The abandoned ammunition on French ground by the last three wars’ soldiers is industrial waste with no place to go. The waste was subjected to unforeseen discoveries, to disorganized storage, to centers of destruction located very far from centers of “production”, and to unexpected transfers — it is therefore why one recovers bombs in garbage dumps, grenades in potato sacks originating from the north of France, and shrapnel in a marine sandlot delivered to an equestrian center. The law of silence applies to these objects and substances. It is impossible to know the state of chemical ex-ammunition stocks, and at the same time, weapons of mass destruction (WMD) are quasi-abandoned in plain view, like at the Mars-de-Tour (54), in contradiction with the Convention on the Prohibition of the Development, Production, Stockpiling, and Use of Chemical Weapons and Their Destruction, (CWC). These abandonments expose the environment and public security to risks of pollution, theft, and blackmail. The construction, and even the location of a destruction factory for this type of ammunition, is always deferred. After abandoned military sites are transferred to civil use, they are not subject to surface and subsurface decontamination 50 cm deep, leaving to the instigators the responsibility of underground decontamination.
The chemical ammunition whose mode of action is the poisoning of civilian or military populations, and the conventional ammunition whose mode of action is the physical destruction of people and goods, are each the sources of air, water, ground, and sediment pollution. The chemical weapons are pesticide weapons, and the explosive matters degrade into DNOC (DiNitroOrthoCresol), a toxic herbicide known since 1930 and forbidden in Europe since 2000.
Public workers, farmers, and fishermen are the groups most exposed to the vestiges of war. In the forests, gardens, and on the beaches and river sides, families and children are the principle actors in their discovery. Dredging work and port enlargement revealed pyrotechnic reservoirs. On the construction site of Port 2000 at Havre, 60 munitions were relocated or sucked into dredging engines. Among these French and English bombs, there was a Tall Boy—the largest bomb ever used on a battlefield in the Occident. Since these 60 objects had been revealed after the official mine clearance reports were returned by the Ministry of Defense, they were not made the subject of any alert and evacuation procedures for the nearby inhabitants of Havre or the port workers! These collections of undersea vessels particularly threaten ports on the Atlantic side and the coastal linear between Menton and Toulon; these configurations are explosive, they meddle often with Seveso factories, bombs, and tourism.
A long time afterwards, the wars continue to threaten and kill. In the marked regions, Nord-Pas-de-Calais, Lorraine, Picardy, Normandy, Brittany, Pays-de-la-Loire, Provence-Alpes-Cote d’Azur, it is hoped that more pedagogical information will be distributed concerning waste management—on the seashore, at the construction sites, in the agricultural and educational places. The conditions of collection, transit, storage, and destruction of explosive and chemical munitions imposes the need to always report technical, land, and financial investments. 150 minesweepers have recollected 300 tons, more or less, of non-explosive munitions. The human loss and mutilations are common for minesweepers, individuals, fortuitous inventers, and maniac collectors of war remnants.
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