First of two parts.
   
Buried away inside concrete bunkers beneath the Pine Bluff Arsenal, 3,850 tons of chemical-filled rockets, bombs and warheads will soon see sunlight after 45 years of being shrouded in darkness.
   
The military installation will go into lockdown in just a few days in preparation for the destruction of the weapons, which contain some of the most deadly substances on earth.
   
The Cold War relics will be obliterated in a series of highpowered furnaces early next year, moving the nation’s chemical weapons destruction program to full throttle. By then, six of the nation’s eight stockpile sites will be either burning or using other methods to neutralize the outdated weaponry.
   
Incineration at the Pine Bluff Arsenal will mark a milestone for the national chemical weapons disposal program, which has been plagued by delays, funding woes and persistent criticism of its incineration technology.
   
"We’re at the watershed point, no doubt," said Kevin Flamm, the U.S. Army’s program manager for the elimination of chemical weapons. "Before, we always had facilities that were in construction and design. But then [next year] we’ll have six plants all eliminating the risks to local communities."
   
Flamm and others in the Army say the destruction of the nation’s remaining 22,080 tons of munitions stored at the eight stockpile sites — tentatively set to be complete by 2012 — will undoubtedly make Pine Bluff and the other communities safer for the 1 million people who live near the sites.
   
Scientists say the aging munitions are becoming more dangerous as they decompose inside underground bunkers. The deterioration threatens to release virulent poisons — chemicals like VX, an oily substance so deadly that the amount needed to cover the eye of George Washington on a quarter is enough to kill a man in minutes.
   
While the Army and its contractors have missed two planned incinerator startup dates this year, they expect to begin destroying weapons at the Pine Bluff Arsenal by February.
   
Several potential roadblocks remain, however.
   
For example, officials concede that there is less discretionary money in the Army’s budget for the destruction of chemical weapons as a result of the war in Iraq and military operations in Afghanistan.
   
Also, they must continue to contend with nagging criticism of the incineration technology, safety record and environmental practices in addition to growing concerns about a terrorist theft or attack.
   
For people who live near the stockpile sites, perhaps the biggest challenge after the weapons are destroyed will be redefining their communities. The munition’s storage and destruction provided many jobs in a region of Arkansas that needed them.
   

BEHIND SCHEDULE
   
Built as a deterrent to a feared Soviet attack, the munitions have lain dormant in their Cold War tombs for more than 45 years, sometimes leaking a deadly soup of toxins.
   
The most prone to escape and vaporize is GB, a nerve gas invented by Germans scientists as an insecticide but later adopted by the military. Also known as Sarin, GB is about 25 times more deadly than cyanide gas.
   
Fears about the decomposing stockpile and the $100 million needed annually to maintain it prompted Congress in 1985 to issue its first directive to destroy the weapons.
   
At the time, the Army estimated that the destruction could be done by 1994 at a cost of $1.8 billion. Ten years later, the job is only about 30 percent complete, and the latest estimates place the price tag at $24 billion or more.
   
Destruction at most stockpile sites is several years behind schedule, pushing the original projected completion date back almost 18 years. Consequently, the United States asked for the extension of an international treaty that required the weapons to be destroyed by 2007.
   
"We were all pushing for that [completion by 1994], and for a variety of reasons that was not an achievable goal," Flamm said.
   
Flamm and others in the Chemical Materials Agency program make no apologies for operational delays.
   
Instead, they insist that they’ve learned from mistakes, and they expect the Pine Bluff Arsenal incinerator to operate more safely and efficiently than earlier plants.
   
But pressed for answers about why the delays have occurred, they blame state environmental regulators who made them jump through a myriad of permit hoops or the citizen activist groups that demanded they consider alternative technologies to incineration.
   
The Kentucky-based Chemical Weapons Working Group has been the loudest voice opposing the Army’s weapons destruction plans, filing lawsuits and contesting state environmental regulatory permits at every site along the way.
   
"Incineration is a flawed, highly emissive technology, meaning that some of what goes into the furnace comes out of the stack and into your community," said Craig Williams, the group’s director.
   
While the Army contends that incineration is a safe and effective way to destroy the national stockpile — a sentiment shared by the National Research Council, a nonprofit institute that provides scientific advice to Congress — it has yielded to demands from the Chemical Weapons Working Group’s that alternative technologies be used.
   
Now, stockpiles in Colorado, Maryland and Indiana will be destroyed by neutralizing the weapons in vats of hot water and sodium hydroxide. Those stockpiles contain mostly one-ton bulk containers, which are easier to neutralize than rockets and projectiles.
   
Despite the working group’s influence on the national chemical weapons destruction program, it has never had much luck in recruiting members in Arkansas.
   
"In Pine Bluff, you’ve got a community that’s more focused on day-to-day life," said Williams. "People are more concerned about feeding their families. We understand that."
   
Still, that doesn’t mean Pine Bluff residents shouldn’t be concerned, he said.
   
"I think it’s not a question of if something bad is going to happen at Pine Bluff, it’s a matter of when," he said.
   

STACK EMISSIONS?
   
The possibility of an accidental release of nerve agent from the destruction facilities is what drives safety precautions taken by the Army and its contractors at stockpile sites.
   
Since the weapons elimination program began in 1990 at the Johnson Atoll in the South Pacific, Army officials say there’s been only one accidental release of a nerve agent into the environment.
   
On May 9, 2000, the alarms at the Deseret Chemical Depot in Tooele, Utah, sounded, indicating that a small amount of GB had escaped from an incinerator’s stack. The Army and later the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said the quantity of released nerve agent was so small that it likely evaporated in a matter of minutes and never made it past the boundaries of the isolated desert outpost.
   
The incident, however, caused the Tooele facility to close for several months as investigators tried to figure out what went wrong. They ultimately concluded that human error and equipment malfunction were to blame.
 
The Army and its contractors hotly dispute Chemical Weapons Working Group’s claims that there have been other releases of nerve agents.
   
Still, questions remain about what exactly is coming out of incinerator stacks.
   
"If the public is really interested and they can work hard, they can find out what the regulatory requirements are — what the thresholds are the stack can reach," said Robert Downing, a Calhoun County, Ala., commissioner. "But basically people don’t know day in and day out what’s coming out of that stack, and I really question whether the regulators know."
   
While the Army’s contractors and state environmental regulators do monitor continuously for the presence of chemical agents, they do not look daily for hazardous chemical compounds coming out the stack — things like polychlorinated biphenals (or PCBs), dioxins, furans and heavy metals.
   
State environmental regulators will scan for more than 240 hazardous chemical compounds during the chemical agent trial burns or a series of tests before incineration begins.
   
If the Pine Bluff facility passes the tests, they will never check again.
   
"If you keep all those same parameters the same, it’s logical to assume that the results you got during the trial burn are occurring during the actual operation," said Greg Mahall, spokesman for the Chemical Materials Agency.
   
Engineers with the Arkansas Department of Environmental Quality say they have no reason to suspect that the Pine Bluff Arsenal incinerator would emit anything harmful given how well it performed during tests last year.
   
During those tests, a mixture of solvents and chemicals used in dry cleaning were fed through the furnaces.
   
State environmental regulators say that that "surrogate" material is actually harder to destroy than chemical agents, yet the incinerator at the Pine Bluff Arsenal safely destroyed 99.9999 percent of it.
   
Similarly, the furnaces met all the state requirements for air emissions.
   
"The dioxins and furans that are emitted are so low it’s not really a concern," said Mike Hill, a department engineer assigned to the arsenal. "And there’s no real-time monitor that could even tell you what the continuous emission rates are."
   
Betsy Francis, co-chairman of a Pine Bluff citizens’ advisory commission, said many residents of White Hall and Pine Bluff have told her they won’t worry about the air they breathe once the incinerator is fired up at the arsenal next year.
   
"Nothing has ever happened that would cause us to be concerned," said Francis, who is the administrative assistant for the White Hall school superintendent. "There’s a lot of education and a lot of trust, and that’s really the bottom line."

PROTECTING THE WORK FORCE
   
While the Army says that residents living near stockpiles have never been exposed to chemical agents, it cannot make that assertion for the thousands of men and women working at the destruction plants.
   
Since the Army started destroying weapons, about a dozen plant workers have accidentally been exposed to nerve agents, although none were seriously injured.
   
Some of the reported accidents include:
   
On July 15, 2002, maintenance workers were exposed while changing pipes at the Tooele facility. The accident closed the facility for eight months so safety procedures could be re-evaluated.
   
Last January, Sarin spilled on technicians at the Anniston, Ala., plant as they were changing filters on a drainage pump. In July, the Occupational Safety and Health Administration fined the contractor more than $4,000 for that and two subsequent spills.
   
In September, two workers at the Hermiston, Ore., stockpike site not wearing appropriate protective gear entered a room where nerve agents were stored. The incident caused the weapons-destruction plant to be shut down for five days during the second week it was operational.
   
"It certainly conjures up the image of Homer Simpson at the nuclear plant, doesn’t it?" Williams said about the Oregon accident.
   
Army officials say these accidents are no laughing matter and that they will not tolerate unsafe conditions in their facilities even if that means cracking down on their contractors.
   
In Arkansas, Washington Group International employs 700 people at the $600 million Pine Bluff Chemical Agent Disposal Facility on the arsenal’s property.
   
Since facility construction was completed in November 2002, the Washington Group’s employees have undergone rigorous training to make sure they know how to properly handle the weapons.
   
In recent weeks, they’ve been practicing how to safely remove dummy munitions from a bunker, transport them to the destruction facility and unpack them before they are fed to the incinerator.
   
"This is really our final dress rehearsal," said Chris West, a spokesman for the defense contractor in Arkansas.
   
West said he expects fewer problems in the Pine Bluff facility since it will be the last incinerator to go online and will benefit from all of the lessons learned at the other plants.
   
"Lessons Learned" is a formal Army program embraced by the contractors concerning "how to" and sometimes "how not to" destroy chemical weapons.
   
"It’s a living, breathing kind of plan," Mahall said. "It’s a dynamic, fluid operation that some assumptions just can’t prepare you for."
   

SHIFTING PRIORITIES
   
Plants near Pine Bluff and Newport, Ind., are to begin destroying weapons in the next few months. The cost of destroying the nation’s stockpile is expected to swell to an all-time high for the Army.
   
That fact combined with funding shortfalls as a result of the war in Iraq and ongoing military operations in Afghanistan present a financial challenge for the program.
   
Already, the stockpile sites are feeling a budget pinch.
   
Last year, Congress slashed the 2005 chemical weapons destruction budget by $200 million, decreasing it from $1.5 billion to $1.3 billion.
   
That cut didn’t have an immediate chilling effect at the Pine Bluff Arsenal like it did at Pueblo, Colo., where the Army slashed $147 million from Pueblo’s original $153 million budget.
   
While Colorado’s congressional delegation was able to restore $50 million, the budget cut temporarily jeopardized the construction of the neutralization plant there.
   
It also did not set well with residents who were anxious for the destruction of the weapons to begin and even more keen on the prospect of luring contractor jobs to the region.
   
"That really caused a lot of distrust of the Army," said John Klomp, who lives in Pueblo and is chairman of a citizens advisory commission there. "There was a lot of anger because all this time we had been told that the stockpile posed a risk to the community and that we needed to alleviate that risk."
   
But Flamm said the funds had to be cut somewhere, and Pueblo’s budget was the most obvious choice. He pointed to the fact that Pueblo only houses mustard gas — the least deadly in the family of nerve agents — and the community was several miles downwind from the depot.
   
The thing that increases the overall risk to Arkansas’ White Hall community — the proximity of its schools to the arsenal — is probably what kept the Pine Bluff project’s budget intact.
   
"It’s not that we’re losing money," Flamm said. "It’s just that we’re being told "Hey guys. As you go through this, don’t expect additional money in the out [future] years."
   

WHAT’S NEXT
   
This summer, the Army and its contractors reached the halfway mark at Tooele, a notable accomplishment considering that the desert outpost has the biggest stockpile of weapons in the United States.
   
Plans are under way to close the facility, prompting leaders there to begin pondering life with fewer soldiers pumping money into the local economy.
   
"You have some of the highest trained, technical people who work in those industries, and we attract them here," said Tooele County Commissioner Gene White.
   
But Chip Ward, a Salt Lake librarian and author of Canaries on the Rim, which chronicles Utah’s environmental problems, worries that the Army may have inadvertently done more than attract highpaying jobs to Tooele.
   
He points to a recently scrapped proposal to take highlevel nuclear waste to Tooele County, which has often been called by national environmental groups the most toxic county in the nation because of industries there that either generate or handle hazardous wastes.
   
"The predatory companies that have processes that can’t be abided elsewhere are looking for signals," Ward said.
 
"If your community accepts things like nerve gas and burning it, which is controversial, it shows a tolerance for risk and a desperation for jobs and revenue. And that is exactly what they’re looking for. So what you really need to be doing at this point is planning how you close the gates into Pine Bluff, Arkansas."
   
With the destruction of the Pine Bluff Arsenal’s stockpile not set for completion until 2011, nearby residents there have yet to ponder some of the questions about the future that are being batted around in Tooele.
   
Unlike some of the other storage depots, the Pine Bluff Arsenal is not set for closure and will continue with its many other missions including manufacturing smoke munitions and repairing soldiers’ protective gear.
   
Some residents find it difficult to imagine what life will be like without the specter of chemical weapons.
   
But they’d like to try.
   
"Even though I’m not afraid of it, I do recognize that it does pose a danger to our community as long as it’s out there," Francis said. "I think everyone wants it gone and trusts the Army and the contractors do the job right."