President DWIGHT EISENHOWER (18 January, 1953):

"The problem in defense is how far you can go without destroying from within what you are trying

to defend from without."

NARRATOR: The United States military. Guardians of the Republic. Protectors of the people. But in providing us with the most powerful fighting force in the history, has the Pentagon placed at risk the very citizens it has sworn to defend?

GARY COHEN: We need to start thinking about war reparations to our own citizens that have been poisoned by our own government defending them.

GARY VEST: You know, we're a defense organization and our mission is to have the capability to do what we're asked to do. But part of that defense mission is protection and enhancement of the environment, and our people know that, you know, I think our people believe that.

SETH SHULMAN: I don't think that the mission of the military as a protector of our security and as a body that's preparing for conflict needs to be the kind of polluter that it has been all these years.

["AMERICA'S DEFENSE MONITOR" program introduction.]

Admiral GENE LaROCQUE (US Navy, Ret.): Welcome once again to "AMERICA'S DEFENSE MONITOR."

During the past 45 years our military has been doing an excellent job defending this country against a possible Soviet attack and stemming the spread of communism. At the same time, they've been busily training our forces, firing guns, flying planes from our bases, and creating some problems here at home. As a matter of fact, they've made some pretty good messes at a lot of our military bases. The program today is on that subject. I think it'll surprise you.

NARRATOR: It comes as no surprise that waging war is hazardous to the environment. Just look at the aftermath of the war with Iraq. Far less obvious are the environmental costs of preparing for war. When Mother Nature goes up against Uncle Sam's military, it's usually the military that wins.

For decades the military haphazardly dumped a witch's brew of toxic chemicals into the air, ground and water. Now the problem is creeping beyond the fences of military bases, both in the United States and at American bases in foreign countries. The environmental consequences of assembling and maintaining huge standing armed forces are literally surfacing. Cold war fears that "the Russians are coming" have been replaced by fears that toxic waste from the nearby military base may find its way into our drinking water.

The Pentagon, manager of more than 25 million acres of land, estimates that thousands of sites on hundreds of military installations are contaminated. Many of these sites now await cleanup.

GARY COHEN: They own some of the most polluted real estate in the country. There is over a hundred military bases that are on the nation's Superfund list, the worst polluted pieces of property in America, and there's probably 200 more than they haven't gotten around to listing.

NARRATOR: Gary Cohen is executive director of the National Toxics Campaign Fund, an organization that encourages and supports citizen environmental awareness and action.

Mr. COHEN: There are places that we could perhaps call "national sacrifice zones" that are so contaminated they will never be cleaned up and it's conceivable we'll need to rope them off, fence them off and leave them for hundreds of years because they're too dangerous to re-use.

JOHN PAUL: We have a variety of contaminants here. We have a lot of chlorinated organic solvents, which causes problems. We have some metal contamination and we have, in particular areas, some chemical warfare agent.

NARRATOR: "AMERICA'S DEFENSE MONITOR" traveled to the Aberdeen Proving Ground on the Chesapeake Bay in Maryland, one of America's most polluted bases. Environmental Protection Specialist John Paul estimates what it will take to clean-up Aberdeen.

Mr. PAUL: It is kind of speculative, but I think we can be sure that it is going to be an expensive process and will cost hundreds of millions of dollars. We're pretty sure that it's going to take a minimum of ten years to make good progress and the actual clean-up will probably stretch well into the future. Some of the problems that we have here are unique and we will be needing to develop technologies to deal with them.

NARRATOR: Cleaning-up the military's toxic pollution, to the extent that it can be cleaned-up, is a daunting task. It is going to require new technologies. It is going to take a lot of time. And, most of all, it is going to cost a lot of money.

Mr. COHEN: The environmental bill for all this contamina- tion hasn't begun to be paid. The DoD's own inspector general estimates it may cost up to $200 billion to clean-up the Depart-ment of Defense's waste.

NARRATOR: Seth Shulman is an awarding-winning journalist who has spent several years investigating the military's environ-mental practices. He is the author of The Threat at Home: Confronting the Toxic Legacy of the U.S. Military.

SETH SHULMAN: Well, we're looking at a very large problem, some 15- to 20,000 toxic sites around this country. That doesn't even count the unknown number of toxic sites at the hundreds of US bases abroad. It also doesn't count the pollution from mili-tary contractors.

To understand it you have to begin to think of the military as a vast industrial enterprise that's still putting out something on the order of a ton of toxic waste every minute.

NARRATOR: Most of this waste is generated on military bases through routine activities, such as cleaning engines, stripping paint, and fueling and servicing planes and vehicles.

Typical contaminants found on military bases include oils, fuels, greases, paints, paint thinners, heavy metals, cyanides, alkalines, acids, PCBs and, perhaps most prevalent, solvents.

Mr. SHULMAN: In the Air Force, in particular, they've acknowledged that virtually every one of their airfields is contaminated with the solvent TCE, or trichloroethylene, which is now believed -- suspected to be a cancer-causing chemical in very low amounts, five parts per billion.

NARRATOR: One of the places that has been most contaminated by solvents is McClellan Air Force Base, a major air logistics center near Sacramento, California.

Mr. SHULMAN: The real story at McClellan I think is that they were very poor at coming forth to the public about the problems that they were increasingly realizing at the facility. So much so that, in fact, the military still talks about the so-called "McClellan experience" because, presumably, they've learned a lesson about how not to deal with the public. And what alerted the public to the problems there was that a municipal well that served some-20,000 people was found to be contaminated

with solvents.

NARRATOR: At McClellan and many other military bases around the country, toxic pollution is suspected of endangering public health.

Mr. COHEN: One site is the Otis Air Force Base in Massachu-setts, where for years the Air Force dumped millions of gallons of spent rocket fuel and other industrial solvents into the ground and it has created this huge plume that is traveling across Cape Cod destroying ground water in its path and where the cancer rates and other illness rates in the Cape Cod area is greatly elevated above the state and national averages.

NARRATOR: Of all the services, the Army faces the greatest environmental challenge. Perhaps its most contaminated installa-tion is the Rocky Mountain Arsenal.

From U.S. Army Video:

"In May of 1942, just outside Denver, Colorado, on land that had previously been used for farming, a patriotic team of workers broke ground to create one of the world's largest war factories, the Rocky Mountain Arsenal. Within six months, the agricultural land had a manufacturing plant in operation to produce chemical and incendiary weapons throughout World War II."

NARRATOR: The center of the Rocky Mountain Arsenal has been described as "the most toxic square mile on earth." Seth Shulman recounts his visit to Basin F, repository for nearly 11 million gallons of the deadliest chemicals known to man.

Mr. SHULMAN: There was a 93-acre lake of glowing toxic sludge, the byproducts of nerve and mustard gas production.

INTERVIEWER: Glowing?

Mr. SHULMAN: Glowing. I'm taking a little license, but on that day it really was. It was a phosphorescent color.

NARRATOR: Basin F is one of several liquid waste dumps at the arsenal. What especially alarmed Seth Shulman was that of all the dumps, only Basin F had an asphalt lining.

Mr. SHULMAN: The really chilling thing about the experience is that I had just driven a good portion of a mile down, passing all these basins that hadn't been lined. At least this still held its contents. All the previous ones, similar size, the contents had dropped into the ground.

NARRATOR: Another installation causing the Army nightmares is the Jefferson Proving Ground in Indiana, a place where, for decades, heavy ammunition has been tested. Now it is among a number of military bases that are slated to be closed.

Environmental problems that took decades to create may make it difficult and perhaps even impossible to convert military bases to civilian uses.

Mr. COHEN: As more and more bases are closing, most of the ones that are closing are, in fact, Superfund sites, toxic waste sites, and they are creating the potential of toxic ghost towns because we're not sure if they can clean-up the sites fast enough to be able to re-use them so that the local economies, that for 50 years have depended on the military, will go bust.

NARRATOR: The prospects of re-using land are especially bleak at the Jefferson Proving Ground, where possibly as many as seven million unexploded munitions lie buried in its soil. The Army estimates that to render the ground absolutely safe would cost at least $5 billion.

Mr. SHULMAN: The prospect of cleaning-up a place like this after 40 years of shooting off bombs is just mind-boggling to think of what to do. Basically, you'd have to stripmine 100 square miles of Indiana down to a depth of 30 feet.

NARRATOR: One episode the Army would just as soon not repeat concerns the former Raritan Arsenal in New Jersey. The arsenal was closed in 1963 and sold to the private sector. Only much later, after a community college and office buildings were built on the former base, was it learned that they were literally sitting on bombs waiting to go off.

The Army also faces serious environmental problems at its numerous ammunition plants. At the Cornhusker Army Ammunition Plant in Nebraska, toxic compounds made their way into the ground water.

Mr. SHULMAN: It's pretty clear that the Army knew for a full year that the compounds had migrated beyond the borders of their base into an area in Grand Island, Nebraska where people depend on well water for drinking and for all agricultural uses, and yet they hadn't notified the public. As is the case in many, many military sites, the military's first inclination when they discovered the contamination problem was not to come forth to the public, but rather to try and cover it up.

NARRATOR: But if the Army has not always been responsive in the past, its top environmental official assures us that that is no longer the case today. Lewis Walker is Deputy Assistant Secre-tary of the Army for Environment, Safety and Occupational Health.

Secretary LEWIS WALKER: If we find that we have damaged or influenced a ground water or a drinking water system, we imme- diately provide bottled water to the citizens that have been affected by this. Then we look at a long-term water supply. And we've had three or four cases where we have actually installed or extended city water lines for them to have a safe drinking water supply. Then we look at alternative actions to try to correct the contamination.

NARRATOR: According to Gary Cohen, if the military wants to have the confidence of local citizens, it must disclose base con-tamination as soon as it occurs and, in general, demonstrate greater openness.

Mr. COHEN: We want the military to become good neighbors. But, in order to do that, they've got to let citizens beyond the gates into the rooms to discuss with them what they're doing, how they can do it better. Let the citizens bring their own experts in, so they can test themselves, they can monitor themselves. We need to bring more democracy into the military which, in theory, we as the taxpayers of America own.

NARRATOR: The Air Force's Gary Vest agrees that citizens must have a role in addressing the military's pollution problems. Vest is Deputy Assistant Secretary of the Air Force for Environ-ment, Safety and Occupational Health.

Secretary GARY VEST: I think we learned that some years ago by experience that, when you have a real or a perceived environ-mental problem, you've got to open up the process and those people have got to understand. They've got to have access to the facts. They've got to be literally part of the decision process.

NARRATOR: The first step to gaining access to the facts, Seth Shulman says, is simply to call a military base's public affairs office and ask questions.

Mr. SHULMAN: The key has to do with understanding the process that the military goes through in the clean-up. It goes through a very established process where first they do what's called a preliminary assessment, then they do a site investiga-tion, etc., etc., down finally toward a remedial action or a clean-up. If you ask the public affairs person at your local base where they stand in that process, it gives you a tremendous access to information because you can request the preliminary assessment or the site investigation.

NARRATOR: Still, says Gary Cohen, it would help consider-ably and spare citizens a lot of trouble if military bases, in at least one respect, behaved more like private industry.

Mr. COHEN: Private industry has to report their toxic chemical releases to the air, and to the water, and to the land. But our own government, the US military, claims exemption.

Secretary VEST: One of the things that we have worked so hard on and for the last several years is to basically change in the Air Force the culture. And part of changing culture in this context is to get our people fully aware of what their environ-mental responsibilities are and fully execute them, and I believe we've achieved that in the Air Force.

NARRATOR: In 1989, Defense Secretary Dick Cheney issued a memo to the service secretaries stating his desire that the Pentagon become "the federal leader" in complying with environ-mental laws and protecting the environment.

Gary Vest says the Air Force is doing its part to meet this goal.

Secretary VEST: In 1970, Air Force people, I would have to say, were really not environmentally aware. Today they are. And what we've done is that we have reached our commanders and all of our people saying environment is simply part of your basic mission.

NARRATOR: The Army also is espousing a new environmental awareness. It stresses its determination to clean-up its mess.

Secretary WALKER: We have a new ethic in the Army and that's being good stewards. Our goal is to try to restore the land in such a manner that we do not leave any future liability for the Army. We do it because we feel that we have a responsibi-lity for clean air and clean water, but we also know that the laws are very stringent and they must be followed.

NARRATOR: In the past, however, the military has adopted a different position: It has claimed immunity from prosecution for environmental crimes. Environmental regulations, like the public, stopped at the installation gate.

Mr. SHULMAN: The mindset was epitomized by something that a base commander in Virginia said, where he said, "We're in the business of protecting the nation, not the environment."

NARRATOR: A bill signed into law in October 1992, the Federal Facilities Compliance Act, promises to change this.

Mr. SHULMAN: It says not only are federal facilities required to obey the same environmental laws, but that they are subject to the same penalties and the same fines as anyone in the private sector would be. And what this potentially does is put teeth into the EPA's ability to enforce the law.

NARRATOR: Meanwhile, the military assures us that it is already doing a lot to cooperate with environmental regulators.

Secretary WALKER: We work very closely with the Environ-mental Protection Agency. We work very closely with the state agency as well, because they have to be satisfied with our clean-up operations. We don't want any doubt, and so there's not the perception that we're trying to hide something from the public. Actually, there are no secrets in contamination clean-up.

INTERVIEWER: What is your relationship with the Environmental Protection Agency?

Mr. PAUL: We have a very good relationship with the EPA here. They, of course, have an officer who's assigned to this project and we work very closely with him and everything that we do here is with their oversight and approval.

Secretary VEST: One of the things that they're starting now with federal facilities is to have what are called multi-media joint EPA and state inspections, where a large group of people will come spend a few days or a week with us and look at every-thing. And we've already had one of those and, in fact, we like it.

NARRATOR: One of the military's main environmental goals has been to reduce the amount of hazardous waste it generates.

Secretary VEST: One of our major emphasis points in our program today is pollution prevention. Because what we do not want to do is to create any more clean-up requirements. And if we're not effectively doing pollution prevention, then we're not going to be able to do effective compliance.

Secretary WALKER: We believe that there are many opportu-nities here to prevent the very things that have happened in the past. We also know that it's very good business because if you use less hazardous materials, you generate less hazardous waste, and then the disposal costs are reduced.

From U.S. Army Video:

"In contrast to chemical stripping, abrasive blasting operations do not generate liquid hazardous waste."

NARRATOR: One example of successful hazardous waste reduc-tion by the military is its use of substitutes for toxic cleaning compounds and solvents. Among them, a cleaning solution that uses a lemon juice base, and paint stripping and rust removal with plastic pellets blasted through an air hose.

However, the military is still using CFCs and halons that are damaging the earth's vital ozone layer.

Mr. COHEN: They require the use of CFC-113, which is the most potent chemical destroying the ozone layer. In fact, the military purchases more than half of the CFC-113 used in this country. So you get these bizarre paradoxes, where in the name of defending Americans, the US military and its contractors are destroying the ozone layer, which is going to increase the possibility of millions of new skin cancers.

NARRATOR: According to Gary Vest and Lewis Walker, the Air Force and the Army are now taking steps to reduce their depen-dence on ozone-destroying chemicals.

Secretary VEST: We're now looking at pretty much phasing out ozone-depleting chemical purchases in the Air Force before the end of 1993. And we think that we're going to probably be able to be about 85 percent out of them within the next 12 to 15 months.

Secretary WALKER: We have one critical area that we're waiting for a substitute to come in, and that is the use of halons in our tank compartments. It is a lifesaving matter and we're looking desperately for a substitute that will serve the same -- has the same characteristics.

It's been demonstrated in combat that you save 45 percent of your tank crews from fires if you have the halon fire suppression system. So, we say that's a mission-critical element.

NARRATOR: Despite such efforts, says Gary Cohen, the mili-tary establishment remains a massive user of toxic chemicals.

Mr. COHEN: They still use and discharge millions of pounds of toxic chemicals a year, so it's not just an issue of past dumping, past waste. It's the continuing practices of the mili-tary and its contractors that continue to cause environmental problems. And we're not going to solve this problem until we can get the military off of their chemical addiction.

NARRATOR: We asked Seth Shulman and Gary Cohen to evaluate the military's progress on environmental matters.

Mr. SHULMAN: In terms of compliance, I think the military can point to a number of dramatic changes over the past few years. The other half of the coin though is the legacy that we're left with after these four decades of cold war years. In this regard, the record is far less promising.

INTERVIEWER: The clean-up.

Mr. SHULMAN: The clean-up.

INTERVIEWER: Do you think they're moving fast enough to clean up?

Mr. COHEN: You should ask people that live around military bases whose health has been endangered. From their point of view, they're not moving fast enough because there are many people who are getting ill, are getting cancer, who are experiencing prob- lems both on bases and off bases that feel that the military's not moving fast enough. If you look at the dollar amounts, the military still spends less that one percent of its budget on environmental programs.

Mr. SHULMAN: We're talking about tens of thousands of toxic sites and, to date, only a tiny handful of those sites have actually been cleaned, something on the order of two percent.

NARRATOR: Gary Vest does not deny the slow pace of the military's toxic waste clean-up. He and others involved in the process, he says, will continue to push forward.

Secretary VEST: Unfortunately, what has happened in this country is that we have a clean-up process that has become very slow and very laborious. It is subject to a tremendous amount of study, a great deal of interaction, very time-consuming interac-tion with the regulators. And so, I think that all of those that are involved in it recognize that. So, you know, we're developing new technologies and all that. But I think the real challenge is how we can get it done much faster and cost-effective.

Mr. PAUL: One thing that's not readily apparent to people when they say, gee, it's taking so long to clean these places up is that it's a very complicated process.

Mr. SHULMAN: It's a huge, huge problem and it's going to be with us, unfortunately, for a lot of years to come.

NARRATOR: The cold war is over and fears of sudden death in a nuclear attack have subsided. But fears of slow death from exposure to military contaminants are increasing. The damage to America's quality of life, in terms of human health, safety, and the environment, may turn out to be the cold war's most lasting legacy.

Admiral LaROCQUE: Well, as we were doing this program, all of us kept in mind the wonderful job our military has done in the past 45 years to defend this country against a possible Soviet attack. But I think all of us were disappointed to learn the extent of the pollution that has been caused on our military bases by the training, the shooting of the guns, the flying the planes, etc., that had to take place on those bases.

I was very much encouraged, however, to note that the Pentagon has finally recognized that they have, indeed, caused a considerable amount of pollution and they are beginning to take steps to clean up the mess that has been made, although the clean-up is proceeding very, very slowly. It probably will continue to be slow unless the people of the United States bring a little pressure on the powers that be in Washington to accelerate the clean-up of our bases. One thing we do know, that whenever we embark on an enterprise, even if it has to do with the defense of the United States, that we must keep in mind what effect there will be on our environment.

I hope you found the program interesting. And until next time, for "AMERICA'S DEFENSE MONITOR," I'm Gene LaRocque.