Berea Citizen
June 14, 2001

Leader of anti-incineration group says progress has been made

By Connie Esh and John Butwell
free-lance writers
chronicle2@iclub.org

Berea's Craig Williams can measure how long he's been fighting the proposed nerve-agent incinerator at the Bluegrass Army Depot by the height of his son.

"When I started this issue, I was carrying Dustin on my hip," Williams recalls. "Somebody asked me, "Why are you doing this?' And I held him up and said, 'This is why I'm doing it.' I couldn't hold him up now he's 6-foot-4."

But Williams, 53, is encouraged by progress that's been made toward selecting an alternative way to destroy the aging rockets tipped with
deadly nerve agents which are stockpiled at the depot, he says. He expects a final decision "by this time next year," Williams adds. But he admits "it's been a long, hard road" -- and incineration opponents still might not win.

At least it's been interesting along the way.

Williams' activism caused him, by chance, to be in Los Angeles during the big earthquake and to call up Bruce Springsteen once the earth stopped moving, since Williams was in L.A. to set up a benefit concert for the Vietnam Veterans of America Foundation.

Williams' upstairs office on Short Street features the "day after" front page of the Los Angeles Times, and he describes: "I just stood there on the balcony watching all these buildings rocking and rolling. It was just unreal." Williams was supposed to be "meeting with Bruce" in Malibu to discuss plans for the concert, but "we couldn't get there," he recalls. "So we called him up and he said, 'Don't worry. Even if you could get here, I'm out of here. I've got a jet coming to pick me up in a little while, to get myself and my family. Were headed back to Jersey.' I said, 'I don't blame you, man.'"

The vererans' foundation, which Williams helped found, was a co-recipient of the 1997 Nobel Peace Prize for its International Campaign to Ban Landmines. "It's not every day that you co-found an organization that wins the Nobel Prize," Williams said at the time.

The veterans' foundation sponsors "prosthetics clinics that we have set up now, I think, in eight countries to serve the needs of landmine victims," Williams explains. "We've got this place in Cambodia where, through our efforts, Cambodians now manufacture their own prosthetics."

But Williams is no stranger to protecting civilians from side effects of the weapons of war, which became his full-time job more than a decade ago -- when Williams gave up his cabinet-making business to take on the challenge. That's when Williams founded and became executive director of the Kentucky Environmental Foundation based in Berea, and helped found the nationwide Chemical Weapons Working Group to oppose incineration of the Army's nerve-agent stockpiles.

Like the landmines campaign, the working group has taken an international approach to nerve-agent disposal, and Williams has traveled to Russia repeatedly to visit that country's stockpile sites. "It's an agrarian society with an advanced defense and space program," he reports. "You get 10 miles outside of Moscow, it's like going back into the 18th century. People ride around with horses and carts, and growing cabbages in the back yard because they've got to -- not because they want to dabble in gardening. People depend on what they grow."

Russia is about to try its first disposal facility, which will use neutralization, according to Williams. "They have rejected incineration as an option; it was taken off the table." But Russia has encountered some other problems with destroying nerve agents, Williams reports. "They're trying to put these disposal plants in the middle of communities where 80 percent of the town doesn't have running water. And now they're going to build this half-a-billion-dollar modern plant to get rid of chemical weapons, and the people are sitting there going, 'Wait a minute. You're spending all that money on them, and we haven't even got a place to go to the bathroom.'"

Reporters from the New York Times, Washington Post, Time magazine, "60 Minutes" and other national news media regularly call Williams, who is the national spokesperson for the Chemical Weapons Working Group. But it all started here in Madison County for Williams, a 1978 EKU graduate, when "I went to a public meeting about this issue in 1984," he recalls, "I was not at all satisfied about the responses that were being given at that meeting. I went to several more, and it was obvious to me that this was a done deal and any kind of true interest in what citizens had to say about it was a myth," Williams adds.

"Some of the most routine, basic issues that were being raised about this proposal were just being either half-answered or not answered or skirted around or whatever." Williams continues, "People just started asking themselves the famous rhetorical question: Is it a good idea to burn the most lethal chemicals on the planet in the middle of a population area?"

But when the Army published its 1988 decision to burn nerve agent at the eight sites in the continental United States where it is stored, local opponents felt defeated. "It became apparent there was no way we were going to stop this thing on our own," Williams recalls. "We could have everybody in the state of Kentucky on our side, but it was kind of this juggernaut coming down the road, and there was no way. So we started thinking about, 'How do we increase the political clout that's going to be necessary to turn this thing around?'"

A nationwide coalition of "similar groups in other states and national groups with a similar focus" was needed, incinerator opponents decided. The trouble was, "everybody in the local coalition had full-time jobs," Williams remembers. "We weren't going to get the (necessary) level of scrutiny on this thing by meeting once a month and having a bean supper or something. Somebody had to step up and say, 'We've got to take this thing on full-time.'"

Williams became the key organizer, he says, because "by that time, I already was spending more time on it than I was on running my business. Plus, by '89-'90, we were in the middle of a recession, and there weren't a whole lot of cabinets to build anyhow. The handwriting seemed to be on the wall, that I was going to be the person to try to do this."

Williams admits that he,s taken some criticism for making his living as an activist. But he comments, "It's not a career move I planned on. I've been doing this full-time now for 11 years. I make $32,000 a year, gross. That's my salary after 11 years. I don't do it for the money. I've got to have money to live. I don't think there's anything wrong with working 70 hours a week in the best interests of this community, and getting compensated for it at well-below market value."

Williams' critics also tend to be incinerator supporters, he adds. "That's the common denominator. If they don't like what I'm doing, then everything I'm doing they don't like. Like getting paid to do it, or going to Washington and testifying."

Undaunted, Williams was scheduled to be back in Washington this week to appear before a National Academy committee about suspected cover-ups of nerve-agent leaks. The Chemical Weapons Working Group helped prompt the investigation, according to Williams, just like the Army,s 1997 study of alternative technologies for destroying nerve agents -- which Williams counts as one of his group's successes.

That study was "a congressionally-mandated project undertaken by the Pentagon, but there's been a significant amount of citizen involvement in it, which is unique," he describes. Alternative technologies will cost about the same or less than as incineration, Williams adds, alleging that the Army has been underestimating the cost of incineration nationwide "by up to $10 billion above the $15 billion they're claiming it's going to cost."

But on the local level, the Army's trying to do better, partly in response to the nerve-agent controversy, Williams believes. "In fact, the Bluegrass Army Depot is one of the leaders in alternative methods for its old activities that created a risk," he admits. "You know they used to blow old ordinance up all the time. Now they,re bringing in salts and technology to get rid of that stuff without blowing it up.

"I have never had anything against that depot itself," Williams adds. "I've always tried to say that, and even publicly showed my appreciation many times for the folks who are watching this chemical weapons stockpile while we're figuring out what to do with it. The people I have a problem with are back East, up at the Department of the Army."