Security

Chemical arms: Watchdog wants states to reveal WWII dumps

Strasbourg, 31 May (AKI) - Europe's top rights watchdog has urged the United Kingdom, United States and NATO to reveal locations of chemical munitions dumped in the Baltic Sea after World War II.

The Council of Europe Parliamentary Assembly (PACE) has called for them to immediately declassify information on the locations of sites where chemical munitions were dumped when the war ended.

A resolution adopted by the body on Thursday calls for information to allow a detailed study of the current condition of these chemical weapons, and the risk they pose to the marine environment.

Although most experts agree the munitions would be safer left where they are, the forthcoming construction of the Nordstream gas pipeline on the Baltic seabed "may pose new and considerable dangers", the parliamentarians said.

At the Potsdam Conference in 1945, at the end of World War II, the Allied Powers agreed to dump around 300,000 tonnes of unused German munitions – including mustard gas, a nerve agent called tabun, teargas and the choking agent phosgene -- in the Atlantic Ocean.

It is now known that these weapons were in fact dumped in the Baltic and the North Sea, sometimes in water only tens of metres deep, the Council of Europe said.

The Allies agreed not to make the locations public for 50 years, but in 1997 the UK Ministry of Defence and the US Department of Defence extended this period for a further 20 years.

Unlike the European Parliament, PACE is not an EU institution. Its powers extend only to the ability to investigate, recommend and advise.

It has a total of 636 members who are representatives of each member state from the European Union, the Balkans, Caucasus and Baltic countries.