CHEMICAL WEAPONS DESTRUCTION ADVOCATES APPLAUD GLOBAL MOVE TO ABANDON INCINERATION; SUPPORT SAFER, CHEAPER ALTERNATIVE TECHNOLOGIES

Recent moves to reject incineration as the technology of choice to eliminate the world's
chemical weapons stockpile and, instead, use low-temperature alternatives that
guarantee no smokestack emissions, today won praise from leaders of the U.S. anti-
incineration movement.

"The fact that major corporations continue promoting alternative technologies should be
a 'wake-up call to Congress and the Pentagon' to end chemical weapons incineration' said
Craig Williams, spokesperson for the Chemical Weapons Working Group, a global
movement opposed to incinerator construction. "It's time for Congress and the Pentagon
to abandon this bankrupt technology and work with community groups and business to
adopt better options."

Earlier this week, Teledyne-Commodore, announced successful testing of a low-
temperature, low-pressure process that it says can destroy all chemical weapons
munition components with no emissions. The company also claimed that its approach will
be less costly than the Army's incineration program, which is budgeted at $12 billion
and is 13 years behind schedule.

Today, the New York Times reported that the American firm Morrison Knudsen will
build a neutralization plant in Russia to destroy half of that country's chemical weapons.
Other U.S. companies are working with China and Japan to eliminate their World War II
stockpiles through non-incineration technologies.>

Tomorrow, leaders of Gulf War veterans groups will join with CWWG activists at a
Jacksonville State University, Alabama, symposium to demonstrate their joint
opposition to a chemical weapons incinerator in nearby Anniston. Jim Tuite, founder of
the National Gulf War Research Foundation, is among those who will warn of the danger
from low-level nerve agent exposure.

"With safer technologies proving out on a continuing basis, to allow the Pentagon to
continue burning chemical weapons ignores the Congressional mandate of offering
'Maximum Protection' to the American Public," Williams added.

A lawsuit to shut down the Army's Tooele, Utah, facility, the only chemical weapons
incinerator operating on the U.S. mainland, goes to trial in federal district court in Salt
Lake City on Monday, March 3. The Tooele incinerator has closed due to malfunctions at
least six times in the six months since it began operations, and the former general
manager has said plant conditions are like those that existed before the Three Mile
Island, Bhopal, and Challenger disasters. A similar chemical weapons incinerator in the
Pacific was fined twice by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency for leaking lethal
agent.

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