware of it. Delegates to the 1992 Rio Earth Summit went so far as to demand that the agenda included the impact of militarism on the environment and on development. The United States vetoed that agenda item. What
You Can Do Support “plowshares” policies that divert funding and other resources away from further production of environmentally hazardous weaponry and toward environmental restoration. A real potential exists for the labs that produced hazardous waste to develop new approaches and strategies to rectify existing damage; for this to happen, however, would require the re-structuring of intergovernmental transfers to ensure that funding is earmarked to reflect a prioritizing of restoration over further military production. Only two percent of the budget at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory is devoted to environmental restoration, even though forecasters expect a strong growth trajectory for the world envirotech market, matching or exceeding its current growth and outstripping the growth rate of the global economy as a whole. Visit military bases, whether local or overseas, and demand to know more about the bases’ activities and their hazardous wastes sites. Demand full disclosure to the public in host nations of all documentation pertaining to the environmental conditions of U.S. bases. Documents should include comprehensive environmental assessments, conducted in collaboration with democratically appointed representatives of the host nation, and should be delivered to host government agencies and deposited with libraries or universities that offer public access. Moreover, the Department of Defense should commit itself to post-closure cleanup agreements that allow for continuing obligations, as is usual domestically. This is particularly crucial, both because cleanup often takes years to complete and also because emerging technology may make future cleanup feasible, even though it may not be practical today. Campaign to have unrestorable nuclear sites and test ranges (what Worldwatch researcher Michael Renner calls “national sacrifice zones”) declared national monuments, an enduring reminder of the destruction wrought by nuclear proliferation. Tyrone Savage is from Cape Town, South Africa, and is getting a dual Master’s Degree in International Relations and Public Administration at Syracuse University in upstate New York as a Fulbright Scholar. This past spring he served as WRL’s first Disarmament Intern. |
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hanks
to the U.S. military’s relentless abuse of the environment, the world’s sole remaining
superpower is also its leading superpolluter.