The US is about to begin destroying its largest remaining stockpile of chemical-laden artillery shells, marking a milestone in the global campaign to eradicate a debilitating weapon that still creeps into modern wars.
The Pueblo Chemical Depot in southern Colorado plans to start neutralizing 2,358 tonnes of aging mustard agent next month as the US moves toward complying with a 1997 treaty banning all chemical weapons.
Pueblo has about 780,000 shells containing mustard agent, which can maim or kill, blistering skin, scarring eyes and inflaming airways. Mustard agent is a thick liquid, not a gas as commonly believed. It’s colorless and almost odorless, but got its name because impurities made early versions smell like mustard.
After nightmarish gas attacks in World War I, a 1925 treaty barred the use of chemical weapons, and the 1997 Chemical Weapons Convention set a 2012 deadline to eradicate them. Four nations that acknowledged having chemical weapons have missed the deadline: the US, Russia, Libya and Iraq.
The US amassed 27,760 tonnes of chemical weapons, both mustard agent and deadly nerve agent, much of it during the Cold War. The US Army described them as a deterrent, and the US never used them in combat.
Nearly 90 percent of the US stockpile has been eliminated at depots in six states and Johnson Atoll in the Pacific, mostly by incineration.
The US Army will use two methods for the Pueblo stockpile. Next month, the first of an estimated 1,400 shells that are leaking or otherwise damaged will be placed in a sealed steel chamber with walls up to 23cm thick. Explosives will tear open the shells and the mustard agent will be neutralized with chemicals.
The remaining hundreds of thousands of shells will be run through a partially automated US$4.5 billion plant starting in December or January next year. It will dismantle the shells, neutralize the mustard agent in water and then add bacteria to digest and convert the remaining chemicals. The end product can be disposed of at a hazardous waste dump.
The plant can process up to 60 shells per hour, but the explosion chamber can destroy only six shells per day.
Pueblo expects to finish the job in 2019 — more than 55 years after some of the shells there were produced.
Blue Grass is not expected to start destroying weapons until next year or 2017, and finishing in 2023, US Army spokeswoman Kathy DeWeese said. All told, it is expected to cost about US$11 billion to destroy the remaining US chemical weapons.
Officials who oversee the Pueblo operation insist it is safe, citing years of careful planning and training, as well as the remote location — an empty expanse of sagebrush about 24km from the city’s outskirts.
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