China Haunted by WWII Chemical Weapons

High on a hill above an abandoned brickyard, a poisonous legacy of war lingers in this placid city.

In February 2000, a road construction team digging on Yellow Beard Mountain stumbled on a stash of chemical weapons left by Japanese forces when they pulled out of China at the end of World War II.

Unbeknown to the residents who went about life in its shadow, about 20,000 metal canisters lay buried atop the hill, full of toxic substances still capable of inducing vomiting in victims, damaging lung tissue and, in extreme instances, causing a painful death by suffocation from excess fluid in the lungs.

More than half a century since the munitions were stowed away, work finally wrapped up this month on unearthing and moving them to a special storage site. Eventually, technicians are to neutralize the harmful agents inside.

The size of the cache, experts say, is enough to put Yellow Beard Mountain near the top of the list of places around the world, including sites in England and France, where abandoned chemical weapons have been recovered and disarmed in recent times.

More startling is the fact that the stockpile in Nanjing represents just a tiny fraction of the chemical arms in China left behind by the retreating Japanese army.

The Japanese government, which is bound by international treaty to render harmless the abandoned ordnance, estimates that 700,000 of its chemical munitions are scattered across China; Beijing puts the figure at 2 million.

Either way, China is now home to the world’s largest chemical weapons cleanup campaign at a time of new global scrutiny of unconventional warfare and its consequences.

The process of destroying the arms is extremely delicate and shows the challenge that could lie ahead for the U.S. and its allies if Osama bin Laden turns out to have amassed an arsenal of chemical weapons and if U.S.-led forces succeed in getting their hands on it.

The difficulty of the decommissioning project in China is compounded by the leftover weapons’ age, condition, mixed content and sheer quantity.

“This is something that has been done before, but not on that scale,” said Abu Talib, a chemical weapons expert in the United States. “Most of the chemical weapons around the world, you’re talking [in the] hundreds and thousands--not such a huge pile.”

Talib works at Mitretek Systems in Falls Church, Va., an organization being consulted by Tokyo in its effort to purge China of one of the more embarrassing, and threatening, reminders of Japan’s brutal military occupation of parts of the country in the 1930s and ‘40s.

Beijing says the weapons have continued to injure and kill since the end of World War II, harming as many as 2,000 Chinese and damaging the environment. Eighteen alleged postwar victims are finally to get a hearing in a Tokyo court in February or March after years of filing suit for compensation.

Japan’s agreement to clean up the arms also came after years of contention and negotiation hampered by Tokyo’s long refusal to acknowledge formally that such munitions were used, despite the discovery of so many left behind.

Most of the weapons found so far were in the northeast, in what was the puppet state of Manchukuo under the Japanese imperial regime.

Sometime after the war, the Chinese military rounded up all the abandoned weapons it could find--some of the locations were contained in Japanese records--and selected a remote, mountainous area, Haerbaling in Jilin province, to serve as a repository.

“Because of financial and technical reasons, we weren’t able to destroy them, so we collected them all together and buried them,” said Ge Guangbiao, deputy director of the Chinese government agency overseeing the cleanup project. “This was the only thing we could do.”

Shells, Canisters and Drums Fill Pits

In two large pits, Chinese soldiers interred a vast stockpile of munitions: 670,000 artillery and mortar shells, smoke canisters, huge drums of chemicals, perhaps some bombs.

Their payloads were designed to disable and, possibly, kill the enemy, and to control crowds. In addition to numerous vomiting agents, there was a potentially lethal “mustard gas” compound that inflamed and blistered victims’ eyes, lungs and skin, and an agent that induced tearing and coughing and made breathing difficult--and that in high doses could also inflict death by suffocation.

The chemicals are not as deadly as the nerve agents found in other parts of the world--just a dab of those can be fatal within minutes--but they are nonetheless hazardous to both humans and the environment.

Few people live in Haerbaling, a forested area near the meandering Songhua River. During fine weather, says someone who has visited the site, it seems “an ideal place for a picnic” but for the fences and the occasional soldier guarding what is considered military property, off limits to civilians.

For decades, Haerbaling’s inaccessibility and the cool temperatures below ground, which slow metal corrosion, made it a satisfactory place to store the weapons.

But the inaccessibility and the inability to examine the full extent and condition of the buried weapons have become drawbacks in the effort to extract the munitions--a laborious process that cannot begin until the Chinese finish building a road to the site.

Destroying the arms too will be a complicated task, especially as some, though not all, are still rigged to explode. Japanese scientists are trying to come up with a range of effective technologies, drawing on lessons learned in other parts of the world.

“The U.S. has tons of experience [dealing with] our stockpile of munitions,” Talib said. “We’ve learned a lot, we and the Europeans, over the last 30 years about how to handle these things . . . and the Japanese can learn a lot from the U.S. experience. It’s a risky thing, but it’s a manageable risk.”

Whether such a monumental task can be completed by 2007, the deadline imposed by the international Chemical Weapons Convention, remains to be seen.

Japan and China both signed the convention in 1993, lending impetus to the fitful negotiations over the abandoned weapons that the two had engaged in up to that point.

Although a team of Japanese specialists visited northeastern China in 1991 to examine some of the munitions, progress in dealing with them was stymied by Tokyo’s refusal to admit to having deployed such arms.

Only in November 1995, after the U.S. declassified documents pertaining to the weapons, did the Japanese government admit that it had used “lethal gases” during the war, according to a report last year by the International Institute for Strategic Studies in London.

Neither Tokyo nor Beijing sounds optimistic about meeting the 2007 deadline. Construction of a pilot destruction plant is already behind schedule.

The cleanup project’s price tag is enormous: Disposing of a single canister is estimated to cost several thousand dollars. A Japanese official associated with the project, who asked not to be identified, said the bill will probably exceed $1 billion.

But both countries say Tokyo is committed to seeing the project through.

“It is not at all easy to achieve this target [date], but we are now making our best effort,” a Japanese government official, Seiji Kojima, told an international conference in May. Kojima is director general of the Office for Abandoned Chemical Weapons, a unit of the prime minister’s office.

Besides the huge stash in Haerbaling, chemical ordnance in varying amounts has been found in at least a dozen other provinces, Chinese officials say.

Evidence Japan’s Forces Used Chemical Arms

In Nanjing, the cache on Yellow Beard Mountain contained some already used weapons, showing for the first time that Japanese forces deployed chemical arms during their invasion of the city in 1937, said a Chinese Defense Ministry expert, Zhao Fujin, in a report released by state-run media last year.

The report quoted a historian as saying that Nanjing, whose wartime suffering included the atrocities known collectively as the Rape of Nanking, was at one time the command post of the Japanese army’s chemical weapons division.

During excavations at Yellow Beard Mountain, the report added, experts found that some of the toxic substances had seeped into the soil, causing “serious pollution in neighboring areas” and forcing authorities to move and detoxify more than 60 tons of earth.

But last month, even as Japanese and Chinese teams toiled on the hill overlooking Nanjing’s apartments and alleyways, many residents had no idea what was going on.

“The Japanese buried things up there,” said the owner of a nearby shop, who shook her head when asked if she knew what the “things” were.

When told that they were abandoned chemical weapons, she shrugged. “They’re so old, there shouldn’t be a problem,” she said.

Unfortunately, accidental encounters with the munitions can indeed prove deadly. The London institute’s report cited one case in 1974 in which Chinese workers dredging a river were exposed to poison gas and contracted a series of debilitating illnesses that led to the death of one of the laborers 17 years later.

In another instance, in 1995, road workers accidentally set off an abandoned chemical weapon, killing two people and injuring several others.

The institute also noted that many of the leftover munitions contain arsenic, which, if it leaked out, could contaminate the soil and nearby water sources.

“This is a present problem that needs to be urgently resolved. It doesn’t just disappear over time,” said Ge, the official with the Chinese agency overseeing the cleanup project.

“If there’s just one weapon, [Japan] must take care of it. If there are 3 million, they must take care of it,” Ge said emphatically. “There’s no limit.”