Author: Xiao Xinxin
Recently, a news that a superb test in the United States may lead to the death of 4 bell snails and 90 giant clams at the range was exposed by the relevant departments of the US Air Force. The report has raised awareness that military activities sometimes use the name of "national defense" to destroy the environment beyond normal needs. As the world's largest and most advanced armed force, the US military's degree of environmental damage is also deservedly the first. Today, leaving aside the enormous carbon emissions of america's vast standing army in daily training and combat, this article is only about those unique acts of the United States that have done great damage to the environment.
The first is its various weapons tests and the destruction of offshore organisms by setting up weapons test sites on Pacific islands and reefs. Just this month, the U.S. Air Force Nuclear Weapons Center at Cortland Air Force Base released its latest environmental impact assessment document, drawing on data from the U.S. Marine Fisheries Agency (NMFS). The document argues that the U.S. Air Force's ARRW hypersonic weapons would cause significant damage to marine life located at the range at Kwajalein Atoll in the Republic of the Marshall Islands.
The environmental assessment report shows that because the ARRW hypersonic weapon has a great impact when it hits the sea surface, it will cause damage to the seabed of the test area. Because seawater is incompressible, its shock waves travel long distances through seawater to the seafloor. Just as mines and near-target projectiles can cause damage to nearby ships. According to environmental estimates, about 10,000 corals in the sea could be completely dead ("experience complete mortality").
Compared to corals that are too hard to be killed directly by the shock wave in the water, other creatures are relatively better. After combining the population densities within the atolls, the document states that "the expected impact of shock waves on bell snails and giant clams is negligible." "Considering that it is expected to cause only 4 bell snails (previously mistranslated as snails) and 90 giant clams (large clams) are expected to die, it will also cause injuries to more than 100 humphead wrasse (commonly known as sumei fish and dragon king seabream) belonging to endangered species." But the "good news" is that the U.S. military has assessed that these damages, while large, are not irreversible.
Exploding fish with hypersonic weapons is not the only environmentally impactful test in the United States, nor is the shock wave generated by the missile's entry into the water the only cause of environmental damage. The report also points out that noise during tests, harmful substances, interference from human and equipment work, being hit by aircraft or ships, and the increase in man-made objects in the ocean can adversely affect the habitat of marine life. According to the assessment, a future GBSD testing program will have "influential but not particularly adverse" effects on 16 species of cetaceans, two species of sea turtles and seven other species of fish, as well as "likely adverse effects" on seven species of corals and three species of molluscs. Of course, these damages are compared to the radioactive pollution caused by the approximately 100 nuclear tests of the United States at Bikini Atoll.
Just as the so-called lice are more worried, the destruction of the environment is more, and naturally feel that the problem is not big. The reason why the U.S. military attaches great importance to environmental assessment is not environmental protection, but to have more data when persuading Congress and environmental protection international organizations. If the biggest enemy of the US Navy is Capitol Hill, then due to the particularity of the sea and the Navy, various environmental protection NGOs are even counted as the second largest enemy, and they have launched a "encirclement and suppression" of the US Navy. Almost every time the U.S. Navy conducts an exercise, it goes to court to sue the U.S. Navy, saying that its exercises have had a very bad impact on marine life.
In 2003, environmental groups successfully blocked the deployment of low-frequency sonar systems around the world by environmental groups, restricting the use of U.S. forces only in parts of the Northwest Pacific. Since then, almost every large-scale U.S. military exercise has been sued by U.S. environmental groups in federal court for the impact of their sonar on marine animals. Of course, at this time, the U.S. Navy can also argue, after all, holding exercises in the country and near the high seas is indeed a "national defense demand", except for the Mongolian Navy, no navy does not use sonar, and no navy does not use deep bombs to fry fish. However, the US military and NATO use a unified 5 kHz frequency sonar, which is exactly similar to that of killer whales, which will cause the whale's stress response, so that other whales think that "killer whales are coming, everyone hurry up and run", and then they are stranded in panic. According to environmental groups, a number of whale suicide strandings are related to U.S. military sonar, and some of the U.S. military's exercises are suspected of violating local environmental requirements.
In addition to the U.S. Navy, the U.S. Army is also routinely criticized and prosecuted by U.S. environmental groups. The most recent large class action lawsuit was filed in federal court in Montana by plaintiffs including the Center for Biodiversity, the Sierra Club, Friends of the Earth, the Water Conservation Alliance, and the Montana Environmental Information Center, suing the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers' No. 12 Permit for not considering environmental impacts that could threaten endangered species in more than 3,000 acres of water. In addition, in the power supply network, river water conservancy, in recent years, the Army Engineering Corps has also been often prosecuted.
In addition, the US military has also extensively carried out unnecessary environmental damage in its war operations. For example, during the Vietnam War, Diệm asked the United States to use herbicides to remove the Viet Cong's hidden jungle, so in November 1962, Kennedy approved the joint implementation of "Operation Ranch Hand", which is the spraying of herbicides, by the U.S. military and the South Vietnamese army. It got its name "Agent Orange" because it was encapsulated in a 210-liter drum with orange stripes. The 76 million litres of herbicide sprayed cleared nearly 20 percent of South Vietnam's rainforest and about 30 percent of its mangrove forests, and nearly 42 percent of Agent Orange was sprayed in rice paddies, displacing about 2 million people from famine in Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia.
The abuse sparked resentment among its inventor, Arthur Galston, who in 1965 joined forces with other scientists to demand that the U.S. government immediately stop using it and asked the Department of Defense to study the harms of abuse to the human body. Although the main components of the herbicide used are 2,4,5-trichlorophenoxyacetic acid (2,4,5-T) and 2,4-dichlorophenoxyacetic acid (2,4-D), which are relatively harmless, a variety of impurities occur in chemical production, including a class of carcinogens tetrachlorodibenzo dioxin (2,3,7,8-Tetrachlorodibenzodioxin, TCDD). In 1971, Nixon, who promoted environmental policies, ordered the cessation of "Pastoral Operations", but the big mistakes had been made, and since then a very high proportion of deformed babies and strange diseases have emerged in Vietnam. Vietnam says millions of people are affected by Agent Orange, including 150,000 children born with severe birth defects.
In addition to Agent Orange, depleted uranium bombs are also an environmentally damaging focus of the U.S. military. Depleted uranium is the waste product of uranium enrichment, which is named depleted uranium because of its extremely low uranium-235 content. Depleted uranium is low in radioactivity but extremely dense, and has a unique mechanical effect, making it particularly suitable as an armor-piercing shell and armored structure. However, depleted uranium shells produce aerosols after firing, causing widespread soil contamination. In the Kosovo War, NATO dropped 31,000 depleted uranium bombs, which directly triggered the "Balkan syndrome": the European media revealed that many peacekeepers in Bosnia and Herzegovina and Kosovo suffered from headaches, hair loss, mental trance, insomnia and irritability, and even died of cancer and leukemia. In addition, according to studies of Iraqi children, there is an inverse relationship between the probability of neonatal deformity and the amount of thorium and uranium in the hair, both of which come from depleted uranium bombs of the US military. The rest of the world, including traditional tank powers such as France, Germany and Russia, have not officially distributed depleted uranium bombs, and only the United States and their British cousins have used depleted uranium weapons in large quantities to save costs.
U.S. military bases around the world have also caused huge damage to the area. Just this month, several Japanese media, including the Asahi Shimbun, reported that the firefighting equipment of the US military base stationed in Uruma City, Okinawa Prefecture was damaged due to continuous torrential rains. However, the relevant personnel of the US military refused to overhaul the equipment under the pretext of heavy rainfall, resulting in more than 2,400 liters of sewage containing perfluorooctane sulfonyl (PFOS) firefighting foam being discharged down the sewer on the night of June 10. In April this year, the U.S. military base in Ginowan City, Okinawa Prefecture, was also exposed in an attempt to directly discharge sewage from firefighting exercises. In South Korea, after the detection of groundwater carcinogens at the Yongsan base in 2016, it was found that more carcinogens were detected at the Yongsan base, and the highest local benzene content exceeded the standard by 162 times.
The U.S. military is not only the military with the most carbon emissions, but also the army that pollutes the environment the most. In the context of a sharp deterioration of the global climate, it is the consensus of all responsible powers and leaders to contain environmental degradation as much as possible. In this case, the US military, as the world's largest carbon emitter, should not have the exemption from carbon emissions, but should set an example in environmental protection. Calling on the US military to strengthen environmental protection is not only a call of American environmental protection organizations, but also a manifestation of responsibility to the American people and the people of the world. Even as the world's number one power, other countries will not interfere in the invasion of the United States even if they do not retain their troops. The positive impact of the withdrawal of the US military on the environment and ecological protection is bound to be far greater than the Chinese and not eating seafood, which is also a very constructive proposal in front of the US government.