HERMISTON, Ore. - As early as mid-August, munitions handlers hope to go to one of the 80-foot-long concrete bunkers in K Block of the Umatilla Chemical Depot, fire up a forklift, and move to the door two pallets stacked with a total of 30 M55 rockets filled with deadly nerve agent.

Outside the bunker, another forklift will load the rockets into a 19,000-pound pressurized containment cylinder on a flatbed truck, which will drive down a short road to a huge building inside the U.S. Army's Umatilla Chemical Agent Disposal Facility.

The rockets will be the first of more than 220,000 munitions containing nerve and mustard agents left over from the Cold War to move through the robotic disassembly line, where they will be punched, drained, chopped and finally burned in special furnaces, disposing of a threat that has sat in the rolling sagebrush of the Columbia Plateau for more than 60 years.

"It's time," said Frank Harkenrider, who as mayor of Hermiston from 1990 to 2000 took part in many of the battles fought over the past decade to get to this point. "It's time to say yes to the incinerator."

The last remaining yes needed to fire up the furnaces with real nerve and mustard agents is expected to come Aug. 13, when the Oregon Environmental Quality Commission considers the results of three years of testing.

Destroying the munitions and shutting down the Umatilla plant is expected to take the next six years - three years past the initial deadline set by international treaty - and cost a total of $24 billion.

Still, not everyone is eager to get on with it. Karyn Jones, who manages her father's dental office here and grew up downwind of radiation from the Hanford nuclear reservation, has fought the incinerator every step of the way. She and the grassroots organization GASP still have three lawsuits pending, hoping to force the U.S. Army to start over with a chemical neutralization process.

"It's a disaster waiting to happen," Jones said.

The first of the chemical weapons arrived on five rail cars in August 1962, just two months before the Cuban missile crisis, when the Cold War conflict between the Soviet Union and the United States almost went hot after President John F. Kennedy refused to let the Soviet Union put nuclear missiles on Cuba.

A total of 7,300 tons of deadly nerve and mustard agents contained in missiles, artillery rounds, bombs, land mines, sprayers and storage containers came to be stored here in row upon row of concrete bunkers originally built for World War II bombs and ammunition. About 140 have leaked since 1984, increasing pressure to destroy them.

President Nixon halted the manufacture of chemical weapons in 1969, and the Army has budgeted $25 billion to destroy the 31,000-ton national stockpile. To date, more than 9,000 tons have been destroyed.

The Army decided in the 1980s to build incinerators at the eight storage sites around the country and one on Johnston Atoll, south of Hawaii. Johnston Atoll has finished incinerating its stockpile. As technology improved and local opposition to incinerators increased, the Army agreed to switch to chemical neutralization at four sites - Newport, Ind.; Blue Grass, Ky.; Edgewood, Del.; and Pueblo, Colo. Sites in Tooele, Utah; Pine Bluff, Ark.; Anniston, Ala. and Umatilla are going ahead with incineration.

Neutralization is not without its problems. Disputes remain over how to dispose of millions of gallons of contaminated wastewater generated by the process.

Construction and testing of the Umatilla incinerator had problems, too. Construction workers claiming they were exposed to nerve agent while building the plant in 1999 have won the first round of their lawsuit against the Army. A federal judge ruled the government was negligent in providing emergency response when the workers became mysteriously ill.

The Army and Washington Demilitarization Co., which built and operates the incinerator, were fined $185,000 for bypassing safety systems during furnace testing last year. Another $11,000 in fines were levied after an employee left the grounds with a diluted vial of the nerve agent sarin in his pocket.

There are four incinerators. Two burn the liquid agent at 2,700 degrees. A deactivation furnace destroys explosives and rocket motors. A metal parts furnace burns off traces of agent from remaining hardware. Exhaust gasses go through an afterburner, then a system of scrubbers and filters before being released into the air.

In the control room, supervisor Lance Pappas can watch over the weapons from bunker to furnace. He feels safe for himself, as well as his family in Kennewick, Wash., 35 miles away.

"I worked in refineries, and refineries are a whole lot more dangerous than this is," Pappas said.

Pappas and everyone else must carry a gas mask and special syringes loaded with antidote in case of a spill. Orange wind socks around the compound show which way the wind is blowing in case gas is released. Weather conditions are constantly monitored to project where a leak may spread. Reader boards on nearby Interstate 84 are ready to warn of an emergency.

The containment rooms where the munitions are dismantled, drained and fed into incinerators have walls 30 inches thick in case of an explosion. Sensors and alarms around the plant can detect minute amounts of agent. In case of a spill, workers don protective suits to clean it up. Video monitors keep watch over the plant and grounds. Guards tightly control people entering and leaving.

Like the midst of the Cold War, when students around the nation practiced hiding under their desks in case of nuclear attack, the 10,000 students in 28 nearby schools practice assembling in special rooms pressurized to keep out drifting gas in case of a release.

Reports from trial burns on the metal parts incinerator - using simulated chemical agents inside the incinerator instead of real ones - have yet to be approved. And the facility for processing wastewater from the pollution control system still must be tested.

But Dennis Murphey, who oversees the incinerator for the Oregon Department of Environmental Quality, does not foresee anything that would delay the process.

In the little town of Irrigon, just a few miles downwind of the depot, retiree George Horace is not looking forward to the day the furnaces fire up. His father breathed mustard gas in World War I and eventually died of it.

"Anybody who gets a whiff of that is dead," Horace said. "If they want to get rid of it, they ought to ship it back to Washington, D.C. They're the only ones making any money off of it."

But Jack Baker, owner of Bake's Restaurant and Lounge, agrees with former mayor Harkenrider.

"I think it's great it's starting," he said. "The quicker they get rid of it, the safer we will be."