dynamics. to do friends. months ago. welcome back here's a recap of the latest new sample week's top stories on our t.v. rebel forces fight on against gadhafi loyalists saying at their fall class of one of his last fall polls at the city of syria but many in the capital tripoli say they're now living in fear of so-called freedom fighters. washington launches its missile defense clouds into eastern europe it will be a near turkey and poland has signed up to most of us feel that moscow bridge a great security concerns and calls for urgent talks. moscow and london agree differences a shouldn't stop of doing business during their first trip by a new came leader to russia in six years multi-million dollar contracts for silda

during david cameron's visit. death examples between a service call several reach boiling point as disputed border posts are seized by cos of our forces local serbs some of barricades the deployments are you a loss of a customs officials on the front here which was previously under serbian control. and up next r t investigates how complex going to be fragile ecosystem struggling to survive and why no one is telling the story that's next. sometimes we think that it's easier to make war and to work to create an attack or to clean up after it the military is a major player in terms of environmental outcomes. the environment is wars silent casualty when we talk about the costs

of war on the rarely focus on what happens to the way the animals we rarely focus on that which sustains from a lot. of them. were completely out of sync that in designing threats to our security. at one time the principal threats were in the water they no longer are there now environmental in the homeland security department there sleeping about vulnerability and preparedness we just haven't made the same yet in climate change but we really need to do that at the minute it see for sleep walking instead sastre we can't afford to sleepwalk into the future we must take decisions and action which ph a goal that we want our children and their children to grow up.

the air. war has changed much over the centuries yet our perception of war has changed little women morea lies the fallen take some note of

collateral damage to civilians but in calculating the cost of war we seldom acknowledge its toll on the natural environment. well when one deals with warfare one has to realize that the tremendous amounts of damage that are done not just human damage but damage the physical environment in which the battlefield takes place and whether it's a small war of a couple of days or whether it's a major war war one war two vietnam war or the recent wars in the middle east tremendous amounts of damage done by aerial bombs by napalm. chemicals that are used i would say there's very little consideration during combat operations to the effect on the environment one gets totally preoccupied in the firefight it's about . after major combat operations are over in almost any

war you have unexploded ordinance. staggered about the landscape. the use of agricultural land to the population you can tension really infect the water supply and the food chain and i would say that that's basically the case almost anywhere that you use fire power either air power artillery. the primary goal in warfare is to beat the enemy and when you want to defeat the enemy as quickly and as. for the cost effectively as you like but you use the most dangerous weapons you can for the most part unless you're your own troops your own population happens to be in belfield. with three six battle gatling gun each capable of firing up to six thousand. one of the still dragon ships and

in every day. when i arrived in vietnam. february one thousand nine hundred seventy. there was a really a great deal of destruction and we were taken out on missions mainly by helicopter i missions were called search and destroy we would try to search out the enemy and destroy the enemy and we could cheer yeah they were in numerable tunnels and usually we would try to build these tunnels up on a c four explosives. and we seldom saw the enemy which hides and destroy the earth. concealed and sustain the enemy i often wonder if our struggle is not against human beings but against the

earth that sustains them. we've become experts in going the earth using bond's artillery mortars see for gunships need to reduce the earth to ashes. and the history of wife on earth there been five moments. and which is pan a major spasm of extinction and the best known as when the dinosaurs left the stage as it were we are now clearly in the first stages of a potential sixth spasm of extinction in the human footprint on nature it's it's just quite you can see the increase greenhouse gases in the atmosphere you can see it in the proliferating dead zones and coastal waters around the world

you can see it in the oceans becoming acid in terms of warm preparations for war that becomes sort of a list of things in itself whether it's. our sonic booms are factoring in marine mammals or it's the burning oil fields around the iraq or its destroyed coral reefs in the pacific for rounding purposes however the worst just goes on and on in war time damage to habitat and wildlife is a given sometimes unintended sometimes the result of a deliberate strategy one of the list examples of the environmental impact of warfare we see injuring the iraq invasion of kuwait in nine hundred ninety one and the deliberate igniting of the oil will seem kuwait by saddam hussein's troops but is has being a vast amounts of oil in fact tens of millions of barrels of oil into the patient gulf region and this had it cherohala faked on the marine farm and on the life in

the area by my criterion and i have periods. one solution that is it had is fine and may fit and it is it is not just a collection of millions of particles of sand it is that is an ecosystem and for vast amounts of oil into a consistent that is terribly destructive for. all's fair in love and war as they say and that's why. aircraft will hit chemical industry will sink tankers. nuclear power plants will hit anything that might bring a society or a city already are fighting it to its knees as quickly as possible with tremendous amounts than likely of environmental damage such deliberate targeting of the environment during the vietnam war prompted the addition of article fifty five zero to call one of the geneva conventions article fifty five of protocol one additional

to the geneva conventions of nineteen forty nine states that care shall be taken and swore to protect from violence against widespread long term and severe damage to the united states. although it is accepted almost all of the provisions of protocol one has taken exception to that. in our bombing campaign and nineteen ninety nine my loss of which did not capitulate and just a few days as we had anticipated and we bombed for seventy eight days we bombed oil refineries resulting in a mile long oil slicks that extended down the danube through remaining into the black sea. we bomb petro chemical plants and fertilizer factories spreading mercury. other carcinogens

on the landscape and do a kind now lead into the danube river it will take the eco systems decades to recover. forests are among the ecosystems that are most often damaged or destroyed in combat itself the main reason for that is because they're very useful for guerrillas trying to find concealment from forces with superior firepower forty years ago when the united states was trying to prevail in vietnam and its enemies the viet cong were using the forests for concealment the american forces tried through fire and chemical defoliants to clear large parts of

the forests of vietnam. not in build up all. they think of themselves as wrong and up there possibly have bases. they fly seven days in the week fifty two weeks in here most days in the bases of spew out the total of nearly eighteen thousand gallons of people. from one hundred sixty to one thousand nine hundred seventy one u.s. military conducted a large scale defoliation drive code named operation ranch hand planes helicopters and tanker trucks sprayed nineteen million gallons of herbicides on south vietnam. i should mention agent orange which was also one of the main ways that the why and was ravaged a place that had been sprayed with would die and the sometimes the we

saw of same banana plants would become enormous and then they would die and it looked like a ghost landscape almost everything had been killed agent orange and was developed actually in world war two at that time it was not thought that this had any effect on human beings so this became a wonderful commercial product but also a very product that could be used to just. jungles to destroy food crops to be able to be used as a tactical weapon of war without being considered chemical warfare in the sense of place and gas thirty percent of the asian aren't consisted of a chemical called two four or five t. which. unless the conditions of manufacture were carefully controlled would become contaminated with dioxin which is an extraordinarily potent toxic chemical so much

of the agent orange of this her aside that was sprayed in vietnam was heavily contaminated the americans did not will be defiled your costumes. and the like the wrong of it. things like well the team will be aging vietnamese will be more anyway these are battles of the mind of just don't know when but it makes no more than about a mission accomplished. in one thousand nine hundred four u.s. veterans who were attributed a variety of adverse physical symptoms to agent orange exposure settled out of court with the manufacturers twenty years later their families fought to have a plaque added to the vietnam veterans memorial it states in memory of the men and women who served in the vietnam war and later died as a result of their service. and remember their circus. knew that the united states government nor the manufacturers of agent orange that compensated the

vietnamese people. when we first started working in afghanistan one of the things that surprised me was that it actually was an area where natural and wild pistachio and woodlands grew i didn't know that they actually existed there before and in fact they were a significant part of the pre-war economy people picked the pistachios and actually exported them it was worth millions of dollars as a source of income to people. in the deforestation we see in afghanistan is a product of three forces first of all you have the mujahideen that were using the forests for cover the soviets destroyed some of the force to prevent that second of all you have the afghans themselves harvested the forests and stockpiled the wood because they feared that they'd be taken away during the collectivization process. and third you had land mines that were put in agricultural areas by putting the

land mines that are cultural areas that forced people to find other areas to grow food and the most obvious where the forests and woodlands of the country so those three factors have led to virtual one hundred percent deforestation in some areas this footage was taken during a field study for the united nations environment program holes in the soil indicate were trees have been uprooted to plant crops. after three decades of war only the smallest patches of forest remain in northern afghanistan barely detectable by satellite and the reason we don't see some of these woodlands and forests regenerating is also complex at the moment if the seedling happens to take root and start growing you actually have grazing of goats and sheep over virtually the entire landscape and those goats and sheep obviously simply eat anything that comes up so what we saw in a in

a number of different sample areas was not a single seedling had taken root. when you have such fragile soils and you have such heavy grazing on them you really amplify and cause soil erosion to the point where recovery is going to be extremely difficult if not impossible. and. it was fun to actually started with my barber when i was probably ten years old he was a marine. who had fought in the battle of water canal salvado and storm world war two i heard the stories of his experiences of storing the beaches running out of supplies and. sword fighting with the japanese soldiers on the islands just for. they saw their supply ship be blown up by japanese aircraft to try to explain that feeling of of seeing their food and their source of self-defense just completely

destroyed from their eyes. i was doing some research on oil spills in general off the australian coast and that that story came back to me and i thought well his ship is still there and that the oil still aboard. there nearly four thousand world war two ship wrecks in the south pacific right now and over three hundred of those are oil tankers. it's no measures are taken on this these ships will collapse they will release their oil. one side or oil answers them or in a garment it'll be very difficult to remove it. the pacific's highest concentration of world war two wrecks can be found in the federated states of micronesia shook look room service forward anchorage for the japanese imperial fleet until an air attack by american forces sank sixty ships and more than two hundred planes the way

that the reefs are struggling around the world due to coral bleaching global warming overfishing and dynamite fishery added to those stresses a massive oil spill would just be the last nail in the coffin for these waves that were not able to regenerate. so i think that a war that we have. in the last century could still be destroying our future it's really pretty shocking. when it's tracking things that current warfare is set up this just might suppress met a natural scene of the victims of wolf a cowardly ass civilians and this is a real turnaround about a hundred at the status of last century when it was about through who is at ten percent of the victims who are civilians and about ninety percent media treatment there it's the opposite. and what's in christine

a pain observed particularly since world war two he is that sadly using more and more mean issues to get the same military effect the invasion of kuwait by iraq and the cleanup of kuwait after the ninety ninety one gulf war is a very good example of the problems and the challenges of cleaning up the battlefield. after the war there was an enormous amount of refuse from the battles that took place these were trucks tanks aircraft all sorts of ordnance a lot of it on explode and what happened was the allied troops came in and they basically picked up all this metal debris and piled it in giant piles the size of a football field in various parts of the kuwaiti desert and left it there was no real plan to get out of iraq. and so from time to time these piles go up in flames and from time to time they explode here and there and no one really knows what to do what to do with unexploded ordnance what we call us those in

a case like that. among the most enduring legacy use of modern warfare is unexploded ordnance are you x o the grenades shells and bombs that failed to detonate during that you act so remains on the battlefield long after the battle often hidden by vegetation or covered by soil. as weapons continue to grow more lethal casualties of war are no longer confined to combatants nor to loot your ration of armed conflict one example is the cluster bomb a hollow shell with rejects multiple smaller nations cole bombing is or bomb lives . up to a third of these bombers can fail to detonate on impact perceptively becoming landmines. again.

not all unexploded ordnance is accidental eighty two nations are contaminated with landmines landmine play to kill or maim fifteen to twenty thousand civilians per year in afghanistan there are ten to twelve landmine casualties each day the issue of landmines is a critical one in afghanistan and there are two ways you can tell if they are they are present the first is of course if the grass hasn't been grazed if the grass is tall and standing and there's no evidence that's been eaten there are probably landmines in the shepherds are keeping their animals away but the second when the local people find land mines they tend to paint rocks and they paint them red on one side and white on the other on the red side is where the land mines are located . ok. ok. the

problem is when you have a landslide or a flood which washes through a landmine area first of all the land mines are actually picked up and distributed across other areas and second the rocks become obviously mixed in general not so we've been in a situation before we were driving down a road we came across a creek bed where flashflood actually washed landmines across the road so it was a major security risk and we couldn't actually move the on the road until we got some mine clearance people to come in. don't touch them i sing these children and listen to them so it's part of an awareness program run by the british team didn't have a grid for their low cost and long jeopardy landmines were laid heavily by both sides during the cambodian vietnamese war today the un estimates that ten million mines remain in cambodian soil. i had occasion to visit phenomenon

a few years ago and it was probably the most depressing scene. that i've ever encountered. there were countless cambodian men with their legs blown off above the knee who were scooting through the dirt begging in the marketplace. and they were for the most part mine victims. war is not healthy for anybody the combatants or the people who are caught up in it recent studies in iraq and mortality come up with the range of excess mortality in the tens of thousands. children of particularly fond of the effects of poor in

a number of free states. one is the most disturbing studies city indicate see impact of war on children was a team of experts from have it which went to iraq in the wake of say ninety ninety one call for the study chain is to made it but the war and the sanctions that followed resulted in existence of fifty to seventy thousand iraqi children whose children were dying in latch numbers from simple infectious disease such as china for its color hepatitis it said and the reason for that was a deliberate decision that was taken in the nationally run war to destroy iraq's electricity generating capacity and without the electricity sanitation water purification its kind happens as children were crying of epidemics of infectious to say so. but. it would not take very long just

a matter of weeks for washington d.c. or new york city to become pretty unloveable and if we didn't have electricity for water purification if we didn't have gasoline for our sanitation trucks to remove the garbage we would be overrun by rats and other vermin our water would become contaminated we would develop cholera and dysentery and typhus we would have plague and we have forgotten all of this especially when we go out and destroy the infrastructure of other countries. faraway land. where human life is ruined my nature. of planet earth is scarcely preserved by the poor. lie hidden in the deep permafrost. and for those who deal with them.

are still much.