Environment

By Richard Lacayo

The military lexicon needs a new term: "eco-war." What better way to describe the acts of environmental carnage committed last week in the Persian Gulf, where the air is thick with the smoke from burning oil wells and a wide swath of crude petroleum is fouling the water and devastating wildlife? If these disasters brought to mind the Exxon Valdez, the news of air attacks on nuclear- and chemical-weapons facilities raised the specter of Chernobyl and Bhopal. The environment itself has become both a weapon and a victim.

A first taste of possible nightmares to come arrived early last week, when a number of oil wells and storage tanks were set afire at Al-Wafra field in southern Kuwait and at the Shuaiba industrial complex just north of Mina Al- Ahmadi. U.S. and Saudi officials claimed that the fires were set by Iraq, perhaps to provide a massive shield of smoke that would confuse the guidance systems of allied missiles and planes and block the view of military satellites.

Then came word of a full-scale disaster. Early in the week, the slightly nauseating odor of oil was noticeable along coastal areas of Saudi Arabia near the border with Kuwait. Within days, observers could see the source of the smell: a 16-km (10-mile) band of crude, so thick in places that the water heaved like mud. Iraq is believed to have opened the spigots of Kuwait's main supertanker-loadin g pier, the Sea Island terminal, 16 km offshore from the country's major petroleum refinery and loading complex at Mina Al-Ahmadi. Through pipes leading from giant storage tanks, millions of gallons of crude had been poured straight into the water. At the same time, at least three tankers docked there were deliberately being emptied into the gulf.

The Iraqis may have released up to 120 million gal. by late last week -- almost a dozen times as much as the Exxon Valdez leaked into Alaska's Prince William Sound in 1989. And this time any cleanup could be a deadly mission in itself. The spill is "in enemy territory," says Marine Major General Robert Johnston, the U.S. Central Command's chief of staff. "We can't just go in and shut it off."

Though the Pentagon labeled the action "environmental terrorism," Saddam had probably unleashed the oil with military purposes in mind. Tar balls could gum up the desalinization plants along the Saudi coast that provide most of the fresh water to the gulf countries as well as to allied troops. As the Saudis scrambled to divert the slick with surface booms, plans were considered to extend intake lines deep into unpolluted waters and provide backup water supplies. President George Bush sent an interagency team to Saudi Arabia to assist the containment effort.

Saddam might also have had in mind setting the oil ablaze to thwart an amphibious Marine landing on the Kuwaiti coast. Because most crude oil burns poorly, that prospect left allied military planners unfazed -- even as they kept a wary eye on a fire that was spotted on the slick during the weekend.

What is certain is that the oil spill has delivered a devastating blow to the ecology of the Persian Gulf. "Massive oil spills could turn this body of water into a virtual dead sea," says Brent Blackwelder, vice president of Friends of the Earth. Hundreds of oil-soaked marine birds are already washing up on the shores of northern Saudi Arabia.

But last week's fires and oil spills could be just a prelude of future environmental disasters wrought by the war with Iraq. Among the areas of greatest concern:

THE GULF. Because it is virtually an enclosed basin, with an outlet to the sea only 35 miles wide at the Strait of Hormuz, the gulf is especially vulnerable to oil spills. In a body of water badly contaminated by tankers, garbage and sewage, a disastrous spill of the kind that Iraq caused last week could destroy nesting areas for endangered sea turtles and spawning grounds for shrimp while poisoning tuna, snapper, sardines and anchovies, which are vital to local fishermen. "The ecosystems are endangered anyway," says Frank Barnaby, former director of the Stockholm Peace Research Institute. "Another million barrels of oil may be the last straw."

In time, the Sea Island terminal spill could be compounded by a flood of oil from a major refinery, either as the result of a U.S. attack or a decision by Iraq to open the faucets. A single refinery tank can hold millions of gallons -- enough to smear large stretches of the sebkha, the flat coastal terrain where Kuwaiti refineries are located.

BURNING OIL FIELDS. Saddam is assumed to have mined all or most of Kuwait's 360 operating oil wells. If he throws the switch, the resulting fires could send forth a vast cloud of dense black smoke that would foul the air and darken skies as far east as Afghanistan and northern India. After 30 days, smoke could cover an area half the size of the U.S. But because oil gushes naturally to the surface in most Kuwaiti wells, with no need of pumping, it will go on feeding a blaze until someone puts it out -- months or years later, depending on how long the war lasts.

The worst possibility is that the immense pall could lower temperatures in the Indian subcontinent four to five degrees, disrupting the monsoon rains that are essential to crops for the nations of that area. "If this goes on until spring and summer, it will be a direct threat to their food supply, which is already marginal," says Anne Ehrlich, a Sierra Club expert.

There is not much support, however, for the contention of a few scientists, including the astronomer Carl Sagan and Abdullah Toukan, science adviser to Jordan's King Hussein, that oil-field fires could bring on a nuclear winter, affecting weather patterns all around the world with devastating effects on agriculture. Nuclear blasts and volcanoes can send smoke exploding 16 km or more into the upper atmosphere, enabling it to travel long distances around the globe; but the worst oil-field inferno would probably lack the upward thrust to send smoke even one-tenth as high into the air before it started to cool and descend.

A group of scientists at the University of California's Lawrence Livermore laboratory recently used a computer model to estimate the effect of a worst- case scenario: simultaneous fires at all of Kuwait's rigs that would put as much as 50,000 tons of soot into the sky each day. "We see no way it's going to get to the upper atmosphere," says Michael MacCracken, who headed the project. "It will get rained out." A black, oily shower was descending upon Iran not long after last week's fires began.

NUCLEAR CONTAMINATION. There have been no signs so far of radioactive contamination resulting from allied air attacks on Iraq's two nuclear reactors at Tuwaitha. Both are small research facilities, with modest amounts of nuclear material at their cores. The smaller of the two is a pint-size reactor of less than a megawatt. The larger puts out just five megawatts of power. Chernobyl was roughly a thousand times as powerful.

Even a runt reactor can contaminate the nearby area if its radioactive core is fractured, in which case some radioactive particles could remain in the soil for decades. But the prospect that a radioactive cloud will spread across the region is universally discounted. "You would need a direct hit to splatter the stuff around," says Thomas B. Cochran of the New York City-based Natural Resources Defense Council. "And then it would be only a local hazard."

CHEMICAL AND BIOLOGICAL WEAPONS. Chemical weapons work fast, then disappear. . They were used during the Iran-Iraq war, sometimes with devastating consequences for combatants, but with almost none for the environment. Since the gulf war began, allied planes and missiles have pounded Iraqi chemical- weapons plants, situated about 25 miles northwest of the Shi'ite holy city of Samarra, that manufacture mustard gas and nerve agents. Because the plants are surrounded by a 25-sq.-km (9.6-sq.-mi.) "exclusion zone," the likelihood of a deadly plume invading populated areas is small. Explosives would also tend to break the gases down into less deadly substances. Harmful chemicals that penetrated the soil would disappear without a trace within a few weeks at most.

Biological agents could be a different problem. Iraq is believed to possess some of them, including typhoid, cholera and botulin toxin. In open air, most of those die within hours. So does anthrax, an infectious, spore-forming bacterium that Saddam is also believed to possess. But if spores of anthrax penetrate the ground, they can survive in a dormant state for decades, waiting for new victims.

One consolation for environmentalists is that this may be the first war in which the ecological consequences of battle have been a focus of world attention even as the fighting takes place. Yet that very awareness multiplies the sense of horror and demoralization caused by Saddam's callous acts of environmental terrorism. In his quixotic madness, the Iraqi strongman seems intent on waging what he calls "the mother of all battles" against the mother of us all -- the earth itself.

CHART: NOT AVAILABLE

CREDIT: TIME Chart by Steve Hart

CAPTION: ECOLOGICAL DISASTERS?

With reporting by Anne Constable/London and Ted Gup/Washington