Pentagon Looks to Destroy 90% of Chemical Stockpile by Treaty Deadline
Wednesday, May 20, 2009

The U.S. Defense Department hopes to eliminate 90 percent of its stockpile of chemical weapons by 2012, the year designated by an international treaty for full disposal of the arsenal, Defense Environment Alert reported last week (see GSN, May 15).

That percentage would seem to cover demilitarization operations that are completed or under way at seven U.S. chemical weapons storage sites.

Left over would be the Blue Grass Army Depot in Kentucky and the Pueblo Chemical Depot in Colorado, where chemical neutralization plants are not yet finished. Disposal work is now expected to be completed in 2020 at Pueblo and three years later at Blue Grass.

The Chemical Weapons Convention requires the U.S. stockpile, which stood at nearly 30,000 tons of warfare materials such as mustard blister agent and sarin nerve agent when the pact entered into force in 1997, to be eliminated by April 2012. Defense officials have acknowledged they cannot meet that schedule, and are now aiming at a 2017 deadline set by Congress.

The Pentagon budget proposal for the next fiscal year includes $550.4 million for preparation of the Colorado and Kentucky plants, a $250 million hike from the anticipated funding request. The extra money is intended to help "complete destruction of the remaining 10 percent of the U.S. chemical stockpile as close to 2017 as possible," according to a Defense Department budget document released this month.

Reports have indicated that the Pentagon intends to request more than $1 billion in additional funding over the next few budgets for the two installations (see GSN, May 6).

The fiscal 2010 defense budget request includes $1.71 billion for the full range of chemical demilitarization activities, encompassing operations and maintenance, research and development and military construction. The federal budget year begins Oct. 1 (Defense Environment Alert/Chemical Weapons Working Group, May 12).