US Military Is The ‘World’s Largest Polluter’

Fact checked

The US military is the biggest polluter both domestically and internationally, according to new report which warns that hundreds of American military bases across the world are “gravely contaminated.”

MintPress News reported this week that the US Defense Department alone produces more hazardous waste than the five largest US chemical companies combined, creating a toxic legacy across the world comprised of depleted uranium, oil, jet fuel, pesticides and defoliants like Agent Orange and lead.

Press TV reports:

According to the report, perchlorate and other chemical components of jet and rocket fuel leaking from US military bases has often contaminated sources of drinking water, groundwater resources, and soil.

Aside from the military bases, there are around 1,200 military facilities scattered across the US that await decontamination under the so-called Superfund program, a federal cleanup initiative. Out of those, 900 have long been abandoned.

Holding the record for most nuclear weapons tests—more than all other nations combined— the US military is also responsible for the huge amount of radiation that continues to contaminate a large number of islands in the Pacific Ocean.

The situation is so severe that people living on the Marshall Islands, where the US tested more than sixty nuclear weapons between 1946 and 1958, have been developing exceedingly high rates of cancer over the past decades.

“Almost every military site in this country is seriously contaminated,” retired Michigan congressman and war veteran John D. Dingell told Newsweek in 2014, the same year the Pentagon admitted that it had to deal with 39,000 contaminated areas spread across 19 million acres just in the US.

Iraq is a more recent example. A research in 2010 revealed that the 2003 US invasion of Iraq and the following occupation of the country led to severe desertification of 90 percent of the land, turning the Arab country from a food exporter into a country that imports 80 percent of the food its people need.

Last week, the US Navy acknowledged that around an estimated 94,000 gallons of jet fuel had leaked from Virginia’s Naval Air Station Oceana into a nearby waterway.

2 Comments

  1. well well well..said the man with 3 holes in the ground…no surprises here folks…no surprises here…

  2. That’s a lot of drums..how is this for a plan…we load them onto a big boat and dump them in to the sea on and outgoing tide…..we sell the drums for $5 each.. that’s not a bad profit after we pay for the fuel…

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