 "chemical weapons")
In a sealed room behind a gantlet of armed guards and three rows of high barbed wire at the Army’s Pueblo Chemical Depot in Colorado, a team of robotic arms was busily disassembling some of the last of the United States’ vast and ghastly stockpile of chemical weapons.
In went artillery shells filled with deadly mustard agent that the Army had been storing for more than 70 years. The bright yellow robots pierced, drained and washed each shell, then baked it at 1,500 degrees Fahrenheit. Out came inert and harmless scrap metal, falling off a conveyor belt into an ordinary brown dumpster with a resounding clank.
“That’s the sound of a chemical weapon dying,” said Kingston Reif, who spent years pushing for disarmament outside government and is now the deputy assistant secretary of defense for threat reduction and arms control. He smiled as another shell clanked into the dumpster.
The destruction of the stockpile has taken decades, and the Army says the work is just about finished. The depot near Pueblo destroyed its last weapon in June; the remaining handful at another depot in Kentucky will be destroyed in the next few days. And when they are gone, all of the world’s publicly declared chemical weapons will have been eliminated.
The American stockpile, built up over generations, was shocking in its scale: Cluster bombs and land mines filled with nerve agent. Artillery shells that could blanket whole forests with a blistering mustard fog. Tanks full of poison that could be loaded on jets and sprayed on targets below.
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They were a class of weapons deemed so inhumane that their use was condemned after World War I, but even so, the United States and other powers continued to develop and amass them. Some held deadlier versions of the chlorine and mustard agents made infamous in the trenches of the Western Front. Others held nerve agents developed later, like VX and Sarin, that are lethal even in tiny quantities.
The United States and the Soviet Union agreed in principle in 1989 to destroy their chemical weapons stockpiles, and when the Senate ratified the Chemical Weapons Convention in 1997, the United States and other signatories committed to getting rid of chemical weapons once and for all.
But destroying them has not been easy: They were built to be fired, not disassembled. The combination of explosives and poison makes them exceptionally dangerous to handle.
Defense Department officials once projected that the job could be done in a few years at a cost of about $1.4 billion. It is now wrapping up decades behind schedule, at a cost close to $42 billion —2,900 percent over budget.
But it’s done.
The immense American stockpile and the decades-long effort to dispose of it are both a monument to human folly and a testament to human potential, people involved say. The job took so long in part because citizens and lawmakers insisted that the work be done without endangering surrounding communities.
Late in June at the 15,000-acre Blue Grass depot, workers carefully pulled fiberglass shipping tubes holding Sarin-filled rockets out of earth-covered concrete storage bunkers and drove them to a series of buildings for processing.
Workers inside, wearing protective suits and gloves, X-rayed the tubes to see if the warheads inside were leaking, then sent them down a conveyor to meet their doom.
The public knew little about how vast and deadly the stockpile had grown until a snowy spring morning in 1968, when 5,600 sheep mysteriously died on land adjacent to an Army test site in Utah. Irene Kornelly, the chair of the citizens’ advisory commission that has overseen the process at Pueblo for 30 years, has kept track as nearly one million mustard shells were destroyed.
“The military didn’t know if they could trust the people, and the people didn’t know if they could trust the military,” she said. She looked around at the plant’s beige buildings and the empty concrete storage bunkers on the Colorado prairie beyond. Nearby, a crowd of workers with emergency gas masks slung on their hips gathered to celebrate. Ms. Kornelly smiled as she took it all in. The process had been smooth, safe, and so plodding, she said, that many residents of the region had forgotten it was going on.
“Most people today don’t have a clue that this all happened — they never had to worry about it,” she said. She paused, then added, “And I think that’s just as well.”
©2023 The New York Times News Service
