The Pentagon just won't give up the idea of moving chemical weapons from Colorado to Utah for destruction. Well, forget it.
Since 1994, federal law has prohibited moving these weapons across state lines. There's a good reason. Moving the stuff is more dangerous than destroying it on-site. That's why the Army decided in 1987 to dispose of its chemical weapons at its eight depots in the continental United States where they were stored.

That was the right policy then, and it's the right policy now.

One of those eight storage sites was the Deseret Chemical Depot near Tooele. It harbored 44 percent of the nation's arsenal of chemical weapons. But since 1996, the Army has burned about three-quarters of that stockpile in a $400 million high-tech incinerator. All of the nerve agent GB, also known as sarin, has been destroyed, as has the arsenal of VX, another nerve agent.

What remains is mustard munitions.

Throughout the process, the Army's critics have argued that chemical neutralization would be a safer disposal technology than burning. But burn the Army did, and much of the job is done.

For decades, Utahns bore the risk of storing these weapons, and now they have gritted their teeth as the nerve agents were burned, hoping that the Army was right and that no chemicals escaped the incinerator stack except at levels that do not endanger our health. Well, we've done our duty, and we will continue to do it as the Army destroys the mustard agents.

But that's enough. Utahns will not accept the shipment of additional weapons from other depots to this state for destruction.

The Pentagon has floated the idea of moving weapons from Colorado to Utah to speed up disposal. Defense officials are concerned that they cannot finish in Colorado by a 2017 treaty deadline, so they want to send some of the weapons to Utah.

This may be a pressure tactic to squeeze more funding out of Congress to pay for faster disposal in Colorado.

The brass reportedly understand that Congress is unlikely to repeal the law that bans interstate transportation of the weapons, and they knew what the reaction in Utah and other states would be to a suggestion that the weapons be moved.

So maybe we're playing to type, but the people of Utah will not accept receipt of more chemical weapons. And we don't take kindly to being played.