CALLISON:Are there fields that are not being used because of concerns about unexploded ordinances?

WALKER: Absolutely. Sure. In Vietnam? Actually, if war happens, where ever it happens, if it's in suburban areas or urban areas or rural areas or agricultural areas, there are always, if in fact there were major usage of munitions, particularly if dropped from the air, there are always lands which are, remain unclean and dangerous. There's even lands in the United States where we have firing ranges which in fact remain unused which could be highly arable, productive land. But it's sufficiently expensive and technically complex and sometimes destructive of the land to clean up unexploded ordinances. In fact they were left as wildlife areas and no man's lands for decades and decades to come because the weapons are still there.

CALLISON:Doesn't this become a danger to animal life?

WALKER: Absolutely. If you look at areas where unexploded ordinances have been left, and these weapons can hang in trees, they may be visible in the ground, sticking half out of the ground, they may be buried as far as six or eight feet deep, so they are not disturbed unless you in fact excavate the ground, building homes or roads or something. You always find dead animals. The animals come upon them out of curiosity, step on them, play with them, and it, sure it kills animals.

The other problem, some of these areas are partly open in countries, not necessarily in Vietnam, I don't know the case of Vietnam, but certainly the United States, are sometimes to hikers and recreational use and off road vehicles in limited areas that are thought to be safe. And, often times those individuals will wander off the beaten path and in those cases, in fact, we have lost limbs, and maimed individuals and death due to long term unexploded ordinance that still remains.

We have ordinance in the United States and in Europe, it still remains from WWI. That's been in the ground almost a century. And those are still, in many cases, live weapons. We found weapons under a housing site, in peoples's backyards right here in Washington DC. We found chemical weapons buried from WWI. So, right now as we talk there's a site being excavated with WWI mustard weapons, that are highly dangerous, in a very sort of high rent district in northwest Washington DC. So, unexploded ordinances is a very, very, serious world wide problem particularly where battle fields exist, or did exist but also where in fact, just practice and firing ranges exist, both on water and on land.

CALLISON:What were the environmental issues that came up during the Gulf war?

WALKER: The Gulf war as you know was a very quick war, and in some ways a very bloodless war from the perceptions from the Americans and the Allies because very few Allied forces were killed.

On the other hand, it was one of the most intense wars, maybe the most intense war in the history of the world, with the amount of tonnage of munitions that were dropped over a certain period of time. We dropped thousands of tons of munitions every single week of the war. As a result of that, there's been tremendous unexploded ordinance and environmental damage done.

Green Cross and Global Green and our legacy program, which is a Russian/Swiss/American program, looking at environmental, long term environmental consequences of war, the Cold War, base closure cleanup, and weapons demilitarization, was asked by the government of Kuwait to come in to study the Kuwait situation six years after the Gulf War. So, 1998 we went in to Kuwait to survey what damage there might be, if any. On the surface, the Kuwaiti area looks like it's fairly clean. All the oil fires we saw, all the pools of oil we saw in the desert were gone. Everything looked like it had amazingly reconstituted itself. But, in fact, when you look closer, you find about six inches under the desert that there's still tremendous amounts of oil. The oil sunk down into the sand, and sand is blown over the oil slicks, but the oil is still there. There's tremendous desert oil pollution.

The Kuwaitis have two fresh water reservoirs that they use as backup reservoirs for drinking and fresh water. Most of their water comes from desalination, a big desalination plant on the gulf, which was destroyed during the Gulf war by the Iraqis. That's been rebuilt, operates now, but our interest was also seeing whether they could still use the water reserves which exist there, perchance another war would break out, and the desalination plant being very vulnerable, would probably be one of the first targets to be struck by the Iraqis. And the oil from the oil fires and the oil wells that were all opened up by the Iraqis have polluted about 2/3 of the underground water reservoirs, and this is still six years after the war. So, it's made the Kuwaitis even more vulnerable to first strike attack.

The other major issue which is important in any war scenario, is unexploded ordinance. And we found in the desert, throughout the desert there were tremendous amounts of unexploded ordinance, both Iraqi as well as Allied weapons, and these are artillery shells, they are cluster weapons, they are landmines, anything that was fired. Air gravity bombs, missiles that were fired during the war, those still exist.

The Allies went into Kuwait, cleaned up the desert fairly well. But what they did, interestingly, is they piled all these unexploded ordinances weapons and landmines they found in giant piles in the middle of the desert. So as you drive through the desert you see large piles of weapons sitting there rusting in the desert, under the baking heat of the desert sun some of them going off from time to time with no one knowing what to do with them.

The desert also used to be a big picnic and outing area for Kuwaiti families in their four wheel drive off road vehicle and it no longer is, because they're too fearful of going into the desert and hitting still existing landmines or unexploded ordinance so it's very much limited the recreational value and the openness of the Kuwaiti land these days.

CALLISON:How did the oil spills affect the marine biology and how well is it recuperating?

WALKER: We actually dove on the coral reefs and in the Gulf and interviewed, surveyed the fishing industry which is a big industry in the Gulf, more so I think than Americans realize, and the immediate impact was disastrous right after the war. There was tremendous seepage of the oil into the Gulf for miles in the Gulf. Totally destroyed the fishing industry and covered the Coral reefs.

Six years later the fishing industry has come back quite a bit, still some damage to the coral reefs, but not as much as we expected, so it looks as if, actually, the marine life has bounced back, really reconstituted itself, more so than people would have predicted.

There were very few bombs dropped in the Gulf itself, so bomb damage is very minimal in the Gulf, it's mostly oil pollution. And that's dissipated pretty well. Although it's, there'll be some long term impact, the fishing industry is still coming back six years later. It's come back farther and more quickly than we would have guessed originally.

CALLISON:Will the land be reclaimed in the future?

WALKER: It'll be long term process, first to reclaim it, just for recreational purposes, you have to make sure all the landmines and unexploded ordinance are removed. And you can never guarantee that one hundred percent. The problem with a number of these weapons is that they are plastic, very small, they're non-detectable, unless you turned over every inch of soil in these areas, whether it's Kosovo, or Vietnam, or Kuwait, you never get a hundred percent. So it never fully reclaimed in that sense once you fire weapons over it. But you can probably 99.99 percent reclaim it, it just takes a lot of time and money and danger. People die doing the landmine clearance and the unexploded ordinance clearance.

In the case of Kuwait, there was such an enormous tonnage dropped that it'll be a very expensive and dangerous task now cleaning up these old, rusting, obsolete weapons, some of them live, some of them just scrap. And that will take a quite dedicated effort by the Kuwaitis and probably by the international community with innovative, innovative technology. There are a variety of proposals, one is to just dig a deep hole right next to these piles and just dump them in the hole and mark them, identify them as no-man's land.

Another is simply to build giant incinerators there, next to the stockpiles and burn them all at that point. Of course, that can be polluting and dangerous from a public health perspective as well. It'll be a daunting technical task. But I think the land can be reclaimed. The oil will always be there. The oil will be there for probably decades, maybe centuries to come. So there will always be subterranean, subsurface pollution of oil, there's just no way they'll clean the whole desert in a cost efficient way. They'll have to live with the rest of their lives.

CALLISON:How does that affect the plant life?

WALKER: You know it really varies. They found in, we found in parts of the desert had really bloomed and come back even with oil beneath the surface. In other areas it hasn't come back very well. So, I think, you know, the judgement is really out as to what happens in the long term consequences of plant life after war. I think it's hard to predict at this point.

CALLISON:The use of depleted uranium has gotten lots of press recently. Can you talk about the use of depleted uranium during the Gulf War and what we can maybe expect to see from Kosovo?

WALKER: Depleted uranium is used simply because it's a dense material. It has tremendous kinetic effects and penetrates, penetrates targets very well. So it's used as a penetrating warhead against armored, mostly armored vehicles or thick concrete bunkers. You can also use tungsten. You can also use other heavy metals but depleted uranium is about the cheapest and most readily available. In and of itself, it's very, very lightly radioactive and judged to be, unless you hold it next to your skin and slept with it every night, you know, judged to be not particularly dangerous.

The problem becomes when you, in fact, fire it and it vaporizes. As it is intended to do. It burns fairly readily. It pierces a tank, for example, and explodes and vaporizes inside the tank, or inside a bunker, kills everybody but in fact the vapor drifts down wind and the vapor is in fact radioactive. And if you inhale these lightly radioactive particles or, if in fact, they get into the soil, and in fact they begin to get into plants and food that you eat and get in the food chain, they can be, over the longer term, it's thought to be hazardous and carcinogenic. The jury is still really out on the exact long term carcinogenic aspects of it. But I think every one has agreed that there are negative, serious public health hazards to wide spread use of depleted uranium and radioactive material in war in any sort of battle where it vaporizes.

We found, in the Gulf War, all sorts of long term, strange public health impacts in a lot of the veterans, from all countries that worked there, particularly the Americans and the British. And no one really, to this date, whether this is partly due to the oil fires, whether it's partly due to the sand, the desert, whether it's partly due to the inoculations that the troops received before they went or whether it's partly due to depleted uranium. My guess, and it's only a guess, is that it's a combination of all of the above. And it probably varies from person to person and family to family.

But the real danger of depleted uranium is that these particles in the lungs or other parts of the body will sit there for years and years and in fact irradiate the body and over time that's likely to be cancer causing. And so the use of depleted uranium in Kosovo, although it was not widely used, you know in the Gulf it was. In the Gulf it was, we dropped, we fired tons and tons of uranium tipped bullets. In Kosovo it was not widely used, largely the apache helicopter were never used, thought to be too vulnerable to Yugoslav troops and anti- aircraft weapons. I still think there will be some long term negative carcinogenic results from local citizens and troops, troops there.

The bigger question in Kosovo is really the unexploded ordinance. Even more important than depleted uranium. But radioactive weapons should be banned. I think in the long run the public health impact is too unknown and potentially too dangerous to allow them to go forward. And there are substitute heavy dense materials that penetrate armor and bunkers that could be used. United States and other countries though have invested a lot of money in depleted uranium weapons up to now so it's, from an economic perspective, difficult for the Defense Department yet to admit that they should replace them.

CALLISON:What does dumping UXO in the Adriatic Sea do to the ecosystem?

WALKER: When you dump bombs and you dump them so they don't explode, what you do is leave unexploded ordinance underwater, unexploded bombs. And those, unless it's extremely deep, those usually wind up in fishing nets at some point. And so if they don't explode and they just sink to the bottom, what you do is you'll endanger the fishing industry there for years to come.

If they do explode, and they probably in some cases did explode in the Adriatic, what you do is distribute toxic materials. When you explode a weapons you distribute the, you know the results of the detonation of all sorts of explosive materials, heavy metals and the like in the water and that will have some minimal long term negative impact. I wouldn't expect, unless there were tremendous amounts dumped, that it would have a large impact on the fishing chain, the water, the food chain. But it will have some negative impact sure, shouldn't be done. It really shouldn't be done.

I mean ideally, in fact ideally you don't want bombs to drop any where of course. I mean they should fly back home. But of course the military assumes that it's safer to drop them before they land back home. They're not used to landing with loaded aircraft which may in fact create more death and havoc back at the base, you know, than it would over the water. Anywhere you drop a weapon it has long term lasting carcinogenic impacts.

Here we detonate bombs every day in the United states in what is called open burn, open detonation processes called OBOD. I visited a site called Crane Naval Reservation in Indiana several months ago. And these look like desert scapes. Most Americans and citizens I think, don't realize that we have to destroy, in the United States, on the average 100,000 tons of ammunition per year. Just obsolete, rusting, unused ammunition. And we do that mostly by detonation, by explosion. Or we disassemble them and pile all the TNT and the explosives together and we burn it, we light it off and burn it in the open air.

In doing that has tremendous local impact. It destroys everything around it obviously, you know, nothing exists, wildlife, or trees, or grass, or vegetation, but in fact all the results of those explosions seep into the ground and the groundwater and badly pollute sites, there's a large number of these sites throughout the United States that are being used and will be badly polluted for years and years to come. We detonate tons and tons at the same time. Usually under twelve feet, three, four meters underground and looks like a whole earthquake going off underground and then they just go out and they excavate another whole and they dump additional tonnage in and they light them off. And this goes on every single day of the year. Except when it rains, they don't do it during rain.

CALLISON:The Serbian media released several reports about damage to the environment that seemed like wartime propaganda. Do we have any idea how much of this was a real problem and how much of it was just propaganda?

WALKER: We have a team in Kosovo right now. We don't yet have the results of that survey. It's a survey being done under the auspices of the United Nations and Green Cross is, and Global Green are part of that team, but it's well known that we targeted chemical plants, fossil fuel facilities, not nuclear reactors, but coal and oil facilities and it's well known, in fact, there was a lot of oil pollution in the Danube. It's known that there were a lot of petrochemicals and other chemicals that have been blown up and vaporized in urban areas in cities.

If you hit a chemical plant and you blow up all their stockpiles of chemicals it usually burns and distributes them down wind. That pollution can be extremely toxic. In some cases it isn't, in most cases it is. It can be lightly toxic, cause eyes to water, people that have respirator problems, or it can have long term carcinogenic aspects and enter the food chain for the long run.

The Danube was badly polluted, not only badly polluted but it was closed. Ships were sunk, ships were leaking their oil into the Danube itself, caused tremendous economical impact in the short run, on Romania, and Bulgaria, and Hungry and all the Southeast European countries and Central European countries that use the Danube for transportation. Yugoslavia had always threatened throughout the Balkans, in Bosnia conflicts over the years, to close the Danube if we did much and try to impact all their neighbors as political leverage. And indeed, we caused the Danube to close in the Kosovo war. So my guess at this point is we'll find that there is much more environmental damage that people realized.

The thought, one of the main points is that people don't look on environmental damage, they don't realize that wars caused tremendous amounts of long term environmental damage and by that I include public health as well. We look at the immediate damage: homes destroyed and bridge spans dropped in rivers and immediate bomb damage, but the longer term damage can be equally as devastating, perhaps even more so than the short term, immediate impact of dropping weapons from the air. My guess is that Kosovo and Yugoslavia in general will have a lot of long term soil pollution, air pollution and water pollution from the war.

CALLISON:Do you know much about the bans on fishing in the Danube?

WALKER: I'm sure if there's... you know I don't. I'm sure if there's oil pollution or chemical pollution in general in fresh or salt water areas, they would ban fishing because the fish would be badly polluted at least for the immediate future. That clears up over time for the most part. You know, as we saw off the cost of Alaska when the Exxon Valdez badly polluted the Alaskan shore all the wildlife and all the fish were badly polluted and you couldn't fish. We see pollution all the time simply from garbage dumping off the east coast of the United States and mussels and lobster and the like banned from, shrimp, banned from being eaten for periods of time. War is badly polluting of water, land, and air and people have to come to the realization that if you undertake a war, and even if you don't go to war but you undertake live fire exercises as we do every day of the year as the world's largest military, it has environmental impact that has long lasting effect on wildlife and human beings and the land, the sea, and the air.

CALLISON:Were there any confirmed reports of oil in the Danube River?

WALKER: We've actually, under this study that is now going on, found oil spills into the Danube. I think that was confirmed, has been confirmed several times. The news reports from the Serbs did go over the top a bit at times. I think there were news reports we were threatening to bomb nuclear reactors, there were news reports that there was very high levels of radioactivity due to the use of depleted uranium, which was really not the case during the war. There was very little depleted uranium used and I don't think you would pick up very high levels of radioactivity from DU. It doesn't mean to underestimate it's long term public health impact, but you have to be, try to be objective and fair minded about it all.

There was oil in the Danube and my guess at this point is that there continues to be oil in the Danube and there probably has been long term damage to fishing industry in the Danube and certainly long term damage to transportation because of the sunken ships, not the oil, but the sunken ships in the Danube.

CALLISON:Were the wildlife areas around the Danube affected by the bombing?

WALKER: I don't know Moon, we'll have to wait 'til actually the study crew comes back to see. I've not seen any mention of that. If there are wildlife areas anywhere near the bombing areas, the target areas, I'm sure they've been damaged, and certainly wildlife killed. Weapons aren't discriminatory. They don't discriminate between human beings and, unless you use a neutron bomb then of course, it discriminates a bit, but a typical incinerary weapon does not discriminate between houses, wildlife, and human beings.

CALLISON:What were the effects of the bombing on the oil refineries and the chemical plants?

WALKER: When you hit a chemical plant, a petrochemical plant, or oil refinery or oil tanks, what you do is put tremendous pollution into the atmosphere and you also cause tremendous leakage of chemicals into the ground and into water, and in the longer run into the ground water, potential drinking water sources of the local population. The main concern is the immediate atmospheric pollution which can cause serious respiratory problems if the people in the region who breath in the soot and the smog and the pollution, the toxic pollution, and the longer term issues of course are carcinogenic aspects and the ground water, drinking water. And then beyond that is the food chain. And there can be long term toxic impacts in the food chain. People eating food, using, tilling the soil where these toxic materials have been exploded, dumped, or spread.

CALLISON:We've kind of bounced around the subject and you've mentioned it several times with unexploded ordinances and possible long term effects but can you give me a short sound bye on what the possible long term effects could be from the activities in Kosovo?

WALKER: Sure, um, long term environmental impacts in Kosovo will be, carcinogenic, a rise in carcinogenic results in human beings and there will be toxic impacts on the food chain. Both the fish food chain and the agricultural food chain. So that we'll probably see spikes five or ten years down the road in cancers in human beings from a whole variety of sources and it will be as a result of the widespread toxic pollution throughout Kosovo and parts of Yugoslavia.

CALLISON:When you say food chain, not the fishing but the agricultural land, what are the concerns how have fields been affected?

WALKER: If you hit a chemical plant, for example, and the chemical plant has toxic materials in it that we know are cancer causing and you burn all those materials in the open air as an explosion will do and it pumps out dioxins and ferins for example, anything with chlorine in it will pump out dioxins and ferins, and that's what we try to scrub in any set of incinerator when we burn garbage, for example, that all floats down, up in the atmosphere floats down and gets into the soil and then when you till the soil all that material, in fact.

Or when the cows eat the grass where that has fallen, that all gets in the milk and the dairy products in your food and in the longer run you just have toxic materials that you begin eating and a buildup of those toxic materials in the body causes cancer. We know that, and that's why we try to preclude in the United States whenever we burn anything as we do a lot of our garbage every year, we try to scrub and quench all of those dioxins and ferins out of the smoke stack And in war there's no smoke stacks its just open fires so the open fires in fact are tremendously long term cancer causing, and that's why war has not only immediate impact but it has long term impact that we are only now beginning to research and understand and, learn facts of from particularly wars like Kosovo and Kuwait.

CALLISON:As the refugees return to their homes, what conditions environmentally are they facing? I've heard stories of wells being polluted with dead animals...

WALKER: Or dead bodies. If you or I were refugees heading back, the biggest concern I would have would be stepping on a land mine or stepping on a cluster weapon that was unexploded or having my child go out in the back yard and pick up what looked like a little helicopter toy which is probably a mini cluster bomb that could blow his arm off or blind him very easily. So the big issue is, I think, bumping into undetonated munitions that were launched probably by everybody the Serbs and the Americans and the allies and the KLA in Kosovo.

The second problem would be growing food. And growing food in fields that have either unexploded ordinance in them or have been toxically polluted neighboring to chemical plants or oil refineries would be long term cancer causing.

CALLISON:Will these long term affects, will they be able to contain it in Yugoslavia/Kosova area or is it going to spread out into the surrounding areas? I know that one of the first articles to come out of the war was that all of Europe was going to be completely contaminated because of this war. Is there any truth to that?

WALKER: No, I don't think there is truth to that. I think the contamination from battle fields are usually pretty battle field specific. When you have chemical and oil pollution that takes place because you've targeted those facilities, that can go down wind and can go down stream quite a bit sometimes for miles and miles as you've seen with general oil spills up and down our coast. But the immediate effects of explosions of weapons unexploded ordinance and pollution in a ground war is pretty locally contained.

The only time you have, you know, tremendously bad pollution downwind is when you detonate weapons extremely high or when there's radioactive releases and to my knowledge there have been no major radioactive releases except for use of depleted uranium in Kosovo. Places where you had tremendous you know, almost worldwide contamination was the Chernobyl disaster and when you also have volcanoes launch and presents pollution, you know, all around the globe that you can follow with weather satellites, that can be somewhat dangerous you know. Certainly the Chernobyl disaster was very, has been very dangerous and we continue to see the effects, long term cancer causing effects from low level radioactivity that's in the ground and, in fallout, fell in fallout all over the world, including the United States.

But the long term consequences from Kosovo will be mostly local with the exception of the Danube, the Danube will of course hurt fishing industry and the Adriatic pollution may hurt Italy and other countries that use the Adriatic for fishing for some time to come.

CALLISON:From what I understand, the United States does not have any legal obligation to clean up environmental damage during war. Do you think there should be, that they should have a moral responsibility?

WALKER: You know I'm not a lawyer so I don't know all the legal ramifications. But as a political scientist and a foreign policy specialist I feel there should be a deep commitment on the part of the United States, both moral and political and practical, that in fact if we go into a region and drop weapons or lay land mines it should be our responsibility to either clean that up ourselves or in fact organize groups to help clean it up.

The militaries around the world in essence are always taught that their responsibility is to wage war, not in fact to wage peace or not to clean up the damage they've done. That's the civilian responsibility, the local community responsibility and yet we find whether it's land mines in Angola or its unexploded ordinance in Kosovo and Kuwait, that in fact people don't have that local expertise and its very expensive and its very dangerous to do.

And I truly believe that the militaries around the world, particularly the United States, the Russians, the West Europeans, those with high technical capability need to bear the responsibility of cleaning up the destruction that they reek in these battlefields. That also means I think that we have to spend a greater amount of money and personnel and research development on cleanup technologies. The issue of environmental security necessitates today that we know how to clean this damage up for the longer run and we have the appropriate technologies to do it and in many cases we don't.

So we need actually more investment in not only weapons of war but in fact weapons to save the environment, actually not weapons but technologies to save the environment and that would help us tremendously in cleaning up land mines it would help us tremendously in finding and detecting and excavating and destroying unexploded ordinance, would help us in cleaning soil... mediation program for soil for example, very important neutralization programs for chemical weapons containing radioactivity, these are all areas which cry for additional attention and research and development.

CALLISONTo what extent are people factoring in these terrible consequences before we go to war?

CALLISON: The environmental implications of war to my knowledge are never seriously taken into account when you go to war. The main goal of war is to win the war and we know that those human and environmental damages that takes place, and that's a defacto result of the war.

There has been some, lately some policy debate within the United States and elsewhere and certainly Global Green and Green Cross have been part of trying to facilitate that debate around long term environmental impacts and how we can help mitigate that. If you have to go to war which we certainly don't support but if you had to go to war, how do we in fact limit the damage, the collateral damage and the long term environmental impact in any way?

It has been a national policy dialog that the American military services have run called the National dialog on military munitions which we have participated in and continue to participate in as we speak and that studies issues of green weapons development. Which may seem like a contradiction in terms but if you fire munitions you can design munitions that in fact aren't as polluting as they are today, not as toxic as they are today. Particularly if you fire munitions in practice on American territory, on American firing ranges, trying to manage those ranges and clean up the after effects of those weapons is much easier and in fact you think first about what goes into that weapon and that's sometimes done, we now use for example concrete in bombs as apposed to explosives so you don't actually have to have them blow up but you can hit the target.