Why Are Baltic Fishermen Still Catching Mustard Gas?

After the Second World War, the Allies dumped around 40,000 tonnes of captured German chemical munitions into the Baltic Sea, mostly east of Bornholm and south-east of Gotland. Eighty years later, fishermen are still hauling up corroded shells and hard, brittle lumps of mustard gas in their nets. This documentary covers where the dumpsites are, why ships scattered munitions long before they reached them, and why thickened mustard gas survives decades in cold seawater with a core that stays fully active. We go through HELCOM and Danish incident records, from the 1991 peak to the 2003 spike, and why falling numbers reflect fewer boats rather than fewer weapons. Then we follow the new risk: offshore wind farms, power cables and pipelines moving into the same seabed. We look at the survey work around Bornholm, the Nord Stream blasts inside the largest dump area, and what happened at Beaufort's Dyke in 1995, when a gas pipeline near Britain's biggest munitions dump was followed by thousands of phosphorus bombs washing ashore. The weapons have been mapped. They have not been removed. 1. HELCOM – Sea-Dumped Chemical Munitions 2. HELCOM – Report on Chemical Munitions Dumped in the Baltic Sea 3. HELCOM – 25 incidents reported in 2003 4. HELCOM – Catches of chemical munitions remain low (2005) 5. CHEMSEA – Evaluation of the dumped munitions problem (Deep-Sea Research II) 6. ScienceBlog – Baltic chemical munitions and fishermen guidance 7. Robin des Bois – Nord Stream and old chemical munitions 8. Wikipedia – Submerged munitions (Thorsen account; Danish incentive data) 9. Wikipedia – Mustard gas (Baltic lumps) 10. Southeast Missourian/AP – Dumped chemical weapons still haunt Baltic (2003) 11. GEOMAR – Managing legacy munitions in the Baltic (MUNI-RISK, 2025) 12. Interreg Baltic – 10 years of munitions cooperation 13. UN SDG – Polish submission on sea-dumped chemical weapons 14. Wikipedia – Beaufort's Dyke 15. Countryfile – Beaufort's Dyke 16. Irish Times – Beaufort Dyke reveals its deadly secrets (1997) #BalticSea #MustardGas #ChemicalWeapons #WW2History #Bornholm #Documentary #Fishermen #HELCOM #OffshoreWind #SeaDumpedMunitions #HiddenHistory #EnvironmentalHistory