War Threatens Our Environment
World
BEYOND War
War and preparations for war are not just the pit into
which trillions of dollars that could be used to
prevent environmental damage are dumped, but also a major direct cause of that
environmental damage.
The U.S. military is one of the biggest polluters on
earth. Since 2001, the U.S. military has emitted 1.2
billion metric tons of greenhouse gases, equivalent to the annual emissions of
257 million cars on the road. The U.S. Department of Defense is the largest
institutional consumer of oil ($17B/year) in the world and the largest
global landholder with
800 foreign military bases in 80 countries. By one estimate, the U.S.
military used 1.2
million barrels of oil in Iraq in just one month of 2008. One military estimate
in 2003 was that two-thirds of the U.S. Army’s fuel consumption occurred in vehicles that were
delivering fuel to the battlefield.
As the environmental crisis worsens, thinking of war
as a tool with which to address it threatens us with the ultimate vicious cycle.
Declaring that climate change causes war misses the reality that human beings
cause war and that unless we learn to address crises nonviolently we will only
make them worse.
A major motivation behind some wars is the desire to
control resources that poison the earth, especially oil and gas. In fact, the
launching of wars by wealthy nations in poor ones does not correlate with human
rights violations or lack of democracy, or threats of terrorism but does
strongly correlate with the presence of
oil.
War does most of its environmental damage where it
happens but also devastates the natural environment of military bases in
foreign and home nations.
The U.S. military is the third-largest
polluter of U.S. waterways.
At least since the Romans sowed salt on Carthaginian
fields during the Third Punic War, wars have damaged the earth, both
intentionally and — more often — as a reckless side-effect.
General Philip Sheridan, having destroyed farmland in
Virginia during the Civil War, proceeded to destroy bison herds as a means of
restricting Native Americans to reservations. World War I saw European land
destroyed with trenches and poison gas. During World War II, the Norwegians
started landslides in their valleys, while the Dutch flooded a third of their
farmland, the Germans destroyed Czech forests and the British burned forests
in Germany and France.
Wars in recent years have rendered large areas
uninhabitable and generated tens of millions of refugees. War “rivals
infectious disease as a global cause of morbidity and mortality,” according to
Jennifer Leaning of Harvard Medical School. Leaning divides war’s
environmental impact into four areas: “production and testing of nuclear
weapons, aerial and naval bombardment of terrain, dispersal, and persistence of
land mines and buried ordnance, and use or storage of military defoliants,
toxins, and waste.”
At least 33,480 U.S. nuclear weapons workers who
have received compensation for health damage are now dead.
Nuclear weapons testing by the United States and the
Soviet Union involved at least 423 atmospheric tests between 1945 and 1957 and
1,400 underground tests between 1957 and 1989. The damage from that radiation
is still not fully known, but it is still spreading, as is our knowledge of the
past. New research in 2009 suggested that Chinese nuclear tests between 1964
and 1996 killed more people directly than the nuclear testing of any other
nation. Jun Takada, a Japanese physicist, calculated that up to 1.48 million
people were exposed to fallout and 190,000 of them may have died from diseases
linked to radiation from those Chinese tests. In the United States,
testing in the 1950s led to untold thousands of deaths from cancer in Nevada,
Utah, and Arizona, the areas most downwind from the testing.
In 1955, movie star John Wayne, who avoided
participating in World War II by opting instead to make movies glorifying war,
decided that he had to play Genghis Khan. The Conqueror was
filmed in Utah, and the conqueror was conquered. Of the 220 people who worked
on the film, by the early 1980s 91 of them had contracted cancer, and 46 had
died of it, including John Wayne, Susan Hayward, Agnes Moorehead, and director
Dick Powell. Statistics suggest that 30 of the 220 might ordinarily have gotten
cancer, not 91. In 1953 the military had tested 11 atomic bombs nearby in
Nevada, and by the 1980s half the residents of St. George, Utah, where the film
was shot, had cancer. You can run from war, but you can’t hide.
The military knew its nuclear detonations would impact
those downwind, and monitored the results, effectively engaging in human
experimentation. In numerous other studies during and in the decades following
World War II, in violation of the Nuremberg Code of 1947, the military and the
CIA have subjected veterans, prisoners, the poor, the mentally disabled, and
other populations to unwitting human experimentation for the purpose of testing
nuclear, chemical, and biological weapons, as well as drugs like LSD, which the
United States went so far as to put into the air and food of an entire French
village in 1951, with horrific and deadly results.
A report prepared in 1994 for the U.S. Senate
Committee on Veterans Affairs begins:
“During the last 50 years, hundreds of thousands of
military personnel have been involved in human experimentation and other
intentional exposures conducted by the Department of Defense (DOD), often
without a servicemember’s knowledge or consent. In some cases, soldiers who
consented to serve as human subjects found themselves participating in
experiments quite different from those described at the time they volunteered.
For example, thousands of World War II veterans who originally volunteered to
‘test summer clothing’ in exchange for extra leave time, found themselves in
gas chambers testing the effects of mustard gas and lewisite. Additionally,
soldiers were sometimes ordered by commanding officers to ‘volunteer’ to
participate in research or face dire consequences. For example, several Persian
Gulf War veterans interviewed by Committee staff reported that they were
ordered to take experimental vaccines during Operation Desert Shield or face
prison.”
The full report contains numerous complaints about the
secrecy of the military and suggests that its findings may be only scraping the
surface of what has been hidden.
In 1993, the U.S. Secretary of Energy released records
of U.S. testing of plutonium on unwitting U.S. victims immediately following
World War II. Newsweek commented reassuringly, on December 27, 1993:
“The scientists who had conducted those tests so long
ago surely had rational reasons: the struggle with the Soviet Union, the fear
of imminent nuclear war, the urgent need to unlock all the secrets of the atom,
for purposes both military and medical.”
Oh, well that’s all right then.
Nuclear weapons production sites in Washington,
Tennessee, Colorado, Georgia, and elsewhere have poisoned the surrounding
environment as well as their employees, over 3,000 of whom were awarded
compensation in 2000. Many peace groups around the United States are focused on
stopping the damage that local weapons factories are doing to the environment
and their workers with subsidies from local governments. Sometimes this work
ends up taking priority over protesting the next war.
In Kansas City, activists have tried to block the
relocation and expansion of a major weapons factory. It seems that President
Harry Truman, who had made his name by opposing waste on weaponry, planted a
factory back home that polluted the land and water for over 60 years while
manufacturing parts for instruments of death thus far used only by Truman. The
private, but the tax-break-subsidized factory will likely continue to produce, but
on a larger scale, 85 percent of the components of nuclear weapons.
Weapons production is the least of it. Non-nuclear
bombs in World War II destroyed cities, farms, and irrigation systems,
producing 50 million refugees and displaced people. The U.S. bombing of
Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia produced 17 million refugees, and as of the end of
2008, there were 13.5 million refugees and asylum seekers around the
world. A long civil war in Sudan led to a famine there in 1988. Rwanda’s
brutal civil war pushed people into areas inhabited by endangered species,
including gorillas. The displacement of populations around the world to less
habitable areas has damaged ecosystems severely.
Wars leave a lot behind. Between 1944 and 1970 the
U.S. military dumped huge quantities of chemical weapons into the Atlantic and
Pacific oceans. In 1943 German bombs had sunk a U.S. ship at Bari, Italy, that
was secretly carrying a million pounds of mustard gas. Many of the U.S. sailors
died from the poison, which the United States dishonestly claimed to have been
using as a “deterrent,” despite keeping it secret. The ship is expected to keep
leaking the gas into the sea for centuries. Meanwhile the United States and
Japan leftover 1,000 ships on the floor of the Pacific, including fuel tankers.
In 2001, one such ship, the USS Mississinewa was found to be leaking oil. In
2003 the military removed what oil it could from the wreck.
Perhaps the most deadly weapons left behind by wars
are land mines and cluster bombs. Tens of millions of them are estimated to be
lying around on the earth, oblivious to any announcements that peace has been
declared. Most of their victims are civilians, a large percentage of them
children. A 1993 U.S. State Department report called land mines “the most toxic
and widespread pollution facing mankind.” Land mines damage the environment in
four ways, writes Jennifer Leaning:
“fear of mines denies access to abundant natural
resources and arable land; populations are forced to move preferentially into
marginal and fragile environments in order to avoid minefields; this migration
speeds depletion of biological diversity, and land-mine explosions disrupt
essential soil and water processes.”
The amount of the earth’s surface impacted is not
minor. Millions of hectares in Europe, North Africa, and Asia are under
interdiction. One-third of the land in Libya conceals land mines and unexploded
World War II munitions. Many of the world’s nations have agreed to ban land
mines and cluster bombs.
From 1965 to 1971, the United States developed new
ways of destroying plant and animal (including human) life; it sprayed 14
percent of South Vietnam’s forests with herbicides, burned farmland, and shot
livestock. One of the worst chemical herbicides, Agent Orange, still threatens
the health of the Vietnamese and has caused some half-million birth defects.
During the Gulf War, Iraq released 10 million gallons of oil into the Persian
Gulf and set 732 oil wells on fire, causing extensive damage to wildlife and
poisoning groundwater with oil spills. In its wars in Yugoslavia and Iraq, the
United States has left behind depleted uranium. A 1994 U.S. Department of
Veterans Affairs survey of Gulf War veterans in Mississippi found 67 percent of
their children conceived since the war had severe illnesses or birth
defects. Wars in Angola eliminated 90 percent of the wildlife between
1975 and 1991. A civil war in Sri Lanka fell five million trees.
The Soviet and U.S. occupations of Afghanistan have
destroyed or damaged thousands of villages and sources of water. The Taliban
has illegally traded timber to Pakistan, resulting in significant
deforestation. U.S. bombs and refugees in need of firewood have added to the
damage. Afghanistan’s forests are almost gone. Most of the migratory birds that
used to pass through Afghanistan no longer do so. Its air and water have been
poisoned with explosives and rocket propellants.
Ethiopia could have reversed its desertification for
$50 million in reforestation, but chose to spend $275 million on its military
instead — each year between 1975 and 1985.
