Army: No plan to move sea-dumped munitions - Army News | News from Afghanistan & Iraq - Army Times

Army: No plan to move sea-dumped munitions

HONOLULU — Several thousand World War II-era chemical munitions have been found by deep-diving submersibles under a joint Army-University of Hawaii team.

So far, no large cache of weapons has been discovered.

The U.S. military dumped some 2,500 tons of weapons containing lethal mustard, cyanide, lewisite, cyanogens and chloride at three deep-sea sites several miles off Oahu. More than 16,000 individual bombs were dumped there.

Over 17 days, a $3 million effort involving remote devices and the university’s two submersibles found several thousand bombs at depths of 1,500 feet by using sonar. The examined area totaled 240 square miles.

Water and sediment samples also were taken near the bombs that were found. The Army has no plans to remove the munitions.