LITTLE ROCK - The Pine Bluff Arsenal's 13,000 acres are like a foreign world to most in the surrounding central and southeast Arkansas communities.

The mayor of neighboring Pine Bluff, Carl Redus, said his father worked there for 34 years, but until he received a VIP tour with visiting congressmen last month - seeing up close the weapons production, intricate development and the self-contained community for uniformed personnel - he "never understood the complexity of it."

The mystery could attract more common curiosity than ever on Tuesday, when the Army begins destroying the nation's second-largest chemical weapons stockpile behind the arsenal's closely guarded gates.

The arsenal has been caught between a concerned public and classified military secrets in the past several months as it has tested incinerators, delayed the start of the program, held public information sessions, opened outreach offices, distributed tone alert radios and instituted a regionwide state-of-alert siren system, just in case.

All has led up to this week - Monday, when two M55 rockets filled with GB nerve agent, or sarin, will be driven 2 1/2 to 3 miles from earthen storage igloos to the disposal facility; and Tuesday, when the rockets are scheduled to spend 15 minutes burning in each of three furnaces, high-tech scrubbers are to remove any polluting residue and a sophisticated ventilation system is to send only cleansed air out through smoke stacks.

The Arkansas Department of Environmental Quality will have scientists on site to constantly test air pollution levels. Emergency plans have been distributed to authorities in 10 surrounding counties and an information center in a White Hall shopping center will have extended hours.

But as much as the arsenal has sought to calm the fears of nervous neighbors, arsenal spokeswoman Raini Wright still thinks Tuesday's first day of incineration will go off like any other.

"It will be pretty much unnoticed," she said.

From there, the arsenal promises to notify the public of milestones, like when it empties the first igloo filled with weapons. But as the initial incineration process starts slowly and ramps up to a pace of 30 rockets destroyed each hour, the general message is that it's business as usual.

Greg Mahall of the Army's Chemical Materials Agency said people need to understand that no method for destroying chemical weapons is "safer" than another, but there are different levels of risks. The arsenal says there's a greater risk at keeping weapons stored in the earthen igloos than in any kind of disposal process.

In addition, the Army has chosen to incinerate the weapons at Pine Bluff, rather than use a newer, non-burning technology called neutralization. Officials say neutralization is better for small amounts of chemical weapons and ones that don't have as many component metal parts as those at Pine Bluff do.

Some communities have responded with great concern and "activism," as Mahall calls it, particularly with the neutralization processes planned for stockpiles at Pueblo, Colo., and Blue Grass, Ky. At Anniston, Ala., another smaller stockpile that started disposal in 2003, authorities have distributed gas masks to surrounding communities, but Pine Bluff Arsenal officials determined that wasn't necessary for the destruction of 3,850 tons of chemical weapons here.

"Activism has occurred at other locations, but here, people have been very supportive," Wright said.