Defense Environment Alert

an exclusive biweekly report on defense policies for cleanup, compliance and pollution prevention

Vol. 16, No. 13

June 24, 2008

ARMY PLANS OVERHAUL OF BURIED CHEMICAL WEAPONS DISPOSAL

The Army is preparing a shakeup of the mechanisms used to respond to chemical weapons materials newly discovered at sites around the country that do not form part of documented stockpiles, under a new plan yet to be approved by the DOD hierarchy. The plan would adopt a reorganized funding structure and make the Army the lead agency responsible for many aspects of the military response to such discoveries.

These proposed changes come as some environmentalists are questioning the adequacy of the military's program for disposing of such newly unearthed chemical weapons. These weapons do not, narrowly speaking, form part of the country's declared list of either "stockpile" or "non-stockpile" chemical weapons materials subject to elimination timetables under the international Chemical Weapons Convention, according to an Army Chemical Materials Agency source. Some environmentalists feel that as a result, they have received insufficient attention until now.

In an interview with Defense Environment Alert, Deputy Assistant Secretary of the Army for Environment, Safety and Occupational Health Addison "Tad" Davis said that the goal is to modify and rationalize the system in anticipation of faster detection and destruction methods for addressing buried chemical munitions and related material, such as chemical weapons detector kits. New technology now being introduced by the Army should allow for faster detection and destruction of buried chemical munitions, Davis said.

Under the proposed Recovered Chemical Warfare Material Implementation Plan, DOD would assign the Army secretary as executive agent for the Chemical Warfare Material Response Program, DOD's program that addresses disposal of discovered chemical weapons material caches.

"We want to look a little further into the future," said Davis, adding that improved detection and mobile destruction technologies should increase the pace of munitions disposal.

According to Davis' staff, the plan would group the following functions: assessment of munitions with an unknown liquid fill; destruction of any munitions determined to contain chemical agent; support of explosives and munitions emergencies where presence of chemical agent is suspected; and sustainment of crews and equipment required to support chemical weapons material emergency responses and range clearance operations. Davis said this would group together emergency response functions used when chemical weapons materials are found for greater efficiency of response and simplification of the process.

These activities would be funded from a single source, but all other range clearance or munitions response activities, such as site investigations and feasibility studies, would remain funded by the existing applicable program funded by individual military services. Hence the service-specific remediation programs now in existence would remain, but would lose some of their functions to the new centrally funded response program.

An Army spokesman says in a written response to questions: "DOD believes combining all support functions under a single entity would allow for improvement." Davis acknowledges that, although chemical weapons responses receive high priority and are professionally handled by the Army, there is room for greater efficiency.

The spokesman says that the Army is the logical service to deal with recovered chemical weapons response, as it is already responsible for the majority of chemical weapons material sites, and possesses the most expertise for dealing with chemical weapons issues.

Davis said that new technologies should improve the search for buried weapons at sites suspected of containing chemical munitions, making wide area assessment more effective. Once weapons are discovered, the Army is keen to use its new "transportable detonation system" to process chemical shells more quickly than has previously been possible. The new system is "much more capable and sophisticated" than what has gone before, Davis said.

He said that the Army proposes to conduct "archival research" on all the suspected chemical weapons sites around the country, in order to whittle down the number of sites to be further investigated. Such research would examine former land uses through available records to determine the odds of chemical weapons material being buried there.

Some environmentalists question the Army's commitment to dealing with the hundreds of suspected burial sites around the country, and the dedication of funds by DOD to address such issues. While the destruction of known stockpiles has been dogged by delays and accusations of underfunding from activists and some lawmakers, the problem of buried weapons has garnered less attention (Defense Environment Alert, April 1, p3).

One source, with environmentalist group Global Green USA, questions whether the buried munitions have become the "poor relation" of the stockpile weapons. Another source, with activist group Chemical Weapons Working Group, concurs, and adds that the Army has so far not adequately estimated how much investigating and disposing of newly discovered munitions will cost.

Army sources concede that more resources go into the disposal of stockpiled weapons, but that is because the numbers of stockpiled weapons disposed of each year are much larger, they argue.

Strictly speaking, the Army CMA's "non-stockpile" disposal program only covers a narrow range of chemical weapons-related materials, defined by the Chemical Weapons Convention (CWC), the international treaty that governs chemical weapons disposal. Disposal of these materials is broadly on track, but activists argue that the wider issue of buried weapons needs to be more vigorously addressed.

The Global Green source asserts that the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers has been insufficiently proactive in seeking out buried weapons, citing the Spring Valley site in Washington DC, where chemical weapons were tested and buried on the former property of American University during World War I and subsequently discovered beneath homes in the 1990s.

The Spring Valley case has now received adequate funding due to its high profile nature, but in general the Corps has neither the funding nor the inclination to look harder for chemical weapons material at sites already identified as suspect, the source says. The Army Corps is responsible for conducting investigations of suspected burial sites on former DOD property.

Davis noted that the technology employed to dispose of chemical shells on-site in Spring Valley was radically more slow than the new mobile detonation system, which has been successfully employed in Hawaii. The Global Green source concedes that the lack of a fast way to dispose of chemical weapons material on-site may have been a deterrent to more energetic cleanup of such sites.

On the funding level devoted to suspected burial sites, Davis adopts a wait-and-see approach. He said that archival review must be completed first to determine the scale of the task before the Army, and funding levels could then be readdressed if necessary. Funding for discovery and disposal of buried chemical weapons material currently comes from an array of funding streams within DOD, complicating comparison with the budget for stockpile weapons destruction, Davis' staff says.