Penthouse
February 2003

Collateral Damage--Friendly-fire victims of the Cold War; Fifty years of military pollution and bureaucratic inaction are taking their terrible toll.

Investigative report by Tom Callahan

Imagine turning on the television and seeing the following stories on
tonight's news:
*Americans are suffering and dying from cancer clusters and mysterious
illnesses in half a dozen places all across the nation. In just one desert
town, Fallon, Nevada, 16 children have been stricken with leukemia and three
have die so far.
*There are safety concerns about the drinking water in Massachusetts.
Over 75 billion gallons on Cape Cod have been contaminated, with another
three to eight million gallons being poisoned everyday.
*About 1800 canisters containing 1634 tons of mustard gas are sitting
just ten miles from the 12th largest city in the United States of America,
Baltimore, Maryland, with a population
of 736,000.
*A potential dirty nuclear bomb is located just three miles from where
100,000 Americans live in the Pacific Northwest.
*Fish are glowing in the dark after being taken from the Columbia River
in Washington State. The suspected cause is radioactive and chemical
contamination. Residents have a one in 50 chance of getting cancer from
eating those fish.
*Live bombs are buried and waiting to be found on some 1500 sites spread
out across 15 million acres of the American landscape. On occasion, Americans
on their own property or public
land will just stumble across a grenade or shell that could blow them to bits.

And all of this, the report continues, was caused by the same
perpetrator.

Is this the work of al-Qaeda? Or has Saddam Hussein finally hit America
with his weapons of mass destruction?

No.

The United States Military is responsible for all of the above--and much
more.

Everything described above was done in the course of fighting and winning
the Cold War. That war ended in 1991, but its deadly impact will last for
generations.

As the United States prepares to fight yet another war against foreign
evil-doers, we have not yet fully faced the human and environmental
consequences of our 50 years struggle against
communism and the Soviet Union.

All wars have consequences, many unintended. Our military never meant
hurt us or the environment. They have defended the U.S. with bravery and
valor throughout our history. But the fact remains that Americans are dying
and getting sick inside their own country. Strong evidence suggests that
they and future generations are the friendly-fire victims of the Cold War. We
succeeded in destroying communism and the Soviet Union. A large part of our
environment became collateral damage.

"One of the worse things we were always afraid the Russians would do--and
we worry about in any future terrorist threat--is attack our source of
drinking water," said Joel Feigenbaum, a Cape Cod college professor and
environmental activist who has been fighting the military on environmental
issues since 1982. "But these guys (our military) couldn't have done a better
job of it themselves."

Between 1948 and 1991, the United States spend $13.213 trillion dollars
on war. From 1940 to 1996, the United States spend an additional $5.481
trillion to build more than 70,000 nuclear weapons.

Most of this money was not spend oversees. Nuclear, chemical and
traditional weapons were made right here. They were tested on American soil.
Millions of soldiers, sailors, marines and pilots were trained here,
practicing on American bases with live ammunition. Jet planes roar across
American skies today on mock bombing runs. They still drop live bombs in
places like Vieques, Puerto Rico.

We think of American military power being exercised in distant, remote
corners of the globe, such as Korea, Vietnam, Afghanistan or Kosovo.
Someplace over there. But the United States military controls 25 million
acres of land over here, right inside the United States. Indeed, there are
some 300 threatened or endangered species on more than 200 military
installations within this country.

The vast military-industrial complex needed to prepare for World War III
created incredible amounts of pollution. By 1990, the year after the fall of
the Berlin Wall, the American military was producing more tons of hazardous
waste each year than the top five United States chemical companies combined.

"The Cold War is over," says Tom Carpenter of the Government
Accountability Project. "But now we are confronting the legacy, and it turns
out to be almost as expensive to deal with the waste as it was to produce it
in the first place."

Until late in the Cold War and recent years, the military did not give a
shit about the environment. Not because they were malicious. But they did not
see protecting land and water as their job.

The military's traditional attitude was best summed up on March 20, 2001
when Major General R. L. Van Antwerp gave testimony before the Senate Armed
Service Committee. "The primary mission of the United States Army is to fight
and win in armed conflict," he said.

True enough. But there is a price to pay. Consider:
*POLLUTED BASES. Over 28,000 sites on nearly 11,000 military
installations may have been polluted from past defense activities. These
sites include current, closed and former military installations in all 50
states, the District of Columbia, and the U.S. territories.
*UNEXPLODED BOMBS. UXOs, or unexploded ordinance, are bombs that never
detonated during training. It is estimated that 10% of fired bombs never
explode. Many of these devices remain hidden even after the military returns
the land to civilian or public use. The military has no idea how many UXOs
are out there, but the best guess is that they are buried on 1500 sites
spread out over 15 million acres.
*STOCKPILED CHEMICAL WEAPONS. The United States today has 23,414 tons of
deadly chemical weapons stored in eight places around the United States. The
Army wants to destroy many of these weapons through incineration. Critics
contend that could lead to catastrophe.
*NON-STOCKPILED CHEMICAL WEAPONS. These are our earliest chemical
weapons, mainly mustard gas, dating back to World War I. They were just
buried and forgotten in 224 potential sites across the U.S. and our
territories. Some ended up beneath what later became civilian housing
developments, such as the exclusive Spring Valley neighborhood in Washington
D.C., where they have been digging up backyards and finding mustard gas and
contaminated soil since 1993.
*NUCLEAR WASTE. Building nuclear bombs contaminated nearly 150 sites
around the U.S. Over 109 will have to become national security "sacrifice
zones," meaning they can never be clean enough for human use. These sites are
located in 27 states, Puerto Rico and the U.S. territorial islands in the
Pacific.

How much will it cost to clean this stuff up?

The military estimates $36 billion for defense installations, formerly
used defense sites and bases closed over the past 14 years. That's probably
low. The Army wants to spend $23.7 billion to destroy the stockpiled chemical
weapons. Then throw in an additional $15 billion or more to get rid of
non-stockpiled chemical weapons. The unexploded ordinance cleanup might
require another $30 billion or more.

That's a minimum of $105 billion.

Then comes the nuclear weapons nightmare involving stuff like plutonium,
which will endanger human life for centuries. Cleanup costs range from
conservative Department of Energy figures of $151 billion to $195 billion.
Unofficial estimates go as high as $1 trillion.

"There is going to be a bill to be paid indefinitely," says Lenny Siegel,
director of the Center for Public Environmental Oversight. "You are going to
have contamination left in places. You are going to have pumps operating for
decades. You are going to have land use controls limiting the uses of
property."

In fairness, the Departments of Defense and Energy do not ignore the
crisis. The DOD has spent almost $25 billion on what they call "environmental
restoration" over the past 17 years. This year they want to spend another $4
billion, but only about $2 billion of that goes to actual cleanups. The
Department of Energy plans on spending $6.4 billion this year on
environmental programs at 114 contaminated sites.

But keep in mind that this is only a tiny part of the entire defense
budget, which this year comes in at a huge $396.1 billion. Generals don't get
stars pinned on their shirts by battling contaminated water plums under Cape
Cod. Pentagon brass say all the right things about wanting to cleanup their
pollution.

During the Clinton years, they even created the Office for Environmental
Security inside the Pentagon. But with the open ended war on terrorism and
possible Second U.S. Iraq War, how high a priority will military pollution be
in future years? Indeed, the military has been pestering Congress for over a
year to role back "encroaching" environmental laws that impact on training.
Those pleas got even louder after September 11, 2001. Congress has yet to
give in.

"The cleanup process has been shortchanged over the past several years,"
said Dr. Paul F. Walker, director of the Legacy Program of Global Green USA.
"In reality, if we don't take care of our own backyard with UXOs and weapons
of mass destruction and God knows what else, we could more endanger our
security than by engaging in warfare across the sea somewhere."

But forget the numbers. The real legacy of the Cold War is its continuing
human cost; military pollution is making Americans sick. Citizens all over
the country are engaged now in an often life and death battle to get the
military to own up to their past actions and fix this problem. This struggle,
though rarely making the evening news, is nothing less than a fight for
justice.

We talked to some of these citizens. We found that this is truly a
problem of national scope. Here are some of the worse cases. Both the
Departments of Defense and Energy did not respond to our request for
interviews with government officials to respond to these charges.

*THE DEFENSE DEPOT OF MEMPHIS, TENNESSEE. This Army depot on 640 acres of land in Southeast Memphis was the military's largest supply warehouse between
1942 and 1997. The surrounding community is poor, working class and
overwhelmingly African-American.

Cancer arrived here in the mid-1980 like an invading army and never left.
Breast cancer in women, prostate cancer in men, a 13 year old girl stricken
with uterine cancer. There are also incidents of kidney and thyroid disease.
Even neighborhood dogs started developing tumors and dying off.

"We noticed that the closer you lived to the site in a half mile radius,
there are clusters of cancer, clusters of kidney disease," say Doris
Bradshaw, a community activist who grew up and lives an eight of a mile from
the depot. "It use to be that black people didn't suffer certain kinds of
cancer. Now all of a sudden in this area, it turns out to be a normal
occurrence."

Bradshaw watched her grandmother and classmates die from these illnesses
over the years. When the community complained about the base to the military,
"they claimed we didn't know what we were talking about," she recalls.

But in fact the depot was contaminated by a witch's brew of chemicals
including arsenic, cadmium, lead, mercury, trichloroethylene (TCE), carbon
tetrachloride, pesticides, dioxin, chlorodane, PCBs and chemical weapons. In
all, Bradshaw claims there were 289 different types of chemicals used and
tested on the depot. It's fair to surmise, as with most pollution, that a lot
of these chemicals got in the water supply, air and bodies of humans.

The depot is now one of 150 defense facilities on the Federal Superfund
cleanup list. For Bradshaw, this is a clear example of environmental racism.
When asked about the Cold War, she shrugs and says: "We were the victims of
it."

*FALLON, NEVADA--home of the Navy's famed Top Gun flight school. Sixteen
children have been stricken with leukemia there over the past five years.
Three have died. Most of the affected families live a third of a mile from an
underground pipeline that delivers 34 million gallons of jet fuel to the
Fallon Naval Air Station.

Federal and state authorities claim that the pipeline is not a hazard.

The investigation continues.

*MARION, OHIO. Parents noticed high rates of leukemia and other cancers
among former students of the River Valley High and Middle Schools. These
schools were built on the site of the 654 acre Marion Engineering Depot. The
Army made bombs and fuses there until the early 1960's. The schools opened in
1962 and 1968. By the late 1990's soil and water contamination was found to
be extensive on school ball fields. The schools won't be relocated until the
Fall of 2003.

*THE MASSACHUSETTS MILITARY RESERVATION. Joel Feigenbaum first got
involved in 1982 when a 2000 acre forest fire caused by artillery training at
the Massachusetts Military Reservation(MMR) rained debris on his home. A year
later a boy brought a live grenade into his daughter's kindergarten class for
show and tell.

As an activist, Feigenbaum has endured anonymous death threats and hate
calls over the years as he battled the Pentagon to learn the truth.

Unlike many bases, which usually impact poorer communities, the 22,000
acre MMR affects beautiful Cape Cod, home of the Kennedys and summer
playground for thousands of wealthy tourists.

Used for training since 1911, MMR is home of Otis Air Force Base and the
Army's Camp Edwards. Since it sits atop the sole aquifer for the entire Cape,
all pollution went straight down into the water supply. MMR created at least
16 underground plums of contamination. The result is staggering.

"Just on the Air Force side, 50 billion gallons of groundwater have been
affected, and that's a conservative estimate," says Feigenbaum. "And that
doesn't count the Army side--where there may be another 25 billion gallons
contaminated, maybe more. It's at least 75 billion between the two."

Another three to eight million gallons of water are polluted every day.
By 2020, the Cape could have a shortfall of 11 million gallons of water a day
due to this pollution. Until the Environmental Protection Agency forced the
Army to stop live fire training in a landmark 1997 decision, cancer rates on
some parts of the Cape were anywhere to 24% to 66% above state averages.

Unlike, say, Memphis or Kelly Air Force Base in San Antonio, where
contamination runs under 20,000 homes in a mostly Latino community, the
military faces a public relations disaster on Cape Cod. Accordingly, the Air
Force has spent $500 million so far on the cleanup. Estimates are that the
total cleanup could cost $1 billion more.

*THE ANNISTON ORDINANCE DEPOT AND CHEMICAL WEAPONS INCINERATOR. Keith Howland of Anniston, Alabama, lives with his wife in a 3000 square foot home on 56 acres. It would be perfect, he says, except for the neighbors.

"I live right bordering the army ordinance depot where TCE (an industrial
solvent) was dumped into open ground trenches for 30 years and contaminated
the groundwater," Howland says. "But I am also about a mile from the
munitions bunkers that contain nearly 700,000 chemical weapons. I feel like I
got to stay on my toes."

Good idea. The 75,000 people living near Anniston face a triple
environmental whammy. The Monsanto corporation contaminated the area with
PCBs during the 1960's and 1970's. The Army repaired all their tanks at the
ordinance depot, polluting a water supply used by 20,000 to 30,000 people a
day. Finally, there are all those pesky chemical weapons: 2253 tons of Sarin,
VX and mustard gas, much of it sitting atop M-55 rockets. The Army has built
an incinerator to destroy them.

"What would you rather have done to you: be polluted or gassed?" Howland
asks. "The water is a continuous exposure issue, whereas the nerve agent can
maim or kill you in an instant."

He knows of people in his neighborhood getting sick, including a seven
year old girl who contracted a rare form of kidney cancer.

A salesman by occupation, he became an activist because, he says, "I was
getting lied to. I was backed into a corner. I was the guy right there and
the answers were not right. I was most at risk. What would you do? It's
unbelievable the amount of bureaucratic bullshit the county and federal
government have done here."

Anniston's problems are a long way from solved. The EPA may lower the
level of contaminants allowed in the drinking water, which would complicate
the Army's cleanup. And test burns at the chemical weapons incinerator have
failed and must be redone, screwing up the Army's burn schedule.

Meanwhile Howland and other residents have been given protective hoods in
case of chemical leaks.

*COLD WAR CHEMICAL WEAPONS. These affect people in Anniston and Pine
Bluff, Arkansas; Pueblo, Colorado; Newport, Indiana; Richmond, Kentucky;
Aberdeen, Maryland; Umatilla, Oregon; and Tooele, Utah.

The U.S. agreed in 1997 with the Russians and other nations to eliminate
all our chemical weapons. But you can't just flush nerve gas down the toilet.
In addition, weaponized chemicals were built to explode.

The Army decided to burn them all. And that is what they have done to
7200 tons over the last decade at incinerators on the tiny Pacific island of
Johnston Atoll and at Tooele, Utah. Now, they also want to incinerate in
Alabama and Arkansas. But, like everything involving military pollution, it's
not that simple.

Burning chemicals weapons is dangerous. The Tooele incinerator had to be
shut down on July 15, 2002, when four workers were exposed to GB nerve agent.
Then on August 12, 2002, there was a release of VX nerve gas on Johnston
Atoll at levels 45 times higher than permitted, according to internal Army
documents.

"The question comes when you translate the Johnston experience and the
Utah experience in the middle of the desert into a place like Anniston, where
there are 75,000 people in the `kill zone'" says Craig Williams, director of
the Chemical Weapons Working Group.

"What it tells you is that [incineration] is dead wrong because where
they have incinerated there have been innumerable worker exposures, malfunctions, technical problems and at least 19 live agent releases that we can document and dozens
more we can't prove."

Williams says the chemicals can be destroyed more cheaply and safely
through a neutralization process.

"Many of us thought that the fourth hijacked plane that crashed in
Pennsylvania on 9/11 could have easily been heading for the Edgewood Arsenal
in Aberdeen, Maryland," says Dr. Walker of Global Green USA. "If it had
crashed there, it would have exploded and burned the entire chemical weapons
stockpile, and depending on the wind drift, it could have killed the entire
city of Baltimore."

Immediately after the terrorist attack, the military decided to spend $9
million to build a reinforced steel structure to protect the 1624 tons of
mustard gas at Aberdeen. But they still must find a safe way to get rid of it.

*HANFORD NUCLEAR RESERVATION. Russell Jim is a Native American, a member
of the Yakima Indian Nation in Washington State. His people have fished and
lived off the Columbia River for centuries. He first heard about the glowing
fish in the river about five years ago. A woman was "cutting and hanging
fish to dry and finished late at night. She turned the light out to go to
her house. She looked back and noticed that the fish were glowing."

What bothered Jim more than the glow was what he learned about the
aftereffects of eating the fish. An EPA study in 2002 reported that "Adults
in...member tribes who eat fish for 70 years at the high ingestion rate (48
meals per month) may have cancer rates that are up to 50 times higher than
those for the general public who consume fish about once a month."

Six thousand Yakima and 100,000 other Americans live in the front yard of
the most contaminated place in the Western Hemisphere: the Hanford Nuclear
Reservation. For over 40 years the plutonium needed for our 70,000 nukes,
including the Nagasaki bomb, was manufactured there.

The government directly poured 440 billion gallons of contaminated liquid
into the ground at Hanford, enough to create a poisonous lake the size of the
island of Manhattan 120 feet deep.

As if that wasn't bad enough, another 54 million gallons of dangerous
high level nuclear waste was also dumped in 177 underground tanks. A third of
those tanks have sprung leaks and much of that contamination has made its way
to the nearby Columbia.

Hanford, which is situated on land taken from the Yakima Nation, no
longer makes plutonium. But in addition to the contamination, Hanford is
still home to nine nuclear reactors, five nuclear processing facilities and
2400 tons of spent unprocessed nuclear fuel containing plutonium.

"Hanford is one big dirty bomb," says Carpenter of the Government
Accountability Project. "There are a lot of targets of opportunity there that
worry people." Hanford is about 150 miles from Spokane; the closest city is
Richland, three miles away, and two smaller towns: Pasco and Kennewick.

"There are high rates of illnesses out here," says Russell Jim, "and I
suspect that a lot of them come out of Hanford. If they had this level of
contamination in the suburbs of Cincinnati or any rich area of the country,
people would be going to the penitentiary."

Jim would like to see the government do a comprehensive study of the
river. Billions have been spent studying Hanford, but the government is not
sure how to cleanup material that will be deadly for thousands of years.

There has been talk of turning the waste into glass, but in the end, it
just might be entombed in a national security sacrifice zone. The cost to
cleanup Hanford alone might run from $100-$150 billion. And that doesn't even
start to fix all the other DOE nuclear weapons sites.

But will the money ever arrive at Hanford or Cape Cod or Memphis or
Anniston? The government promises to take care of the problem.

In an April 2002 Pentagon report Assistant Deputy Under Secretary of
Defense John Paul Woodley wrote that "the Department of Defense is taking the
responsibilities of cleanup seriously, and devoting an enormous measure of
the nation's precious Defense resources to the cleanup effort. A healthy and
productive environment is a key element of national power, and the business
of the Department of Defense is to enhance the elements of national power in
support of the national security strategy."

But that strategy seems to be focused mainly on fighting terrorism and
foreign threats, not restoring the environment. Cleanups are deemed to be
local issues, not national. And communities that have fought the military for
years to get justice will have to continue their struggle, often alone.

"We should be very wary of UXOs and deadly pollution in our own
backyards," Dr. Walker says. "There is a lot more than people realize.
People should ask their Congressmen and Senators to address the issue of
military base cleanups and environmental security and make it a high
priority."

Wars, even just and successful one, take terrible human tolls. Americans
will be living with and dying from the unintended consequences of the Cold
War for generations to come.