NEWPORT, Ind. — Technicians have extracted a small amount of deadly Cold War-era nerve agent from its storage site in Western Indiana to test the process that will be used to destroy the entire stockpile.

Samples of the VX nerve agent, stored at the Newport Chemical Depot, have been sent to Army laboratories in Edgewood, Md. Technicians there will chemically neutralize the agent using the approved process.

About 1,269 tons of VX are stored in 1,690 carbon steel containers housed in reinforced concrete bunkers at the Newport complex. A single droplet of the liquid nerve agent can cause paralysis and death within minutes.

Lt. Col. Joseph Marquart, the depot's commander, said contractors removed about 6 gallons of VX from their containers without incident in late March.

The samples were packaged in reinforced containers and flown to Edgewood in a series of flights that were completed Saturday, Army spokeswoman Terry Arthur said.

Results of the labs' small-scale VX neutralization should be known in about two months, she said.

Parsons Infrastructure and Technology Group Inc. of Pasadena, Calif., has a $300million contract to neutralize the VX at a treatment complex it has built at Newport, about 30 miles north of Terre Haute.

Marquart said Tuesday that the neutralization of the VX agent was expected to begin in July or August at the Newport complex and take about two years to complete.

A series of tests are planned in the coming months on Parsons' complex to make sure the neutralization process works as planned, Marquart said.

"There should be no surprises once we begin operations," he said.

Technicians extracted the VX samples sent to Edgewood from eight of the steel containers using a pump designed to prevent any leakage, Arthur said.

The last time VX was removed those containers was in 1995, when the Army was selecting a technology other than incineration for destroying the nerve agent. The Department of Defense approved the plan to neutralize Newport's VX stockpile in 1997.

In the neutralization process, VX will be drained from the steel containers and destroyed by mixing it with hot water and sodium hydroxide, creating a substance called hydrolysate, which the Army says is comparable to liquid drain cleaner.

The VX was scheduled to be destroyed by April 2007 under an international treaty, but Congress accelerated the process after the 2001 terrorist attacks.

The Army wants to ship the treated waste to Deepwater, N.J., where DuPont's Secure Environmental Treatment facility would break down the hydrolysate and dump effluent containing some chemical byproducts into the Delaware River.

However, the governors of New Jersey and Delaware sent a letter last week to acting Army Secretary Les Brownlee saying they oppose the treatment and disposal plan.

A spokesman for the Army Chemical Materials Agency said military officials would review the letter and respond to the issues raised by the state officials.

DuPont has said it would not accept an Army contract for the project until the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention completes a formal review of the plan.