A Defense Department directive to the Army has raised the possibility that chemical weapons from Kentucky and Colorado could be shipped to the Pine Bluff Arsenal in Arkansas for destruction.

But officials in Richmond, Ky., home to the Blue Grass Army Depot, drafted an ordinance this week that would levy fines and impound any vehicle that hauls weapons-related chemicals on city streets.

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

An incinerator has been built at the Pine Bluff Arsenal to destroy 3,850 tons of chemical weapons stored there, beginning next month.

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

But Blue Grass and a chemical-weapons storage site at Pueblo, Colo., don't have incinerators. The additional costs of the war in Iraq mean that money may not be available soon to build those systems.

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

In Richmond, violators of the proposed ordinance could be fined $2,500 to $5,000.

"My greatest hope is that every city in America will adopt this ordinance and maybe slow this thing down," Richmond Mayor Connie Lawson said Thursday.

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 has been made. "This is just an evaluation, a `what-if.'"

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 it 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.

The weapons at the 15,500-acre Blue Grass depot include the nerve agents sarin and VX.