PINE BLUFF, Ark. - A directive from the Defense Department to the Army has raised the possibility that chemical weapons from other storage sites in the nation could be shipped to the Pine Bluff Arsenal for destruction.

Last week, the Army was ordered to study whether hauling chemical weapons to sites where destruction systems were already in place would be worth the risks involved in transporting the weapons.

An incinerator has been built at the Pine Bluff Arsenal to destroy 3,850 tons of chemical weapons that are stored there. Incineration is scheduled to begin next month.

Other sites with incinerators in place are in Alabama, Oregon and Utah.

But two chemical-weapons storage sites, at Pueblo, Colo., and Richmond, Ky., don't have destruction systems in place yet. The additional costs of the war in Iraq mean that money may not be available soon to build destruction systems there.

An international treaty sets a 2012 deadline for destruction of the country's stockpile of chemical weapons.

Shipping weapons from one site to another would require not only permits from states but also a change in federal law - or an exemption from it - Army spokesman Jeff Lindblad said.

"There is a federal law that prohibits us from transporting the stockpile across state lines," Lindblad said. "You either get a change in the law or the president could issue an executive order in the interest of national security."

Lindblad emphasized that no decision had been made.

"This is just an evaluation, a 'what-if,'" he said.

But the possibility raises concerns among those who opposed the incinerator at the Pine Bluff Arsenal in the first place.

Evelyn Yates, director of Pine Bluff for Safe Disposal, said she worries that "we could become an incineration dump place."

The arsenal's current permit for operating the incinerator bars the facility from receiving stockpile materials from off-site sources.

Craig Williams, director of the Chemical Weapons Working Group, a Kentucky-based anti-incineration organization, said the Pine Bluff Arsenal has a high potential for becoming the recipient of Kentucky's 523 tons of chemical weapons.

"I think the level of response in opposition to this in the state of Alabama has been significant and quick, and I don't see that kind of response coming from Arkansas," he said.

Yates echoed his comments, saying the Pine Bluff area's higher poverty level results in less opposition to the chemical weapons.

"That means we may receive some things that other people will not accept," she said.

The Pine Bluff Arsenal houses 12 percent of the nation's chemical weapons stockpile, which includes blister agent, mustard gas, and the nerve agents VX and sarin.