The U.S. stockpile, built over generations, was shocking in scale: Cluster bombs and land mines filled with nerve agent and artillery shells that could blanket forests with a blistering mustard fog. U.S. destroys the last of its chemical weapons arsenal:
Large cylindrical containers that prevent any leakage from escaping into the atmosphere are used to move chemical weapons from storage bunkers to processing facilities.PUEBLO, Colo. — 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.
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.U.S.
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% over budget.
The immense U.S. 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. 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.
“There were a lot of people asking questions about what would come out of the stack, and we weren’t getting any answers,” he said. “We had to figure it out as we went,” said Walton Levi, a chemical engineer at the Pueblo depot, who started working in the field after college in 1987 and now plans to retire once the last round is destroyed.
The process is similar at the Blue Grass depot. Liquid nerve agents drained from those warheads are mixed with water and caustic soda and then heated and stirred. The resultant liquid, called hydrolysate, is trucked to a facility outside Port Arthur, Texas, where it is incinerated.
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