The US Must Accept Responsibility for the Toxic Bombs We Buried in India

Long-secret documents from WWII show that the US Army’s 771st Chemical Depot Company buried thousands of M47A2 mustard-filled bombs at Ondal Airbase in British-ruled India. The 769th Chemical Depot Company helped bury hundreds of similar bombs at nearby Chakulia Airbase. Practically, legally and morally, the US should acknowledge its responsibility to remediate these burial sites.

Practically, remediation of these Indian sites falls well within US capability. The toxic munitions were buried in only a few, well-documented and readily accessible locations. In China, by contrast, Japan buried its unused chemical weapons in many different and poorly documented locations. The work of finding and destroying Japanese weapons still continues, as do accidents involving the still toxic munitions. As another practical matter, during the decades since the weapons were buried the world has developed well-defined techniques for dealing with contamination of this sort. Unlike deep ocean dumps, we know how to safely decontaminate areas of toxic land, and we are doing so at many locations within the US and elsewhere.

The legal imperative is less clear than the practical one, only because of India’s status as a British colony when the bombs were buried. The Chemical Weapons Convention clearly requires the US to destroy any toxic chemical weapons it “abandoned” outside its own territory. There is, however, a potential loophole in that the abandonment must have occurred without permission of the nation in which the weapons were abandoned. India did not give permission for these burials, of course, but perhaps Britain did. Although details are unclear, there was indeed cooperation during WWII between British and American chemical warfare officers with regard to the overall operation of Ondal Advance Chemical Park. We have pressed American, British, Indian and international authorities for their position on this question:

• James C. King, Assistant for Munitions and Chemical Matters with the US Army, says they are investigating.

• Clive Rowland conducted an investigation in response to our outreach to Britain’s Defence Science and Technology Laboratory and replied, “The UK government has no comment to make at this time.”

• The Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW) which enforces the Chemical Weapons Convention says the status of specific sites is confidential but verifies it can require an “abandoning state” to provide necessary financial and other resources for remediation. This international enforcement can only begin after the site is officially declared by the “Territorial State Party” (India).

• Indian authorities have not replied to our inquiries.

Morally, there should be no question that the welfare of India and its people does matter. My father talked only reluctantly about his participation in the ocean dumping of Ondal’s toxic chemicals, and he never mentioned the land burials at all. He was concerned that the ocean-dumped chemicals might drift beneath the surface and eventually reach US shores, and he was relieved to hear my opinion as a university physics student that the bombs were still located where he left them. In his view—and the view of many Americans and Europeans today—toxic bombs buried in India don’t really matter very much because they are far away. Distance should not lessen our responsibility.

Whether or not the bombs pose a direct threat to the health and welfare of Americans and Europeans, we are responsible for putting them where they are. Corporate America accepted its share of responsibility for the toxic gases released in 1984 by a Union Carbide plant in Bhopal, India. Japan accepted responsibility for the toxic weapons it buried in China at the same time we were burying ours in India. In 2017, the US fulfilled its responsibility to destroy 8 WWII-era chemical bombs that had been found in Panama. It is time for the US to accept responsibility for the thousands of toxic bombs we buried in India.

Please email your comments to HoosierScientist@yahoo.com.