The United States ended this Friday the destruction of all its chemical weapons reserves, a milestone that according to the president, Joe Biden, brings “one step closer to a world free of the horrors” of these types of weapons.
The last two depots were in Pueblo County, Colorado, where there was some 2,600 tons of mustard gas in about 780,000 munitions, and in eastern Kentucky.
The first destroyed its last weapons in June and the second, called the Blue Grass Army Depot, was completed on Friday. The latter originally contained 523 tons of sarin, mustard and VX gas in shells and rockets.
“The United States has worked tirelessly for more than 30 years to eliminate its arsenal of chemical weapons. Today I am proud to announce that you have safely destroyed the last of the ammunition in that stockpile,” Biden said in a statement.
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The Democratic president stressed that successive administrations had determined that these weapons should neither be further developed nor deployed.
The complete destruction of the arsenal, he stressed, not only fulfills the commitment acquired with the Convention on the
Chemical Weapons, which precisely vetoes their development, production, storage, transfer and use, but also makes it “the first time that an international organization has verified the destruction of an entire category of
declared weapons of mass destruction.
“I thank the thousands of Americans who gave their time and talents to this noble and challenging mission,” added Biden, who He urged those countries that have not ratified that convention to do so so that the global veto on such weapons “can reach its full potential.”
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The Chemical Weapons Convention entered into force in 1997. and, according to its website, it gave the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW) “the mandate to eradicate forever the scourge of chemical weapons and to verify the destruction, within the established deadlines, of the declared stockpiles of chemical weapons”.
The OPCW points out that 193 States have committed to the Convention and that 98 percent of the world’s population lives under its protection.
“Russia and Syria should return to complying with the Convention and admit their undeclared programs, which have been used to commit atrocities and brazen attacks. (…) Together with our partners, we will not stop until we can finally and forever free the world of this scourge,” Biden said.
The US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) point out on its website that The United States produced chemical weapons from the First World War (1914-1918) and until 1968 as a deterrent against similar weapons used by other countries.
These weapons reached nearly 40,000 tons in the United States by the end of the sixties. and they were stored in a total of 9 warehouses in different parts of the country. Although they had never been used on the battlefield, the CDC adds, they had become outdated and deteriorated over time.
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Following Biden’s announcement, the OPCW claimed that all declared stockpiles of these toxic agents had been “irreversibly destroyed”.
“The end of the destruction of all declared chemical weapons stocks is an important stage,” Fernando Arias, the head of the OPCW, said in a statement.
This entity based in The Hague (Netherlands) assured that the measure taken by the United States means that “all declared stocks of chemical weapons (were) verified as irreversibly destroyed.”
But the recent use of such weapons means the world must still be on its guard, the Nobel Peace Prize-winning organization has warned.
EFE AND AFP
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