[ The world banned chemical weapons in 1997. Here’s why it took
so long for the US to eliminate its arsenal.]
[[link removed]]

2023, THE US FINALLY DESTROYED ITS CHEMICAL WEAPONS  
[[link removed]]


 

Jen Kirby
September 30, 2023
VOX
[[link removed]]


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[[link removed]]
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_ The world banned chemical weapons in 1997. Here’s why it took so
long for the US to eliminate its arsenal. _

, Niv Bavarsky for Vox

 

heThe United States’s Chemical Warfare Service readied hundreds of
thousands of mortar shells and artillery rounds filled with mustard
gas [[link removed]] in
the 1940s. During the Cold War, even more lethal chemical weapons
followed: artillery and rockets filled with VX and GB, better known as
Sarin, nerve agents that, with as little as a few drops, can be
deadly.

These munitions would make up the United States’s chemical weapons
arsenal, one of the biggest in the world.

It’s all gone now. This summer, on July 7, at the Blue Grass
Chemical Agent-Destruction Pilot Plant in Kentucky, the last M55
rocket, filled with GB, was dismantled
[[link removed]]. With
it went the entirety of the US’s declared chemical munitions
stockpile.

The United States achieved this just shy of its September 30 deadline
[[link removed]]
under the Chemical Weapons Convention
[[link removed]] (CWC), the 1997
international treaty that bans the production, use, and stockpiling of
these weapons. The US was the last country
[[link removed].]
party to the treaty to eliminate its declared chemical weapons
stockpile, destroying the kinds of agents and munitions once hoarded
for use on the battlefield.

The world still has chemical weapons — in countries that never
signed the treaty, scattered in old war zones, and likely in nations
that have broken their treaty promises
[[link removed]].

But the US certification is still a huge achievement for America, and
for the world.

The US had some 30,000 tons of chemical warfare agents at the time of
the CWC ratification. The US learned quickly that agreeing to
eliminate chemical weapons was one thing. Actually doing so was far
more complex. “These are weapons that were built to be used, not
destroyed,” said Sonia Ben Ouagrham-Gormley, an expert in weapons
programs and an associate professor at George Mason University.

That treaty effort stretched more than 25 years, though the US had
grappled with how to dismantle its arsenal safely and effectively even
before that. The US wasn’t alone in needing extensions under the CWC
[[link removed]],
but the American experience was uniquely lengthy and complicated.

Local, state, and federal lawmakers all got involved, as did
environmental and community activists who questioned and challenged
how the US Army planned to destroy toxic agents in the places where
they and their families lived. It was akin to a “not in my
backyard” movement with something close to existential stakes. These
organizers used their protests to create new policies and influence
the technology and methods used to destroy these munitions. Early
opponents became community watchdogs for a global agreement so that
the treaty’s mission — the safe elimination of an entire class of
weapons — reflected the desires of the public it was intended to
protect.

These debates and delays weren’t exactly predicted when countries
signed on to the Chemical Weapons Convention, but they helped reveal
one of the biggest challenges of disarmament: The decision to produce
weapons of mass destruction is not easily unraveled or undone.
Chemical munitions were designed to kill, not to be disassembled and
decontaminated. It took decades to eliminate America’s chemical
weapons arsenal because, as dangerous as these weapons are to make and
to store, they are all that much harder to destroy.

CraigCraig Williams remembers the US Army hosting members of the local
community for a meeting in February 1984 on the grounds of the Blue
Grass Army Depot in Richmond, Kentucky. About 300 people showed up.
“The Army got up,” Williams, the co-chair of the Kentucky
Citizens’ Advisory Commission, recalled, “and they explained that
there were chemical weapons stored on the facility’s grounds, and
they planned to dispose of them by incinerating them. And did anybody
have any questions?”

Many people had many, many questions, Williams said. For good reason.
Blue Grass was one of nine chemical weapons depots
[[link removed]]
maintained by the United States (there were eight within the
continental US and one on Johnston Atoll in the Pacific). Communities
like Williams’s knew of these military facilities, but what was
being stored in those lumps on the landscape wasn’t widely
advertised. Many found out about the chemical weapons close to their
neighborhoods when the Army said it wanted to destroy them.

Williams had just collided with the start of the latest, maybe most
contentious, chapter of the US’s efforts to maintain its chemical
weapons stockpile, one that began nearly a decade before the CWC even
opened up for signatures
[[link removed].].

The United States used chemical weapons in World War I
[[link removed].],
though they were foreign-made munitions from its allies. That use of
poisonous gas on European battlefields helped prompt countries to
create the Geneva Protocol of 1925
[[link removed]], which
banned poisonous gasses and biological agents in war. The US did not
sign on
[[link removed].]
at the time and continued researching and developing chemical weapons
[[link removed].],
although it wasn’t a huge priority for the military until World War
II. Washington did not deploy chemical munitions in World War II,
though it “had supplies of agents and equipment with which they
could have waged warfare energetically if necessary,” according to
_The Chemical Warfare Service: From Laboratory to Field_
[[link removed]].

Most of those World War II-era weapons were blister agents, like
mustard, which can cause burns or blisters, damaging the eyes or
lungs; they were intended to slow enemy troop movements. During the
Cold War, the US began experimenting with nerve agents
[[link removed].]
in rockets and artillery, things like GB that, when released, acted
fast and were almost assuredly lethal
[[link removed]].

Both the US and the then-Soviet Union ultimately built huge chemical
stockpiles, each with, at points, an estimated 30,000 to 40,000 tons
of chemical agents.

By the early 1960s, though, these weapons started to fall out of favor
in the US. America still felt it necessary to have chemical weapons in
case the USSR used them, but the Cold War emphasis was on America’s
nuclear arsenal. There were also some public mishaps
[[link removed]]
— like an alleged open-air VX test in Utah
[[link removed]]
that killed or injured thousands of sheep — and public anger over
the use of herbicides like Agent Orange
[[link removed]]
during the Vietnam War, which created lasting harm and health issues
for both US veterans and civilians in Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia
[[link removed]].

These forces helped push Congress [[link removed]] to
pressure the Nixon administration to review the entirety of the US
biological and chemical weapons programs. In 1969, Nixon renounced
biological weapons — eventually leading to an international treaty
banning
[[link removed]]
those — and the US reiterated a no-first-use policy for lethal and
incapacitating chemicals
[[link removed]]
(meaning, Washington would only use them if Moscow did first) and
halted the production of new chemical weapons
[[link removed]].

Yet it wasn’t as simple as hitting pause. All weapons have a shelf
life, and chemical munitions are no exception. They age, they degrade,
they can leak. You can’t just put them in storage and forget about
them. Maintaining an adequate arsenal also requires disposing of its
faulty components.

The solution was mostly the sea. In the late 1960s, the US undertook
Operation CHASE (“Cut Holes and Sink ’Em”)
[[link removed](50%20USC%201521).].
It is what it sounds like: Load a bunch of chemical weapons or
ammunition on an old ship and sink it all. The other options, though,
were worse: burning chemical weapons
[[link removed]]
in the open air or burying them on land.

These operations also started to come under scrutiny amid a growing
environmental movement. In the 1970s, Congress more tightly regulated
the disposal of chemical weapons, forcing health and safety reviews,
and eventually outlawing the sea dumps
[[link removed](PL,dumping%20done%20during%20Operation%20CHASE.].
This solved one problem but not the other: a bunch of old, crumbling
chemical weapons, sitting in storage.

Which was the Army’s dilemma when it showed up near Williams’s
hometown. By that point, in the 1980s, the Pentagon
[[link removed]]
said the US stockpile was barely usable. The munitions didn’t work
with the current-day launchers. It was all a bunch of crap, albeit
very, very dangerous
[[link removed]]
crap that needed to be closely monitored.

The military’s plan was to replace the old stocks with a
“binary” chemical munition. It sold these newer weapons as a more
stable, “safer” version because instead of filling up an artillery
shell with a lethal toxin, these munitions separated the chemical
compounds so that they became a deadly nerve agent only after being
fired, making them easier to transport, store, and, if necessary, get
rid of.

Congress was less convinced. The US had stopped producing new chemical
weapons and now indicated it wanted a worldwide ban
[[link removed]].
The Pentagon proposed upgrading an arsenal the US had by now promised
it would never use. [[link removed]]

Lawmakers found a kind of compromise: For every new binary weapon the
military wanted, it would have to get rid of one old munition first.

TheThe Army had already begun piloting methods of destroying chemical
weapons
[[link removed].]
at this point. One was incineration, which uses very, very high
temperatures to destroy the chemical agent (and also treat the
munition). The Army began employing
[[link removed]]
on a small scale starting in the 1970s.

Now the Army planned to scale up incineration. And when the military
told people who lived near these chemical depots what they proposed to
do, a lot of people in those communities thought some version of:
You’re going to do what_ _with what? Where?

Williams felt the Army didn’t have any satisfactory answers when he
and others pressed it on the mechanics of incineration. “Simple
things like, you know: What comes out of the stack? How does the
technology work?” Williams recalled. “And they were like, well,
just, you know, ‘Trust us.’”

This sense of distrust and skepticism existed elsewhere, too, in
addition to the fear that the Army wasn’t listening to their
concerns about possible pollution or health effects.

Rufus Kinney, an activist in Alabama, joined protests, including a
ribbon-burning with civil rights leaders at the chemical depot site in
Anniston, Alabama. As Kinney noted, the depot was near a predominantly
Black neighborhood that had been poisoned for decades by Monsanto
[[link removed]];
why would this time be different? In Pueblo, Colorado, home to another
depot, Irene Kornelly, chair of the Colorado Citizens’ Advisory
Commission, recalled how farmers and ranchers worried about the
possibility of tainted food supplies.

And it made some sense: Incineration called to mind industrial
processes with smelly stacks puffing out dark smoke. The process to
destroy chemical weapons was not the same as “take trash from the
local community and throw it in and burn it up,” said Michael
Greenberg, a professor emeritus at Rutgers and a member of the
National Research Council Committees that consulted on the destruction
of the US chemical weapons stockpile.

The incinerators expose toxic agents to very, very, very high
temperatures [[link removed]], and
through a series of steps, the end product becomes harmless.
Incineration was the Army’s preferred method of disposal. They
argued it could be tightly controlled and regulated and prevented the
possibility of any chemical agent re-forming. The process included
safeguards to protect workers and communities, such as stringent
monitoring protocols and airflow systems
[[link removed]] that prevented
chemicals from being released.

But many activists said they didn’t feel as though their concerns
_were _adequately addressed: What if something went wrong in the
process? The military may be monitoring what’s being released, but
how confident should affected communities be that everything was being
detected?

The Army essentially told people, “‘We’re the technical experts
so you need to follow our direction,’” said Robert Futrell,
professor of sociology at the University of Nevada-Las Vegas, who has
researched the destruction of chemical weapons and grew up near the
Blue Grass depot. “But there’s a question that I think the
citizens were raising as well: ‘You might be the technical experts,
but are you asking all the right questions?’”

AsAs this was unfolding at home, the United States was getting out of
the chemical weapons game altogether at the international level. The
US and the USSR negotiated an arms control agreement on chemical
weapons, signed in 1990,
[[link removed]] in which they
agreed to make no new weapons and drastically reduce their stockpiles
by 2002.

This brought momentum to a global treaty. The CWC opened for
signatures in 1993
[[link removed].].
It prohibited the production, development, and use of chemical
weapons, and notably included a robust verification and inspection
regime. The US and Russia [[link removed]] both signed.
More than 190 states are now party to the treaty.

The CWC went into force in 1997. It was a huge global accomplishment,
the outlawing of an entire class of weapons, one considered uniquely
dangerous and horrific. Unlike the Biological Weapons Conventio
[[link removed]]n
before it, countries agreed to robust verification metrics, such as
on-site inspections, including of industry, to prevent any materials
from being repurposed for weapons use.

A major part of the CWC involved eliminating those declared arsenals.
Countries came forward to say how many chemical munitions
[[link removed]] or bulk agents they
possessed. The CWC set the initial deadline for destruction for all
declared stockpiles by 2007, though multiple countries got extensions,
most notably the US, which eventually received this 2023 deadline
[[link removed]].
Only a handful of states
[[link removed]] declared
their stockpiles when they joined the CWC: Albania, India
[[link removed]], Libya, Syria, Iraq, an anonymous state
that is widely believed to be South Korea, and the US and Russia.

But it was really all about Russia and the US, said Al Mauroni,
director of the US Air Force Center for Strategic Deterrence Studies,
who spent decades in the Pentagon working on chemical weapons issues.
Other countries had much smaller arsenals; India
[[link removed]], for example, had
about a thousand metric tons of sulfur mustard; Albania, the first
state to destroy its stockpile
[[link removed].],
had about 16 metric tons — still an order of magnitude smaller than
either of the two superpowers.

“There was a subtext to the treaty, very much to say the reason
we’re having this discussion is because Russia and the United States
have really big chemical weapons stockpiles,” Mauroni said.

As the world moved toward banning chemical weapons in the 1990s, US
activists also started to see their fight in more international terms.
In 1990, in Kentucky, Williams helped organize a gathering of leaders
from community leaders tied to the chemical weapons depots around the
country and from other nations about to undertake their own
destruction processes, including Russia.

They formed the Chemical Weapons Working Group (CWWG). Together they
developed a citizens’ accord on chemical weapons destruction. “We
were collectively trying to protect communities all over the place
where this material was stored and where they planned on
incinerating,” Williams said.

That accord, Williams said, marked “the transition from ‘not in my
backyard’ to ‘not on planet Earth.’”

The Chemical Weapons Working Group was adamantly opposed to the
Army’s method of incineration, but they wanted the weapons gone,
too, so they had to figure out what would work. They raised funds to
hire experts to study alternatives. They came back with their own
plans and proposals. They pursued lawsuits. They lobbied lawmakers.

“The pushback was not just pushback,” said Ben Ouagrham-Gormley.
“It meant creating committees with localities to discuss the
different technologies, investing time and money in investigating
different technologies, and also looking at the environmental impact
of the technologies.”

“All that took several years and pushed the deadline further because
without a clear design or clear acceptance of a certain technology by
the localities, then there was no way to start the destruction.”

A few things happened as a result. The activists became enough of a
force that the Army realized that if it wanted to destroy the weapons,
it needed communities on its side, not as antagonists. The Army got
better at public relations. It began holding more public hearings
where Army representatives explained their approach in more detail. It
gave money to local communities for additional safety precautions: gas
masks and radios, in case something went wrong. They installed sirens,
trained local hospital staff, and added safety measures and protocols.

The Army “put a lot of effort into making sure that the states felt
comfortable, that they would be part of the management of an incident
if something were to go wrong, which never happened,” Mauroni said.

Yet the Army had moved ahead with construction for an incinerator at
Tooele, Utah [[link removed]],
where a huge chunk of the US’s chemical weapons arsenal was stored.
The plant began burning weapons via incineration in 1996.
[[link removed]]

With Tooele up and running, the Army began planning construction at
other facilities. Activists and environmentalists in those communities
did not give up, and continued to fight, threaten lawsuits, and lobby
lawmakers. In 1996, Congress created the Assembled Chemical Weapons
Assessment (ACWA
[[link removed].])
program, which required the identification and testing of at least two
alternative ways to destroy chemical weapon. The activists had finally
prevailed.

NeutralizationNeutralization became the chosen alternative process.
This wasn’t a new technology, exactly; the Army had also tested this
process in the past to destroy chemical weapons,
[[link removed].]
just never scaled it up because the military preferred incineration.

But activists saw this as a safer, more sound alternative. With
neutralization, the munitions are disassembled, with the explosive and
the chemical agent removed. The metal in the munition is blasted with
very high heat to make sure all the chemical agent is eliminated, and
then it’s recycled — into railroad tracks or car parts.

The chemical agent, meanwhile, goes through a bunch of tanks, where
it’s heated, agitated for several hours, and then gets a dose of
sodium hydroxide, which triggers a chemical reaction that turns the
lethal agent into a non-deadly one. That mixture is sampled — just
to make sure it’s all okay — and then it goes through a
biotreatment process; that is, a bunch of microbes eat up any leftover
compounds.

It took a while to get there, though. ACWA studied new technologies
and tested them, and it also got other stakeholders involved: local
government, public health authorities, and the community. “Now
you’ve got to build a whole facility that can manage all the
chemicals, test it, and then get it into operations, and that took a
lot longer than anybody had intended,” Marouni said.

Two sites — in Pueblo, Colorado, and Blue Grass, in Kentucky —
piloted the neutralization process to destroy their stockpiles of
chemical weapons. They are the same two sites that finally disposed of
all their weapons this summer.

These local activists achieved an alternative method to destroy
chemical weapons. But depending on who you ask, this was either an
incredible accomplishment by passionate communities or a long,
drawn-out roadblock — and then there is the complicated, muddy
middle.

“That’s why it took such a long time,” Greenberg said of the
destruction process. “And you know what? Both sides were right. And
both sides were wrong.”

The military favored incineration as its preferred method and pointed
out that they executed it safely in all of the sites where it
happened. (Though there were scares
[[link removed]]
along the way.) It remains an accepted method for chemical weapons
destruction under the CWC
[[link removed]]. About 90
percent of the nation’s chemical weapons stockpile was destroyed by
about 2012
[[link removed]],
primarily through incineration, though that last 10 percent
[[link removed]],
destroyed largely through neutralization at Pueblo and Blue Grass,
took another decade.

But activists, and many experts, see the value in the community
pushback. For one, the chemical weapons activists brought public and
government attention to such a sensitive issue. Many of the early
antagonists to the chemical weapons destruction plans, like Williams,
became the leaders of the citizen advisory commissions that served as
the main way for depot staff, officials, and citizens to share
information on the destruction processes.

“We wanted to get rid of the weapons,” Williams said. “We just
wanted to do it in a way that prioritized public health and
environmental protection and that involved the input of the
communities impacted. That was our mission. We didn’t waiver from
that.”

By forcing the United States to seek out alternatives, these activists
helped influence the way the world destroys chemical weapons.
Neutralization is “much more controllable, and doesn’t release
anything to the atmosphere,” said Paul Walker, vice chair of the
Arms Control Association and coordinator of the CWC Coalition. It’s
also more nimble, and mobile. The US deployed a version of
neutralization technology as part of the international effort to
destroy Syria’s stockpile of chemical weapons in 2014, which took
place on ships at sea. “Not only did they change the process of
participation, and that moved all the way out to shaping international
treaties, they also changed technology,” Futrell said.

For many environmentalists and activists, concerns about incineration
never went away. Some activists who live in communities where
incineration took place are still frustrated, though proud they helped
achieve an alternative elsewhere. “I’m grateful the chemical
weapons are gone,” said Cindy King, an activist near the Tooele,
Utah facility that incinerated weapons. “But at what expense? Did
they have to be gone the way they did?”

Overall, the chemical weapons destruction process in the US was
extraordinarily safe, which was never guaranteed. That there have been
no accidents, no leaks, no casualties in the multi-decade process is
remarkable. “Our safety profile in this industrial, very toxic area
is equal to a banking system,” said Michael Abaie, a top Pentagon
official involved in the Program Executive Office for Assembled
Chemical Weapons Alternatives. “Wrap your brain around that.”

o“No munitions have ever been designed to be taken apart,” Abaie
said. “That was one of the biggest challenges that we ever took
on.”

When the military made these weapons decades ago, their concern
focused on how they might work on the battlefield, what they might do
to the enemy, and what their existence could prevent the enemy from
doing to us. No one thought of what it might take to get rid of them.
“It was an extraordinarily dangerous and complicated effort, and we
saw it through to the end,” said Andy Weber, senior fellow at the
Council on Strategic Risks and a former Pentagon official overseeing
chemical and biological risks.

In hindsight, the CWC’s initial destruction timeline was very
ambitious, set by a bunch of diplomats who maybe didn’t fully
understand what it would take. But this is what the spirit of
disarmament is about, says Alexander Ghionis, research fellow in
chemical and biological security at the University of Sussex.
“You’ve got to set ambitious goals when the atmosphere is good.
And diplomacy was moving in the right direction.”

The necessary requests for the US extensions were done in consultation
and approved by the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical
Weapons (OPCW), the group that oversees and implements the CWC.
Inspectors were on site at the chemical depots, observing the
destruction of every single munition — via cameras, of course.

A lot of this happened because the CWC is one of a kind: a
near-universal disarmament treaty that has real heft behind it. The
OPCW, which today has an estimated 2023 budget of around $80 million
[[link removed]]
and some 500 staff members
[[link removed]], was created to
oversee implementation and inspections. It also bans specific
substances, which makes it harder to circumvent. “Other than the
Non-Proliferation Treaty, it’s the only one that is still being
actively implemented worldwide from a verification [standpoint] and
from otherwise ensuring people meet their obligations,” said John
Gilbert, a retired US Air Force colonel and senior science fellow with
the Center for Arms Control and Non-Proliferation’s Scientists
Working Group.

Now that the declared weapons stockpiles are gone, the goal is to make
sure they don’t come back. That means keeping up with inspections
and any scientific developments that could be used for chemical
weapons. And the success of the CWC so far does not make it foolproof.

Some countries are in violation of the treaty. Syria used
[[link removed]]
chemical weapons against its civilians in its civil war, and many
experts and officials suspect the country has maintained some portion
of its arsenal. Russia destroyed its 40,000-ton arsenal in 2017 under
OPCW supervision, but it has used chemical agents in assassinations
— for example, the nerve agent Novichok was employed in an attack on
ex-Russian spy Sergei Skripal in 2018
[[link removed]].
At the time, it was not a banned substance under the CWC, but it
became one in 2019
[[link removed].],
over Russia’s initial objections.

And there are still countries that are outside the CWC, including
Israel [[link removed]] and Egypt. North Korea
[[link removed]] is not a signatory to the treaty,
and it definitely has chemical weapons
[[link removed]]; it is
credibly believed to have used VX in an assassination in 2017.
[[link removed]]

The world is also still dotted with remnants of old and abandoned
chemical weapons. The OPCW is working with China
[[link removed]] and Japan to clean up old stockpiles
[[link removed]]
left behind after World War II. A report
[[link removed]] from the 1990s assessed
that there were chemical weapons buried in 215 sites in at least 33
states in the US. The world’s oceans are full of chemical weapons,
especially in the Baltic and Mediterranean Seas, where vast arsenals
were dumped after World War II. Those effects still linger
[[link removed]] today.

All of which means the world is still not fully free from the threat
of chemical weapons. Even elimination comes with an asterisk; you just
can’t unmake a huge weapon of mass destruction program. Even with
the weapons now gone, the US depots that housed these chemical
munitions will now have to go through a years-long decontamination and
decommissioning process Even when they’re repurposed, the options
for their use will be limited because those weapons were stored there
for so long.

Chemical weapons may now be less likely to be used as a tool of war,
but the difficulty of the destruction process provides a warning. The
tools of battle linger long after they are used; in Ukraine right now,
unexploded artillery shells and land mines litter fields and
communities. The chemical weapons created decades ago still pollute
fields and seas; they may be fine for now, but for how long?

The norms of war shift and change. Chemical and biological weapons are
now taboo weapons, but there are so many others — anti-personnel
landmines, cluster munitions, nukes — that the world has tried to
ban. It hasn’t fully yet, but it may, and what will happen to all
those rounds and rounds in storage? “You shouldn’t build [weapons]
to be used on the battlefield only,” Walker said. “You should
design into them ways to recycle them.” Countries invest and prepare
for war, but in doing so, they should also make it easier to prepare
for peace.

Jen Kirby [[link removed]] is a senior foreign
and national security reporter at Vox, where she covers global
instability.

Vox’s staff of over 100 journalists and subject-matter experts
research, report and produce articles, videos, and podcasts that make
complex ideas accessible. Whether it’s policy, culture, the Supreme
Court, meatless meat, political extremism, biodiversity, artificial
intelligence, the climate crisis, or something else, we give context
to what’s happening today. Our goal is to ensure that everyone,
regardless of income or status, can access accurate information that
empowers them.

* chemical weapons
[[link removed]]

*
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*
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*
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