U.S. Army documents reveal that the military secretly dumped off the coastlines of 11 states the following chemical toxins --64 million pounds of nerve and mustard gas agents, 500 tons of radioactive waste, and 400,000 chemical-filled bombs, rockets, and land mines.

Six of the affected states are on the East Coast, two on the Gulf Coast, with Alaska, Hawaii and California comprising the rest of the dump sites. The dumping from ships took place from Word War I through the early 1970s and many of these sites are known to be just a few miles from major port cities.

Records are so incomplete -- and monitoring so nonexistent -- that many more dump sites probably exist than have been identified. "We do not claim to know where they all are," confessed William Brankowitz, a deputy project manager in the Army Chemical Materials Agency, speaking to a Virginia newspaper in 2005. "We don't want to be cavalier at all and say this stuff was exposed to water and is okay. It can last for a very, very long time."

By some estimates, a time-delayed release of these chemicals from corroding containers could last a century or more, with unpredictable effects on aquatic life and unknown health consequences for humans who consume that ocean life. Of course, since no one is monitoring these sites or even knows where they all are, we must wait for those consequences to show up before we can begin to measure what we are doing to ourselves.

This is a continuing theme of The Hundred Year Lie. Our attempts to hide behind willful negligence, denial and rationalization, or feigned ignorance about the harm we are inflicting on ourselves and the planet with the synthetics paradigm, will inevitably catch up to us.