Dear Mr. President,
First of all please accept my sincere congratulations with respect to your election as President of a great country which recognizes its leadership in the world and accepts responsibility for all events happening now and will happen in future. I wish that you achieve your goals for the United States: peace, progress, prosperity and well being.
Achievement of these goals will incolve facing challenges of recent years arising from political, social, military and economic problems, religious conflicts, terrorist threats and global environmental and climatic changes.
These problems include one which emerged after World War II, in 1945. At that time the countries which were members of the anti-Hitler coalition faced the task of disposal (liquidation) of chemical weapons of mass destruction: a huge volume of fifteen types of chemical warfare agents produced in Germany and owned by the Wehrmacht.
In those days, the means of disposal of such weapons simply did not exist.
In 1945 at the Potsdam Conference it was decided to bury chemical weapons in the Atlantic Ocean. In fact the chemical weapons were dumped in the Baltic and North Seas.
The military services of the USSR, the USA and Great Britain took part in a chemical weapons disposal operation from 1945-1947. The USA and Great Britain buried 88% of the Wehrmacht's weapons; the USSR buried 12%.
The methods of disposal differed. The USSR dumped the chemical weapons by dispersing them in large areas in the Baltic Sea. The USA and Great Britain disposed of the weapons in a compact way: they filled the holds of captured ships of various classes, bringing the ships to the sea and scuttling them by demolition.
According to our information the USSR, the USA, Great Britain and some other countries were disposing not only of the Wehrmacht's chemical weapons but also their own weapons not used in military operations against Hitler’s troops. The volume of these weapons, their types, their environmental effect and places where they were disposed of are classified.
After fifty years, in 1997, only the Russian Federation, following the terms of the Potsdam Conference, canceled the security grading on materials related to this operation and published the locations of chemical warfare agents disposals undertaken by the Soviet military services.
The USA and Great Britain extended to 2017 the security grading of materials related to their disposals.
Currently, thanks to the efforts of the international foundations World Ocean (Russia) and Clean Baltic (Estonia), the positions of 32 sunken ships with chemical weapons on board were found and registered.
The scientists of various countries of the Baltic region came to an unanimous opinion on the basis of examination of fauna and flora: development of the situation in disposal areas at the bottom of the Baltic and North Seas is going in accordance with the worst forecasts. Poisonous substances in the water and bottom silt exceeds by a hundredfold the maximum permissible concentrations. There were registered cases of unidentified diseases and deaths for reasons unknown among fishermen. The number of oncologic diseases among people living in the coastal regions of the Baltic countries increased significantly. The fishery in these seas, tourism and the leisure industry in these countries are in jeopardy.
The Baltic Sea is a closed body of water; a complete water exchange in the sea lasts around 28-30 years.
Scientists from Virginia Institute of Marine Science, USA, and their colleagues from Goteborg University, Sweden, have conducted a study which revealed that the Baltic Sea now represents a vast dead zone. A series of major blowouts of chemical warfare agents into the water constitutes a major threat. Missiles and containers for chemical warfare agents are rusted through as they have been in a corrosive environment. They can break down because of internal pressure.
The leaking of chemical warfare agents into the waters of the Baltic Sea, North Sea, Gulf Stream and onward to the world’s oceans would be an overwhelming catastrophe for our planet!
Dear Mr. President, for almost two decades I, jointly with a few enthusiasts and the Russian World Ocean Foundation, have tried to overcome the conspiracy of silence surrounding this problem. The presidents and governments, the European Union and NATO maintain their silence. The intelligence community and security services keep silent too despite they have to notify in advance about security hazards but not the way they did it in case with 9/11, or with Iraq's nuclear weapons problem, or with Al Qaeda terroristic attacks. They do not anticipate the probability of other hazards such as terrorist organizations' blackmail on a continental or a global scale. The Russian government, Gazprom, and German and Dutch corporations responsible for the construction of the Nord Stream gas pipeline also remain silent in response to a call to conduct an independent international environmental inquiry into the project which will lay the pipeline across locations where chemical warfare agents were dumped.
In short those high-ranking persons whose functions include the taking of strategic decisions regardless of corporate interests and state egoism are silent. It seems their reaction will emerge only when some problem occurs. But now when a catastrophe can happen at any time such behavior is irresponsible and even suicidal.
All this leads me to address you personally, the Congress, the Senate and the government of the United States of America, and to ask all to examine the problem and to take the correct decisions prior to 2017. I enclose the Baltic Proclamation with this letter. This is a sort of a roadmap for demilitarization of the seabeds of the Baltic and North Seas. It is intended that not only countries located in the Baltic and North Sea regions but also the USA, Great Britain and the entire civilized world community should take part in implementation of the Baltic Proclamation.
A solution of the problem will include consolidation of material and financial resources, will involve participation by highly qualified specialists in various spheres and the use of the latest scientific and technical achievements including nanotechnologies. The problem’s solution will reveal a maturity of our community, its willingness to face any evident challenges of the present time and in the future.
Sincerely yours,
Dr. Arnold Pork
President-Founder of Clean Baltic International Foundation
Estonia
December 12, 2008