With the push of a button and a spurt of steam, the US Army brought an end to years of legal wrangling on Saturday and began burning the first of millions of pounds of chemical weapons stored here, despite outcries from worried residents.
The first M-55 rocket, after it was drained of the deadly nerve agent sarin, was chopped up into eight pieces and roasted in a 593?C furnace, turning a Cold War relic into a pile of ash.
"This is absolutely a gorgeous day," said Michael B. Abrams, a spokesman for the Anniston Chemical Agent Disposal Facility.
"We're beginning the end of chemical weapons in Anniston," he said.
Many residents were less enthusiastic. For six years, since construction began on a giant, US$1 billion weapons incinerator, an alliance of local and national environmental groups has fought to block its use.
"We're very disappointed today," said David Christian, an Anniston architect who led protests.
"They're putting poisons in the air and we may not know for years what the effects will be," he said.
US Army officials have said the process is completely safe, but just to make sure, Alabama officials issued protective hoods to residents living near the incinerator, which just made many people feel worse.
Environmental groups in many places, including Anniston, have been pressing the US Army to find other ways to neutralize its stockpile of Cold War weapons of mass destruction. More than 660,000 chemical weapons, packed with chemicals like VX gas, mustard gas and sarin, are stored here, in concrete bunkers known as igloos.
The environment groups said the Anniston area, along the I-20 corridor between Atlanta and Birmingham, was too heavily populated for an incinerator. About 250,000 people live within a 48km radius of the plant, many more than in the other places the US Army has burned chemical weapons, like Tooele, Utah, and Johnston Atoll near Hawaii.
The US Army's response was that it more dangerous to keep the aging, corroding weapons than to burn them. Hundreds of mortar rounds and M-55 rockets in the igloos are leaking, US Army officials said.
In a last effort to derail the burning, protesters appealed to a federal judge in Washington to issue an injunction, saying that safety plans had not been completed.
But on Friday, Judge Thomas Penfield Jackson of US District Court ruled that there was no imminent harm and that the plant could begin destroying the weapons.
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