Unexploded ordnance

Unexploded ordnance (or UXOs/UXBs, sometimes acronymized as UO) are explosive weapons (bombs, bullets, shells, grenades, land mines, naval mines, etc.) that did not explode when they were employed and still pose a risk of detonation, potentially many decades after they were used or discarded. While "UXO" is widely and informally used, munitions and explosives of concern (MEC) is the current preferred terminology within the remediation community.

File:Corroded shell.jpg

Extremely corroded Iraqi artillery shell dating from the Gulf War of 1991. Live and dangerous.

Unexploded ordnance worldwide

Unexploded ordnance from at least as far back as the First World War still poses a hazard worldwide, both in former combat areas and on military firing ranges. A major problem with unexploded ordnance is that over the years the detonator and main charge deteriorate, frequently making them more sensitive to disturbance, and therefore more dangerous to handle. There are countless examples of civilians tampering with unexploded ordnance that is many years old - often with fatal results. Believing it to be harmless they handle the device and it explodes, killing or severely injuring them. For this reason it is universally recommended that unexploded ordnance should not be touched or handled by unqualified persons. Instead, the location should be reported to the local police so that EOD professionals can render it safe. Civilians are sometimes even told not to use phones and radio devices nearby, as the signals may trigger the device.

In the Ardennes region of France, large-scale citizen evacuations were necessary during UXO removal operations in 2001. In the forests of Verdun French government "demineurs" working for the Department du Deminage still hunt for poisonous, volatile, explosive munitions and recover about 900 tons every year. The most feared are corroded artillery shells containing chemical warfare agents such as mustard gas. According to the film "Aftermath", these demineurs "have gathered more than twenty million shells but have lost six hundred demineurs. At the current speed, France will be fully cleared and safe - in seven hundred years." French farmers still find many UXOs when ploughing their fields; the so-called "iron harvest."

German artillery shell from WWI (1914-1918) left beside a field for disposal by the army in 2004 near Ieper in Belgium. Live and dangerous.

A dramatic example of the threat of UXO is the wreck of the SS Richard Montgomery off the coast of Kent, which still contains 3000 tons of munitions. When a similar World War II-era wreck, the Polish Kielce exploded in 1967, it produced an impact measuring 4.5 on the Richter scale.

According to US Environmental Protection Agency documents released in late 2002, UXO at 16,000 domestic inactive military ranges within the United States pose an "imminent and substantial" public health risk and could require the largest environmental cleanup ever, at a cost of at least $14 billion. Some individual ranges cover 500 square miles (1,300 km²), and, taken together, the ranges comprise an area the size of Florida.

In addition to the obvious danger of explosion, buried UXO also entails the risk of environmental contamination. In some heavily-used military training areas, munitions-related chemicals such as explosives and perchlorate (a component of pyrotechnics and rocket fuel) can enter soil and groundwater. A prominent example exists at the Massachusetts Military Reservation (MMR) on Cape Cod, Massachusetts (USA), where decades of artillery training has contaminated the only drinking water for thousands of surrounding residents. An expensive UXO recovery effort is under way there.

The country of Laos has the distinction of being one of the world's most heavily bombed nations. During the period of the American Vietnam War, over half-a-million bombing missions dropped more than 2 million tons of ordnance on Laos, most of it anti-personnel cluster bombs. Each cluster bomb shell contained hundreds of individual bomblets, "bombies", about the size of a tennis ball. An estimated 30% of these munitions did not detonate. Ten of the 18 Laotian provinces have been described as "severely contaminated" with artillery and mortar shells, mines, rockets, grenades, and other devices from various countries of origin. These munitions pose a continuing obstacle to agriculture and a special threat to children, who are attracted by the toy-like devices.

In the aftermath of the 2006 war between Israel and Lebanon, it is estimated that southern Lebanon is littered with^[1] one million undetonated cluster bombs - approximately 1 ½ bombs per Lebanese inhabitant of the region, dropped by Israeli Defense Forces in the^[2] last days of the war.

In the United Kingdom

UXO is standard terminology in the UK, although in artillery, especially on practice ranges, an unexploded shell is referred to as a blind, and during the Blitz in WWII an unexploded bomb was referred to as an UXB. Most current UXO risk is limited to areas, mainly in London, that were subject to the Blitz and to land used by the military to store ammunition or to train on.

Detection technology

Modern techniques can combine geophysical and survey methods with modern electromagnetic and magnetic detectors. This provides digital mapping of UXO contamination with the aim to better target subsequent excavations, reducing the cost of digging on every metallic contact and speeding the clearance process. Magnetometer probes can detect UXO and provide geotechnical data before drilling or piling is carried out.

Currently in the U.S., the Strategic Environmental Research and Development Program (SERDP), and Environmental Security Technology Certification Program (ESTCP), Department of Defense programs fund research into not only the detection, but also discrimination of UXO from scrap metal. Much of the cost of UXO removal comes from removing non-explosive items that the metal-detectors identified, so improved discrimination is critical. New techniques such as shape reconstruction from magnetic data and better de-noising techniques (to name a few) will prove invaluable to reducing cleanup costs and enhancing recovery.

References

External links

Videos

[1] New York Times (registration needed)

[2] Washington Post

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