Aftermath: The Remnants of War Book

The Second Battle of El Alamein became known, courtesy of Winston Churchill, as "not the end...[nor] even the beginning of the end, but ...perhaps the end of the beginning". Writing fifty plus year later, in 1996, Donovan Webster reframes my view of "the end of the beginning". After finishing Aftermath, I see the Paris Peace Treaties as the earliest possible date for the end of the beginning, the beginning, that is, of the war on the environment that the World War I leave-behinds conduct effortlessly.

Donovan visits the forests near Verdun with French démineurs who disarm and dispose of unexploded shells and grenades left over from World War I. He sees the skeleton fragments of Germans left unburied after the Battle of Stalingrad and the radioactive "playground" in Nevada where physicists who never heard the term "budgetary constraint" conjured with ideas like injecting human guinea pigs with radiation. Agent Orange's effects on Viet Nam's children of the 90's and the minefields that keep on killing in Kuwait are grim stops on his disaster tour.

The Tooele Chemical Agent Disposal Facility had yet to begin disposing when Webster toured it. Happily, its supplies of sarin, VX and mustard agent had all been incinerated by 2012. And the product of the incineration? Shipped to another disposal facility, of course.