The environmental consequences of war: why militaries almost never clean up the messes they leave behind.

• Author: Risen, Clay
• Position: A SPECIAL REPORT

In the waning days of World War II, the retreating Japanese army left millions of chemical weapons scattered across northeastern China. To prevent the Allies from capturing them, units buried the shells--containing chemicals including mustard gas, phosgene, and lewisite--in fields, lakes, and streams. The result has been a slow-motion public health disaster: according to Chinese officials, in the last sixty years more than 2,000 people have died from toxins leaking from the weapons, and countless more have been sickened and permanently injured by them.

For decades, the Japanese government denied knowledge of the weapons, as well as any responsibility for cleaning them up. Bur in 1997 Tokyo entered into talks with Beijing over how to remedy the damage, and Japan eventual ly agreed to a multibillion-dollar plan to locate and destroy some 700,000 abandoned weapons. In a September 1997 speech in Beijing outlining a "new age" for Japanese-Chinese relations, then Japanese Prime Minister Ryutaro Hashimoto described the effort as a salve on "a deep wound in our hearts" that reaffirmed the countries' "two thousand years of friendly relations."

What's amazing about the Japanese effort is that it's happening at all. Japan likely will end up spending almost $1.6 billion to destroy the stock of known chemical weapons in China. If even more weapons are found--and, World War II records being as poor as they are, that's a strong likelihood--the costs could easily double. No wonder the Japanese-Chinese deal is almost the only instance in which a country has voluntarily paid for the environmental damage caused by its military.

Why? The easy answer is that there's no legal requirement--international law is spotty at best when it comes to the environmental and public health legacies of military activity. Bur the real issues are cost and precedent: remediation and health care for victims are incredibly expensive, and no country wants to set a precedent that would force them to spend billions cleaning up their own mess. "Once you open that door, where does it end?" asks Brian Sheridan, a Clinton-era assistant secretary of defense who worked on cleanup issues. "It's enormously expensive. That's not what countries think of when they go to war."

With the United States now pondering a postwar future in Iraq and Afghanistan, some policymakers will wind up examining whether--or how--America might pay for any damage done to the Afghans' and Iraqis' environment and health. Already, for instance, doctors in Iraq are reporting higher-than-normal levels of cancer and birth defects in cities like Fallujah where the fighting was heaviest. So defense planners are looking to the legacy of Agent Orange in Vietnam for clues. Yet history shows that America's use of Agent Orange was hardly the first instance in which a country has ignored the environmental and health impacts of its wartime strategies. Indeed, almost without exception, countries do not pay for these legacies, for a number of reasons: the cost of cleanup is prohibitive; policymakers worry about the impact of paying on national security; and...