Posted on 06/23/2006 1:37:58 PM PDT by musicman
Our story starts 90 years ago. The Great War claimed over 15 million lives and focused on a narrow strip of land in Belgium and France.
This intense trench warfare led to constant shelling by both sides, but not every bomb fired exploded. Hundreds of thousands failed to detonate.
Today the remains of the Belgian front line can still be seen - some trenches are still visible, and visitors can walk past the barbed wire and inspect the rusting military hardware left behind.
And it is those shells that are now resurfacing and presenting a new threat.
* Every year more than 30 people are killed on the battlefields of Europe after disturbing or picking up unexploded bombs and shells.
* It's estimated that three Titanics worth of unexploded bombs still litter the fields of France and Belgium, left over from World War 1.
* Some of these shells contain deadly Mustard Gas and Phosgene. Chemical shells left over from World War 1 that are still as deadly as the day they were fired.
* The Belgian Bomb Disposal Team brings back two lorry loads of unexploded bombs every day for safe destruction.
* Inside the high security chemical warfare lab, bomb teams work four hour shifts inside special chemical suits as they take the gas shells apart and destroy the chemicals.
(Excerpt) Read more at bbc.co.uk ...
"I seem to remember a munitions ship that sank near the mouth of the Thames, it's now too dangerous to try and remove and it's too much to try and blow in place."
I remember that story. They're worried that the explosives are becoming increasingly unstable.
Let's try that excuse the next time the left says "why haven't we found Bin Laden yet?"
I thought that that was the 'excuse' that we were using.
tet68 wrote:"I seem to remember a munitions ship that sank near the mouth of the Thames, it's now too dangerous to try and remove and it's too much to try and blow in place."
--I got some employees for that dangerous job. Go down to club Gitmo and pick up some jihads :)
We're still looking and will hold him up if we find him. The left says that these WMD are not anything to highlight finding.
There weren't supposed to be any leftovers. Yet somehow, sanctions worked. Uh, sure.
Exactly!
Who has seen these to say what they look like?
Saddam was under order by UN resolution to destroy his old WMD.
That circumvention DOES constitute part of an ongoing WMD program.
Saddam's own scientists have agreed that he continued to seek WMD. Some say that they obstructed his efforts. But if a spouse TRIES to hire a hitman, we still prosecute the spouse for attempted murder.
And they're still finding WWII bombs. When I visited Holland the end of April, I was told that they had just found another bomb in Breskens during construction. They told me they find them all the time. This area was heavily bombed by the Allied forces and in fact, the small town my father had been born in was reduced to rubble. Then, the day before I was to take the ferry from Ireland to Liverpool in mid May, the Liverpool harbor was closed for part of the day because they discovered an unexploded bomb there.
A FReeper on another thread said that German farmers yrly die after hitting mustard gas that's been around for yrs.
There's untold tons of shells there that didn't explode as planned, burrowed into the earth, and have been leaking ever since.
Wonderful work musicman!
The shells might still be explosive, but the reports that I've read state that they can't be fired and that the chemicals aren't nearly as effective as they were 15-20 years ago. I'm not saying that these shells don't exist, but I am saying that they don't constitute an active WMD program. Pretending like they do is foolish, and makes us look desperate.
They definitely aren't what we were looking for.
More.
We were looking for any and all.
Exactly! Take these MSMers to an Army post with a gas training room and ask for any volunteers willing to go into the room with some of this "obsolete" "ineffective" stuff opened up. Anyone stupid enough to do it would be the last.
They're from before 1918, the Kaiser has already accounted for them, the League of Nations inspectors didn't find anything, Valerie Plame's grandmother was a covert operative outed by Vice President Marshall's chief of staff, this is obviously part of a neo-conservative plot to control possible oil reserves under the floor of the North Sea, Wilson lied, soldiers died, Winston Churchill MIHOP'd the Lusitania, France and Belgium are a quagmire, no blood for North Sea oil . . .
"* It's estimated that three Titanics worth of unexploded bombs still litter the fields of France and Belgium, left over from World War 1."
135,000 TONS!!?? Wow. That's a lot!
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