PUEBLO, Colo. — In a heavily guarded, sealed room at the U.S. Army’s Pueblo Chemical Depot in Colorado, robotic arms were busy disarming some of the country’s vast arsenal of chemical weapons.
Artillery shells filled with mustard agent entered. Robots drilled, drained and washed each shell, then baked it at 815 degrees Celsius. Harmless scrap was coming out.
The destruction of the arsenal has taken decades. The depot near Pueblo destroyed its last gun in June; another in Kentucky destroyed the remaining handful this month. And with that, all publicly declared chemical weapons in the world have been eliminated.
The American stockpile, accumulated over generations, was shocking in its scale: cluster bombs and nerve agent-filled land mines. Artillery shells that could cover entire forests in searing mustard fog. Tanks full of poison that could be loaded onto aircraft and sprayed on ground targets.
The use of chemical weapons was declared anathema after World War I, but the US and other powers continued to develop and stockpile them. The US military is not known to have used lethal chemical weapons since 1918, although during the Vietnam War they used herbicides that were harmful to humans.
The United States and the Soviet Union agreed in 1989 to destroy their chemical weapons, and when the US Senate ratified the Chemical Weapons Convention in 1997, the US and other signatories pledged to get rid of them.
Officials in the US country once projected that the work could be done in a few years for about $1.4 billion. It ended up costing around $42 billion.
Officials warn that chemical weapons have not been completely eradicated. Some nations never signed the treaty, and some that did, notably Russia, appear to have retained unreported stocks.
The treaty also did not put an end to the use of chemical weapons by rogue states and terrorist groups. IHS Conflict Monitor, a London-based intelligence service, says Islamic State fighters used chemical weapons at least 52 times in Iraq and Syria from 2014 to 2016.
The work in the US took so long in part because the combination of explosives and poison make them exceptionally dangerous to handle, and citizens and lawmakers insisted that the work be done without endangering surrounding communities.
In Pueblo, each shell was pierced by a robotic arm and the mustard agent inside was sucked out. The shell was washed and fired to destroy any remaining traces. The mustard agent was diluted in hot water and then broken down by bacteria. The resulting residue is mostly common table salt, but contains heavy metals that require handling as hazardous waste.
Irene Kornelly, 77, chair of the citizens’ advisory commission that oversaw the process in Pueblo, followed how nearly a million mustard shells were destroyed.
“Most people today have no idea that all this happened—they never had to worry about it,” he said. Kornelly. “Goodness”.
By: DAVE PHILIPPS, and JOHN ISMAY
BBC-NEWS-SRC: http://www.nytsyn.com/subscribed/stories/6802425, IMPORTING DATE: 2023-07-13 17:20:08
#destroyed #million #chemical #weapons