Published:February 19, 2010 10:45pm

Beleaguered U.S. to blow up its chemical stockpiles
versions of this story has appeaered in papers around the country

Jeffery McMurry
Associated Press

Under the gun to destroy the U.S. chemical weapons stockpile — and now all but certain to miss their deadline — Army officials have a plan to hasten the process:Blow some of them up.


The Army would use explosives to destroy some of the Cold War-era weapons, which contain some of the nastiest compounds ever made, in two communities in Kentucky and Colorado that fought down another combustion-based plan years ago.
Some who live near the two installations worry it’s a face-saving measure, driven by pressure from U.S. adversaries, that puts the safety of citizens below the politics of diplomacy and won’t help the U.S. meet an already-blown deadline.


The residents’ sensitivity is understandable.
A concrete guard tower with dark windows looms over a double row of fences deep inside the Army’s Pueblo Chemical Depot some 120 miles south of Denver, and a sign in red letters warns, “Use of deadly force authorized.”
Inside bunkers, locked behind the fences, the slender gray shells are stacked on pallets or stored in boxes.

Though many of the shells are more than 50 years old, they look new. The bunkers, called igloos, are made of 12- to 18-inch-thick reinforced concrete covered with a deep mound of earth.
Only 500 to 1,000 of the weapons are believed to be leaking or in need of immediate attention.

Still, the Army wants to use explosives to destroy all 125,000 of them.
“I’m not in favor of that,” said Marcello Soto, a retired depot worker who lives in Avondale, just south of the Pueblo depot. He worries the chemicals “would get up in the atmosphere or the air, and do some damage.”
Environmentalists who years ago successfully blocked a plan to burn weapons containing mustard agent at the Pueblo depot and another in Richmond, say blowing up some of the weapons in a detonation chamber would be worse than burning them.

They argue the plan violates the Army’s promise to dispose of the mustard agent at the two sites by neutralizing it — a process that involves mixing it with water and either bacteria or a combination of fuel and superheated air — and taking it to a hazardous waste dump.

That takes longer than simply destroying the weapons by explosion.


“It’s taking a bad technology we fought for a decade and a half to get them to abandon here and telling us now they want to put in something worse,” said Ross Vincent of the Sierra Club in Colorado.
In Richmond, word about the plan to use explosives hasn’t generated nearly the reaction as when the Army pushed for incineration some 25 years ago.

Even some residents who were active then hadn’t heard of the Army’s latest proposal.


“It’s so scary — just the unknown,” said Elise Melrood, an art teacher who lives about four miles from Blue Grass Army Depot. “I’m not sure I’d trust what is going to happen when they do this.”

Richmond has far fewer chemical weapons than Pueblo but a wider variety, including the deadly nerve gases sarin and VX. Of the 15,500 mustard rounds housed at the Kentucky depot, as many as 9,300 could be corroded and therefore considered a risk to workers if they leaked and required emergency repairs.
Craig Williams of the Berea-based Chemical Weapons Working Group said Friday that “explosions of any kind have never been on the table.”

"This is not a technology that I would have chosen for this job,” he said. “However, if using it significantly reduces the risk to the work-force, we need to give it serious consideration."

Exploding the weapons would require a federal assessment of the potential environmental impact of the operations, Williams said, adding that the state of Kentucky would then have to issue a permit.

The community still needs a fuller assessment by military of how many potential problem rounds there are, Williams said. And more data is needed on the explosion processes used in Europe and planned for use at chemical weapons facilities in Alabama and Utah, he said.

"We've got some time to look at this," he said.

Chemical weapons have horrified the world since they blinded and crippled thousands of soldiers in World War I. Mustard gas can disable an opposing army by causing severe, painful but nonfatal blistering. It can also cause cancer, and even low levels of exposure may threaten workers and the public.
Scientists developed even deadlier chemical bombs during and after World War II. All of them were supposed to have been destroyed in the U.S. by 1994 under a directive from Congress.

In 1997, the Chemical Weapons Convention enacted an international deadline of 2012. The U.S. now acknowledges it will certainly miss that too.
There were once nine U.S. chemical stockpiles.

Three have been eliminated through incineration or neutralization. Four incinerators remain active, which means 90 percent of the American arsenal is either gone or being destroyed.