Approximately 1.6 million tons of old ammunition are lying on the bottom of the North Sea and Baltic Sea, posing a considerable danger: their casings are slowly rusting and emitting toxic substances such as TNT compounds.
Most of the ammunition was deliberately sunk in the ocean after the war because the Allies were concerned that Germans would resume hostilities against them again at some point, and ordered that Germany destroy all ordnance. At the time the easiest way to do so seemed to be to simply dump everything into the sea.
Every time I read something like this the laziness and lack of foresight is just baffling. It’s hard to comprehend.
It’s hard to overstate just how systemic “we can fix it later” was in the mid 20th century. Progress had happened quickly since the turn of the century, many centuries old problems were solved overnight by new inventions (like penicillin) and it was assumed that that progress would continue.
For instance, the century date problem, later known as the Y2K problem, was first realized in the 1950s. Then brought to light again in the 1970s. But nobody did anything about it until the mid 90s.
Old science fiction books are exactly like this. They just assumed we’d have technological solutions to everything.
Also, they weren’t living in a largely collapsed ecosystem. Today we view this story in horror, but back then there were 1/4th the people, wildlife and nature was bountiful. It was probably hard to imagine that we humans could substantially alter the world. Hell, people today look into the sky and say global warming is bunk. Yeah, looks huge from down here! Take a look from space, paint on a marble.
was
Haven’t changed much really…
Eeehh? The Y2K problem is result because of decisions taken in the 70’s (for very good reasons) and nothing was done until the 90’s because it wasn’t an issue before. Y2K did not exist even as an idea in the 1950’s
The first person known to publicly address this issue was Bob Bemer, who had noticed it in 1958 as a result of work on genealogical software.
Or possibly the mentality of “it is now someone else’s problem”.
Classic mentality of ‘lets dump it in the sea’
…and unless we recover it all with robots, that’s exactly where it’s staying. It’s far too unstable to move with people.
To be fair, people are pretty unstable as well.
