Why the U.S. Halted DumpingScheduled sea drops were scuttled when Congress caught wind - and perhaps saved New York CityThe Army's ocean dumping of chemical weapons ended abruptly when Congress learned what had been going on and halted an operation that could have sent a cloud of deadly nerve gas over New York City. In the late 1960s, a congressman from Buffalo, N.Y., named Richard "Max" McCarthy learned that a shipment of chemical weapons was heading for disposal at sea. He raised hell. He had the prestigious Na-tional Academy of Sciences examine an Army plan to scuttle a ship full of concrete-encased nerve gas off New York. The scientists were aghast. The Army was called to the carpet in a confrontational congressional hearing. "That dump could have killed everyone in Manhattan," recalled Matthew S. Meselson, a Harvard professor and an academy member who testified at the hearings. "The Army had maintained this was very far into the sea, and they maintained it was very deep - too deep for fish. That wasn't right. Our report put the kibosh on the Army's plan." The dumpsite wasn't nearly as far from shore as the Army insisted it would be, the scientists concluded, because the route the ship would have taken was more of a "U" than a straight line from shore. Scientists also determined that the water wasn't nearly as deep as the Army said it would be at the dumpsite, supposedly more than 7,000 feet deep, Meselson said. Also, the plan to encase "a whole world war's worth" of VX nerve gas in concrete before sinking the ship was flawed from an engineering standpoint, and the concrete would not contain a catastrophe, scientists determined. Scientists feared water-pressure changes as the ship sank would set off an explosion, causing a chain-reaction that would blow up the entire ship, Meselson said. That could have sent a toxic cloud high into the air, and prevailing winds at that time of year could have swept it toward New York City, Meselson said. A drop of the nerve gas can kill a person within a minute. Newly released Army reports reveal that a ship with mustard gas scuttled off New Jersey in 1968 exploded on its way to the bottom. Long before the congressional hearing ended, the Army's credibility was "near zero," Meselson said. The mood in the tense hearing was broken momentarily, Meselson recalled, when an unidentified Navy officer offered an unsolicited opinion out loud: "That's what you get for letting the Army play with ships." As a result of the hearing, the Army pulled the plug on two scheduled sea dumps of chemical weapons in 1970. Two years later, Congress passed a law prohibiting disposal of chemical weapons in the ocean. In 1975, the United States signed an international treaty banning the practice. |
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Notes: Summary of Some Chemical Munitions Sea Dumps by the United States
William R. Brankowitz
Jan 30, 1989
Off-Shore
Disposal of Chemical Agents and Weapons Conducted by the United States
Compiled by the U.S. Army Historical
Research and Response Team
Mar 29, 2001
(Acrobat
file)
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