Atlanta Journal-Constitution
August 10, 2003

Army burns chemical arms; First aging weapons incinerated at Anniston

By MIKE TONER
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution

ANNISTON, Ala. -- The U.S. Army burned the first chemical weapons at its Anniston Army Depot on Saturday -- opening a new chapter in a 30-year effort to rid America of its aging weapons of mass destruction.

"That rocket is now history; this community is now one rocket safer," Army spokesman Michael Abrams said shortly before 10 a.m. As he spoke, the remains of a 6 1/2-foot-tall rocket were drained of the deadly nerve agent sarin, chopped into foot-long pieces and pushed into a fiery furnace at the Anniston Chemical Agent Disposal Facility.

"The operation was flawless," Project Manager Timothy Garrett reported afterward. "There were a lot of smiles and handshakes in the control room, but we have a long way to go."

A second M-55 rocket was successfully destroyed later in the day.

The Army won't say exactly how many chemical rockets, artillery shells, mortars and land mines are stored in steel-reinforced bunkers at the Alabama depot, but it acknowledges the number exceeds a half-million.

Critics of the Anniston project failed to persuade a federal judge Friday that the incinerator and its emissions posed a clear threat to people living nearby. The Anniston facility is located in a more densely populated area than the two sites where the military already has destroyed chemical weapons. The Army has offered to provide protective hoods, which function like gas masks, to the 22,500 people living within about six miles of the incinerator.

Congress ordered the Army in 1985 to destroy its chemical weapons, now banned by international treaty. Nationwide, approximately 1.3 million chemical munitions -- about 25 percent of the nation's stockpile -- have been destroyed since 1990.

Approximately 4 million chemical munitions remain in storage at Army depots around the country. Officials hope that the $1 billion Anniston incinerator -- and similar facilities expected to start up in Oregon and Arkansas within the next year -- will help accelerate their destruction.

Start-up of the Anniston incinerator, about 90 miles west of Atlanta, is the beginning of a planned seven-year program there to destroy 2,000 tons of chemical agents.

Despite concerns about the aging stockpile, which includes more than 700 M-55 rockets known to be leaking nerve agents, Army officials said processing will proceed slowly at first.

Today, for instance, eight rockets are slated for destruction. Eventually, the facility will operate around the clock and incinerate up to 40 rockets an hour.

Only the two rockets were burned Saturday. About 2.4 gallons of the nerve agent -- theoretically enough to deliver a lethal dose to 4 million people -- were drained from the rocket shells and held for later disposal in a separate furnace designed to destroy liquids in quantity.

The incinerator will burn rocket parts and small amounts of residual chemicals around the clock, but the Army has pledged to limit its chemical incineration to nights and weekends until safety measures are in place at schools.

"Safety, not schedule is going to drive operations here," Garrett said. "We're not going to rush anything."

Operations at the nation's first chemical weapons incinerator on Kalama Island in the Pacific originally were expected to take five years. They actually took more than a decade.

At the Tooele, Utah, incinerator, the disposal of rockets containing sarin -- the same type now being destroyed at Anniston -- was expected to be completed in six months, but actually took four years.

Craig Williams, director of the Kentucky-based Chemical Weapons Working Group, said Saturday that the group is still studying other legal moves to block the project. The group plans a public protest in Anniston next Saturday.

Although critics contend that other chemicals at the Anniston depot are more deadly than sarin, Garrett says the Army is destroying it first because the combination of a deadly nerve agent, rocket propellant and an explosive warhead poses the greatest danger in the event of an accident.

Most of the arms now awaiting destruction were manufactured in the 1950s and 1960s, before President Richard Nixon halted their production.

Although other agents are more deadly, sarin has been a chemical weapon of choice on at least two occasions in recent years.

Sarin, also known as agent GB, is a colorless, odorless chemical, first produced by German scientists in 1938.

It was one of several agents used by Saddam Hussein's Iraqi forces when they attacked Kurdish villages in the late 1980s. It also was the chemical released in 1995 in the Tokyo subway by the Japanese cult Aum Shinrikyo. Thirteen people died in that incident, and more than 5,000 were hospitalized.