Weapons merchant ships

The following spring it became known that the United States army planned to ship thousands of tons of obsolete chemical weapons across the country from their mid-west bases to the Atlantic seaboard where they were to be loaded into elderly merchant ships which would then be scutded offshore. Local residents, the memory of the Dugway accident still fresh in their minds, quickly dubbed the cargo the ultimate hazardous freight , and were less than happy at the prospect of the weapons being dumped off their summer beaches. 

At the end of the war British sailors loaded twenty elderly merchant vessels with captured German gas shells, and sailed them into the Baltic. Off the coast of Norway they donned gas masks, placed explosive charges aboard, and then watched as, one by one, the ships exploded, taking tens of thousands of tons of gas to the seabed. From bases in Scotland, one hundred thousand tons of British gas weapons were taken out to sea and sunk. In the Far East American sailors sank captured Japanese weapons in the Pacific. Mustard gas stocks which had fallen to the advancing Russian armies were tossed into the Baltic in wooden crates while machine gunners opened fire and sent them to the bottom of the sea.1... 

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