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- DATE: JAN. 24, 1991 18:06 REPORT:
- TO: SPL
- FOR:
- CC:
- BUREAU: WASHINGTON
- BY: TED GUP
- IN:
- SLUG: ENVIRONMENTAL IMPACT
-
- Now add this to the celebrated "fog of war:" the
- conflict in the gulf may or may not spawn a major
- environmental disaster. There are myriad threats to the
- environment, chief among them: oil fires, oil spills, the
- intentional or inadvertent release of chemical weapons,
- biological agents, radioactivity, and the mountain of
- conventional explosives now piled high in the region.
- Whether or not there's a major environmental disaster in
- the offing depends on who you talk to, what specific
- threat you're speaking of, and something as elemental and
- unpredictable as the weather.
-
- Begin with what many scientists believe is the most
- serious environmental threat -- and ironically the source
- of th region's wealth -- oil. The Department of Energy
- dismisses the idea that if Saddam torches Kuwait's oil
- fields and refineries and pipelines he will unleash
- global disaster. DOE cites a study prepared by the Sandia
- National Laboratories in New Mexico and concludes "Major
- climatic changes on a global scale are unlikely as a
- result of smoke discharge. The normal phenomona in the
- lower atmosphere would significantly reduce the amount of
- smoke injected into the atmosphere. Measureable climatic
- affects on a regional level could be created." The actual
- Sandia study entitled "Potential Impacts of Iraqi Use of
- Oil as a Defensive Weapon" has not yet been released --
- it's classified -- and is being treated with considerable
- sensitivity both at Sandia and at DOE.
-
- Others are not nearly so confident about he affects of a
- broadscale firing of the Kuwait oil properties. The
- ubiquitous Carl Sagan, director of the Laboratory for
- Planetary Studies at Cornell University and an expert on
- planetary atmospherics, believes we can learn much about
- the hazards from his research into the affects of a
- so-called "nuclear winter." Sagan envisions a scenario in
- which the approximately 360 Kuwaiti oil fields are set
- ablaze as Saddam makes good on yet another threat. "A set
- of plumes of dark oily sooty smoke would rise over the
- Kuwait oil fields and be carried by the prevailing winds
- in an eastward direction across the gulf to Iran,
- Afghanistan, the Indian subcontinent" -- perhaps as far
- as south China. If hundreds of wells were involved, it
- could takes months or more for the fires to go out,
- meaning the smoke would pour out through the Spring,
- Summer and Fall -- the months of planting and harvest
- time. This could dramatically affect agricultural
- output.
-
- There are those who argue that the sooty cloud would not
- rise to the upper atmosphere. But Sagan notes that
- because of the darkness of soot, it becomes heated and
- heats the air around it, causing the cloud to rise. It is
- hard to find a true historical analogy to what might
- happen. The closest analogy, says Sagan, may be the 1815
- eruption of the Indonesian volcano, Mt. Tambora.
- "Eighteen-sixteen is known as the year without a summer,"
- says Sagan. The year following the eruption was marked by
- massive crop failures in North America and Europe and
- even the Indian monsoons may have been affected,
- according to Sagan.
-
- A number of environmental organizations, among them
- Friends of the Earth and Greenpeace, have also presented
- grim scenarios of the environmental impact of mass fires
- at the Kuwait oil facilities. That and other perils lead
- Greenpeace USA executive director Peter Bahouth to say
- "We feel strongly this could be one of the most
- environmentally devastating events of our time." Brent
- Blackwelder, vice president for Policy at Friends of the
- Earth shares that grim assessment: "We could be looking
- at an ecological catastrophe as a result of this war."
- Blackwelder and others worry not only about the effect of
- oil fires, but also of broad oil spills polluting the
- Gulf. "We could be looking at massive oil spills in the
- Persian Gulf that could turn this body of water into a
- virtual dead sea." Such contamination, warns Blackwelder,
- could destroy vital fisheries of tuna, snapper, sardines,
- anchovies and shrimp. It could destroy the livings of
- local fishermen and international fishing fleets.
-
- Ofcourse, real though such threats may be, at this point
- they remain highly speculative. The vast majority of
- Kuwait's oil fields have not been torched, and oil
- experts still aren't sure exactly what is causing the
- plumes of smoke. While it seems clear the al-Wafra
- facility in Kuwait is involved, even Txaco which operated
- the facility jointly with the Kuwait Oil Company ( KOC )
- is unsure just what's ablaze. They have examined
- television videos of the fire and had company employees
- who worked at the site examine the videos, but it is
- still unclear what's burning. One of three fields jointly
- operated by Texaco and KOC, the facility was closed down
- the first week of the invasion. Texaco officials say
- Al-Wafra had operating wells, storage tanks, and
- pipelines. The storage tanks had a capacity to hold some
- 230,000 barrels of crude oil, but how much is on site
- now, no one at Texaco knows. As for the environmental
- perils presented by the current fire, Texaco spokesman
- David Dickson says "We really don't know at this point
- because we don't know what the sources of the fires are
- and how long it will burn."
-
- Oil is not the only hazard. Suppose allied bombs have
- hit a chemical munitions factory. What is the threat to
- the environment? That depends on the chemicals on site,
- the manner the chemical agents are released, and the
- climatic and weather conditions of the day. The
- persistence of various chemical agents can vary widely,
- according to Elisa D. Harris, senior research analyst at
- the Brookings Institution , and an authority on chemical
- weapons. Much depends on the weather, but broadly
- speaking, says Harris, mustard gas, a blistering agent,
- can persist from a couple of days to as long as a week;
- among the nerve agents Saddam is believed to have, VX
- could persist for several weeks, Tabun a few days, and
- Sarin, can persist from minutes to hours. "None of these
- agents will pose a long term environmental or health
- hazard and all of them can be dealt with through
- decontamination techniques," says Harris. "Chemical
- weapons do not pose a long term threat to the
- environment."
-
- Seth Carus, a fellow at the Washington Institute for
- Near East Policy, and a chemical weapons expert, agrees.
- Carus notes that the primary Iraqi facilities that
- manufacture chemical agents are at Samarra in the midst
- of a 25 square kilometer exclusion zone and that only
- people related to the facility are likely to be in any
- real peril. "If there is a release," says Carus, "there
- is not likely to be a lot of it and it will dissipate
- before it gets out of the exclusion zone." Carus says the
- amount of chemical agent made at the site is not known
- but if it is about 1,000 tons a year as is widely
- believed, most of it would be mustard gas. At any given
- time, says Carus, only a few tons would be at the factory
- site, the rest of it having been transferred to bunkers
- for storage. Thousands of tons of chemical weapons were
- used during the Iran-Iraq war, says Carus, without
- widespread ecological destruction. "It will not create
- any kind of cataclysm," said Carus of the results of a
- direct hit on a chemical factory.
-
- Says Lee Feinstein, Assistant Director for research of
- the Arms Control Association, "the least of our worries
- will be the environmental impact of a bombing of
- Hussein's chemical weapons production or storage
- facilities. Most of the capabilities we know he has are
- short-lasting nerve agent or mustard, so whatever affects
- there might be would be temporary." Still, there are few
- certainties. "I don't feel 100% confident discussing this
- because I don't think a lot of us have thought about
- these kinds of things," says Feinstein.
-
- Many experts agree that the effects of hitting a plant
- that manufactures biological agents presents a more
- complicated problem. Brookings Institution's Harris says
- Hussein has not been known to use biological weapons but
- is known to have been working with a number of biological
- agents, among them, typhoid, cholera, tularemia,
- botulinum toxin, and anthrax. "There are a lot more
- uncertainties on the biological side," says Harris. Again
- the risk to the environment depends on the agent.
- Botulinum toxin is known to degrade naturally in a period
- of several hours. Tularemia is a very fragile organism
- that needs a mammalian host to survive, says Harris.
-
- But the real hazard is anthrax which has been known to
- last in the soil for decades. According to Harris and
- others, the British conducted experiments with anthrax on
- Gruinard Island off the coast of Scotland during World
- War II. While anthrax will decay and become harmless if
- exposed to ultraviolet light -- simple sunlight will do
- it -- anthrax spores survived in the soil of Gruinard
- Island for more than forty years. Eventually, says
- Harris, the British had to decontaminate the island in
- the 1980's using formaldehyde. The greatest and most
- persistent environmental hazard from biological agents
- would therefore be anthrax in the soil. One question
- still remains however -- whether anthrax spores can
- survive as well in the desert sands as it did in the soil
- of Gruinard Island. But even with anthrax, says Harris,
- the threat of a massive and widespread airborne
- pestilence released during the bombing of a laboratory or
- plant and infecting the world is not realistic. As with
- chemical agents, there are many variables to assess,
- among them wind and rain, the concentration of the
- agents, and the exact manner in which they are
- dispersed.
-
- Finally there are the fears of what might be the
- environmental consequences of bombing nuclear facilities
- in Iraq. Thomas B. Cochran, senior staff scientist of the
- Natural Resources Defense Council, does not believe that
- poses a serious widespread hazard to the environment.
- Cochran believes that the facilities are too small and
- the amount of radioactive materials too slight to
- threaten serious ecological harm. It is possible, he
- says, that a direct hit on Iraq's Soviet designed reactor
- could create a problem. It is believed that it has some
- eight kilograms of fuels associated with it. "You would
- need a direct hit to splatter the stuff around, and it
- would be a local hazard," says Cochran. "It would be a
- pretty small local event. You don't have a Chernobyl
- here, and you don't have a Bhopal type of event." That
- view is shared by several other scientists. Says Cochran,
- "you could contaminate the area locally and you could
- clean it up in due time, but the damage done by this
- would be pale in comparison to the other damage being
- done in Iraq."
-
- It is easy in concocting doomsday scenarios for the
- environment to get carried away with the exotica of the
- battlefield. The simple fact may be that neither
- radiation, nor chemicals, nor biologics, nor oil fires
- may cause the greatest ecological damage. More obvious
- threats such as the sheer volume of explosives and the
- subsequent cratering of vast areas will have their own
- devastating affect on the environment. "The things I
- think are the worst are all the conventional crud,"
- observes Seth Carus of the Washington Institute for Near
- East Policy. "As it stands now there are probably places
- in Kuwait where people will never be able to go back in
- simply because of all the mines." In addition, warns
- Carus, "in a mammoth ground war you will have enormous
- quantitites of unexploded munitions all over the place.
- It will take decades to clear it out." In the end, the
- hazards of duds may be as much a deterent to returning to
- the places of war as the firey plumes and the memories of
- gas clouds.
-
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