A BRIEF HISTORY OF THE
US STOCKPILE OF CHEMICAL WEAPONS

(The following is excerpted from "Chemical Weapons Disposal and
Environmental Justice" written by Suzanne Marshall PhD. and published by
the Kentucky Environmental Foundation, November, 1996 with funding from the
Educational Foundation of America.)

The United States began to research, produce and store chemical weapons during World
War I. Mustard gas was the first and the most important chemical weapon until the 1940s
when the development of other chemical agents began. During the 1950s and early 60s,
the production of chemical weapons greatly increased and they were, and continue to be,
stockpiled at eight continental storage depots and on Kalama Atoll in the Pacific. The four
stockpiled chemical agents are:

• Mustard gas , termed agent H by the Army, quickly penetrates the skin and is a potent carcinogen. Inhalation of H produces pulmonary edema.

• GB or sarin , the most volatile of the nerve agents, causes victims to experience pinpoint pupils, increased salivation, abnormal tearing of the eyes, urination, diarrhea, convulsions, respiratory collapse and death.

• VX, twice as toxic as GB by inhalation, 10 times as toxic orally and 170 times as toxic by percutaneous administration, has similar immediate, acute toxic effects.

• BZ, a potent psychomimetic, produces hallucinations, confusion, delirium, amnesia, rapid heartbeat, dilated pupils, ataxia and weakness (National Research Council, 1984).

By 1968, production of unitary chemical weapons in the US had stopped and the Army
was disposing of the obsolete weapons by deep ocean dumping, land burial and open-pit
burning. However, increased environmental awareness and concern led to the banning of
these methods. In 1969, a National Academy of Science study concluded that ocean
dumping should be abandoned and in 1972 Congress passed the Marine Protection Act
which prohibited any further ocean disposal (Bradbury, et al., 1994).

Between 1973 and 1982, the Army extensively researched neutralization, but by 1982 had
made the decision to use incineration as the preferred technology for chemical weapons
disposal without input from local citizens. To satisfy the requirement of public
participation in the decision making process as mandated by the National Environmental
Protection Act (NEPA), the Army held public Scoping Meetings at all stockpile sites for
after-the-fact meetings regarding Environmental Impact Statements. In these meetings,
local citizens were asked, not for input into the choice of technology, but for input into
whether agent should be incinerated on-site or transported to national or regional sites and
incinerated there (Futrell, 1996). At that time little was understood about the risks of
incineration, but local citizens were uneasy enough to not want it in their own backyards
and generally preferred transportation to on-site incineration. However, in 1988 the Army
made the decision to incinerate on-site, citing safety hazards involved with transportation as
justification (Ambrose, 1988).

Based on this decision, the Army made plans to build a chemical weapons incinerator at
each stockpile site. At the time of the decision, an incinerator had already been built on
Kalama Atoll in the Pacific to dispose of chemical weapons belonging to the US that had
been shipped there in 1971 from Okinawa when it reverted to Japan. The decision to
incinerate on Kalama was made without input from the Pacific Islanders (Alailima,
interview 1996).

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