Army might blow up some chemical weapons
versions of this story has appeaered in papers around the country

BY JEFFREY MCMURRAY FEBRUARY 19, 2010

RICHMOND, Ky. — Under the gun to destroy the U.S. chemical weapons stockpiles — and now all but certain to miss their deadline — Army officials have a plan to hasten the process: Blow some of them up.

The plan calls for the Army to use explosives to destroy some of the Cold War-era weapons, which contain some of the nastiest compounds ever made, at facilities in Richmond and Pueblo, Colo., that beat back another combustion-based plan years ago.

“Explosions of any kind have never been on the table,” said Craig Williams, director of the Chemical Weapons Working Group, a citizens’ advocacy organization that monitors plans for weapons destruction at the Bluegrass Army Depot near Richmond. “This is not a technology that I would have chosen for this job. However, if using it significantly reduces the risk to the workforce, we need to give it serious consideration.”

Exploding the weapons would require a federal assessment of the potential environmental impact of the operations. The state of Kentucky would then have to issue a permit, Williams said.

Of course, Congress also could decide to direct the military to abandon the idea, he said.

But the community still needs a fuller assessment by military of how many potential problem rounds there are, Williams said. And more data is needed on the explosion processes used in Europe and planned for use at chemical weapons facilities in Alabama and Utah, Williams said.

“We’ve got some time to look at this,” he said.

Environmentalists who years ago successfully blocked a plan to burn weapons containing mustard agent say blowing up some of the weapons in a detonation chamber would be worse than burning them.

They argue that the plan violates the Army's promise to dispose of the mustard agent at the two sites by neutralizing it — a process that involves mixing it with water and either bacteria or a combination of fuel and superheated air — and taking it to a hazardous waste dump. That takes longer than simply destroying the weapons by explosion.

“It's taking a bad technology we fought for a decade and a half to get them to abandon here and telling us now they want to put in something worse,” said Ross Vincent of the Sierra Club in Colorado.

In Richmond, word about the plan to use explosives hasn't generated nearly the reaction as when the Army pushed for incineration some 25 years ago. Even some residents who were active then hadn't heard of the Army's latest proposal.

“It's so scary — just the unknown,” said Elise Melrood, an art teacher who lives about four miles from Blue Grass Army Depot. “I'm not sure I'd trust what is going to happen when they do this.”

Richmond has far fewer chemical weapons than Pueblo but a wider variety, including the deadly nerve gases sarin and VX. Of the 15,500 mustard rounds housed at the Kentucky depot, as many as 9,300 could be corroded and therefore considered a risk to workers if they leaked and required emergency repairs.

Blue Grass is now scheduled to be the nation's last chemical weapons stockpile to be destroyed, beginning in 2018 and finishing in 2021.
Neutralization will be used for most of the weapons. But the Army surprised citizen groups late last year with a plan to supplement those efforts by exploding some mustard weapons both places, and possibly even some nerve agent in Kentucky.

The Army acknowledges that exploding chemical weapons in Pueblo and Richmond will at best shave a few months off the completion date and still come nowhere close to complying with the treaty.

“I wouldn't say it provides much acceleration,” Kevin Flamm, the Army's program manager for neutralization operations at the two sites, said during briefings in December. “What it does is give us increased confidence we'll be able to achieve the dates we announced.”
Flamm said using explosives wasn't his first choice either.

“We're not trying to pull the wool over anybody's eyes,” he said. “Frankly there aren’t any other technologies we've found that can eliminate these weapons safely and environmentally friendly in the time frame we're looking at.”

Reporter James R. Carroll contributed to this story.