Off the hilly resort island of Bornholm, a tiny speck of Denmark that rises from the Baltic Sea between Sweden and Poland, the crew of the Danish trawler Soraya was catching cod one March morning. As the men hauled their fish on board, Theis Branick, 24, went beneath the net to open it. When the fish spilled out onto the deck, he found the net had also caught something else — a large, yellow-brown lump of solidified mustard gas from World War II.

"It was a huge piece, weighing about 15 kg, and with no traces of the metal casing," says Michael Jepsen, skipper of the Soraya. Aware of the danger and following established procedure, Jepsen alerted the military authorities on Bornholm, who boarded the trawler, inspected the poison and decided it should be tipped back into the sea in a designated dumping area. Branick, though, was in a bad way. "I was fine until I came into the warmth below deck," he says. "Then it started to itch and burn like hell on my back. I took off my clothes. The others said, 'What's that on your back?' It was a red spot the size of a child's fist."

Fishing — Branick's job since he was 16 — has long been regarded as one of the world's most dangerous occupations. Some 24,000 fishermen around the world die each year, and millions more are injured in weather- and equipment-related accidents. In the Baltic, though, there is another hazard — about 35,000 tons of chemical munitions sunk by the Russians near Bornholm and the Swedish island of Gotland, west of Latvia, in the late 1940s. More — sealed on German warships — was sunk by Britain and the U.S. in the deep waters of the Skagerrak, an arm of the North Sea, and in the Norwegian Sea. Over time, some of the weapons in the relatively shallow Baltic — blister agents (such as sulfur mustard), tear gas and other chemical irritants once the property of Nazi Germany — have lost their casings, leached into the sea and been caught in fishing nets.

"In the Baltic," says Commander K.M. Jorgensen of the Danish navy in Bornholm, "the shells were dumped over the rails of Russian ships. In the Skagerrak, they were sunk inside ships that are now lying in 500 to 700 m of water." The Helsinki Commission, which works to protect the Baltic marine environment, has said the toxins should be left on the seabed. That is the general consensus. "It has been there for so long that it poses the least hazard where it is," says biologist Henning Karup of Denmark's Environmental Protection Agency. Only a few fishermen have been treated for gas-related injuries since the 1960s, and the long-term environmental impact is unclear.

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nginx/1.14.0 (Ubuntu) A Greenpeace Denmark spokesman, Jacob Hartmann, acknowledges that trying to raise the chemicals "might pose new and even worse problems," but says: "It is not an easy issue, and referring to a 1994 report by the Helsinki Commission isn't good enough. We need updated information on the state and location of the materials." But there are no plans for a new survey, funds are tight and neighboring countries accuse each other of not sharing information.

The Ecology and Foreign Affairs committees of Russia's State Duma held joint hearings on weapons in April 2002, then recommended a program of evaluation, monitoring and forecasting. "We keep working on the issue," maintains Vladimir Mandrygin, chief of staff of the Ecology committee. "However, not all our Baltic neighbors are supportive; they would rather not talk about it. Russian scientists have been offering various projects for handling the issue, but there is no financing." As well as the potential harm to fishermen, says the panel's chairman, Vladimir Grachev, "danger is involved in laying gas pipes and communication cables on the sea shelf."

Branick was lucky. "I only got hit by the water that had been in contact with the gas. If I had touched the gas itself, I can't imagine what it would have been like." Like their governments, Baltic fishermen are learning to live with the danger.

• MARYANN BIRD
• The toxic legacy of munitions dumping in the Baltic Sea