Half a century of Cold War has left us with thousands of square miles of land contaminated with deadly chemicals and unexploded bombs and shells. Thousands of tons of unused bombs must be destroyed each year and there also remain thousands of workshops and vehicle storage and repair areas contaminated by leaking fuel and other chemicals.

But first, some good news. One of the advantages of today's smart bombs that no one wants to admit is that they will leave less debris to clean up on bombing ranges. Even better, more training with smart bombs can be done with computer simulations; you only need to do it for real to make sure the computer training took. So you end up with far fewer bombs dropped in some wilderness area.

But for the most part, we have allowed a really nasty situation to sneak up on us. For a long time, no one worried too much about all those exploded, and some unexploded, bombs way out there. Aerial bombing ranges are a 20th century development. Range needs were small until World War II, but during that conflict, hundreds of thousands of bombers were built. And even more bomber pilots had to be trained. Since there was a war going on, no one was going to complain about all the real estate being torn up by exploded bombs and polluted by those (often a third or more) that didn't. Currently the U. S. has some 15,000 square miles of bombing ranges (mostly in the west). To give you a better idea how large this area is, it is equal to all the land from New York City to Washington, DC, from the coast to about 70 miles inland.

As aircraft got faster, and artillery was improved, more land was needed to train the crews. Faster aircraft cover more ground while the pilot figures out where to put the bombs. Since this is training, mistakes are made; thus pilots needs a lot of bombing range to practice on before accuracy is achieved. Artillery was improved over the last five decades, mainly by firing the shells farther. So to keep it safe, the big guns needed bigger ranges.

The Cold War also produced the largest peacetime American armed forces ever. So there were tens of thousands of warplanes and artillery involved in training each year. Moreover, huge stocks of ammunition were stockpiled in case there was a war. Most of this stuff never was used and grew old and unstable. Each year thousands of tons of old munitions have to be destroyed. Currently, 200,000 tons of munitions are either fired off at ranges or destroyed because they are too old to use.

The fuel and chemical spills around military truck garages and airfields are not unique to the military. Similar civilian facilities began to notice the same problems after decades of garages or factories operating in the same place. The usual nasty side effect was that the stuff eventually would work its way down into the water supply. Bad water not only tastes bad, it can also make you sick, dead even. But the military bases were worse. Most of the soldiers were young, were only in uniform for a short time and thus were sloppier than their civilian counterparts. More crud got dumped. Moreover, the military had a "get the mission done no matter what" attitude. This meant that when the troops were rushing for an exercise or other emergency, corners would be cut and that often meant more spills. One of the big problems with closing old military bases is the cost of cleaning up after decades of military operations. Sometimes the spills got so bad they had to be cleaned up while the base was still open but, in general, the Pentagon would prefer to put off the day of reckoning (and the enormous bill) as long as possible.

It gets worse.

While decades of fuel, oil, cleaning chemicals and the like seeping into the ground is a problem, as are all the millions of unexploded bombs and shells, it is made worse by new standards in ecological purity. After centuries of killing ourselves by polluting the ground, air and water around major cities, the last three decades have seen major cleanups. Some of these major rivers (Hudson, Thames, Rhine, etc) are cleaner now than they have been for hundreds of years.

Applying the same standards to military bases is expensive, but at least you improve the health of your own troops. The firing ranges are where the real action is. Without these ranges, the troops cannot practice the use of their weapons under realistic conditions. Without that kind of training, more of our folks get killed the next time there's a war. That's not speculation, but a hard, cold historical fact.

The trend among environmentalists (and many civilians living near these ranges) is to clean them up and convert them to civilian use, no matter what. At the moment, no one has a practical method of cleaning up a firing range used for several decades. It's one thing to go through all the topsoil and remove tons of shell and bomb fragments, it's another matter to find and destroy bombs and shells that didn't detonate the first time around. Unexploded stuff is buried in the ground and some of it can be very touchy. This stuff didn't go off because the fuse didn't function properly (for any number of reasons). Just jarring an old bomb can set it off.

Major portions of Europe had unexploded bombs cleared out after World War II, and these places were bombed for only a few years. Fifty years later, they are still finding stuff, usually when a construction crew comes across one of these deadly relics. So clearing up wilderness areas is possible, if you don't ask for perfection. But perfection is what many environmentalists and wilderness enthusiasts are after. The military has been hit with more lawsuits of late, largely a result of an increasingly litigious society. But the environmental lawsuits could be tough to handle. The cleanups can't be done in a hurry, Congress is reluctant to provide money for cleanups, so the result is likely to be money taken from training and readiness and many training areas closed.

All this activity is unlikely to make the news big time, but it will show up in wartime. The troops will be less prepared, more will die and, who knows, someone might even remember it was because training areas were closed for cleanup, or perhaps to provide another national park.

Don't count on it.

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