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Thirty miles south of Lexington 523 tons of chemical weapons, including VX, called the world's deadliest substance, sit in bunkers at the Blue Grass facility near Richmond.
Less than 100 miles west of Indianapolis, 1,269 tons of VX are stored in casks, also in bunkers, at the Newport depot.
Under international treaty, those sites and several others are supposed to be free of their death-dealing chemicals by April 2007. The terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, heightened government concerns over the potential vulnerability of the chemical weapons and the need to get rid of them.
The Blue Grass and Newport projects appear to be making headway after years of delays over community opposition to burning the chemicals.
"I've been pretty pleased with how things are going right now," said Jeanne Hibberd, a fund-raiser for Berea College, which is not far from the Kentucky weapons facility.
Government officials charged with disposing of the chemicals and community activists like Hibberd who wanted to ensure the job is done safely have resolved a 19-year argument over Blue Grass. They share optimism that the work, a neutralization process still in the design stages, is on the right track.
IN NEWPORT, a treatment facility has been built and is undergoing final testing. Neutralizing the VX there could start as soon as January, said Terry Arthur, spokeswoman for the Newport Chemical Depot. There is a snag, however, over where the byproduct should go.
Even so, "I have confidence in the neutralization process," said Sara Morgan, of Montezuma, Ind., a teacher at Rockville Elementary School, about 10 miles from the chemical depot. Active on the disposal issue for a dozen years, Morgan's father worked at the depot when it was making the chemicals 35 years ago, but he couldn't tell anyone what was going on, she said.
As happened at Blue Grass, her local group, Citizens Against Incineration at Newport, pressured the government to find a better way to get rid of its dangerous stockpile.
"When the public gets involved, if you let them have serious involvement and treat them like they've got half a grain of sense, they can work with you and it can be done," Morgan said.
Overall, the disposal program run by the Army and Department of Defense hasn't had a great track record, according to a report released in September by the General Accounting Office, the nonpartisan auditing arm of Congress. Even today, the program "remains in turmoil," the GAO said.
Auditors found that schedules for disposing of chemical weapons could slip and costs rise, as they have already for years, because of an absence of strategic planning, lack of sustained leadership at the top levels and myriad organizational problems.
"We thought this was going to be relatively straightforward," Assistant Army Secretary Claude Bolton told the House Armed Services subcommittee on terrorism, unconventional threats and capabilities last month. "Perhaps we were naive."
Despite that, the United States is further ahead in its chemical weapons disposal program than other nations, he said.
"We are making progress — not as fast as I would like — but we are making progress," Bolton said.
The work at Blue Grass is complicated. The chemicals are in weapons, including rockets, artillery shells and land mines.
"These weapons are really sturdy and aren't meant to be taken apart — they were meant to be used," said Mickey Morales, spokesman for Bechtel Parsons Blue Grass, the contractor chosen to dispose of the weapons. "You don't just punch a hole and drain it."
THE ARSENAL includes about 91 tons of mustard agent made either before or during World War II; nearly 306 tons of GB, also known as sarin, a nerve agent; and 127 tons of VX, a drop of which can kill a person in about three minutes.
The government's plan to incinerate the chemical weapons at Blue Grass ran up against community activists, environmentalists and others, including Kentucky members of Congress. The opponents said such a process posed a danger to an estimated 52,000 people who live within a 6.2-mile radius of the depot. That radius is the zone considered most at risk of exposure in an accidental release of chemicals.
Last November the Department of Defense relented and settled on a new technology that will neutralize the chemicals, first by mixing them with water or a caustic chemical, then superheating the mix to produce water, carbon dioxide and various kinds of salts.
Craig Williams, director of the Chemical Weapons Working Group, a national group based in Berea, Ky., that fought the original incineration plan at Blue Grass and has battled similar plans in other communities, said the $2 billion project has found solid footing at last.
"THERE ARE four basic ingredients here that have to mix ... in order to execute this thing correctly — the government side, the contractor side, the community side and the regulatory side," Williams said. "At the moment, I'm very comfortable about all four of those elements."
Hibberd, a representative on the new Chemical Destruction Community Advisory Board, which will work with the government as the Blue Grass disposal process advances, said defense officials aren't as reluctant to deal with the community as they once were.
"They're being a lot more open with the public about what's going on, and trying to involve people and keep the information flow going," she said.
The Blue Grass project is "going great. ... Things are on track," said Bill Pehlivanian, deputy manager of the Department of Defense's Assembled Chemical Weapons Alternatives Program, which oversees the Blue Grass project.
Initial design of the disposal facility is scheduled for early 2005; construction will take about three years, followed by testing of the technology. If all goes as planned, weapons disposal could start around 2010, with completion by 2012, although some estimates say it could be 2014, Pehlivanian said.
"The main thing is to destroy the weapons safely and efficiently, to keep folks informed and to give the government good value for the money," Morales said.
In Newport, the VX will be mixed with a water and hydroxide solution, which will convert the chemical to a less harmful substance. Unlike at Blue Grass, the VX is only in casks, not in weapons. That means the time to neutralize all of the VX could be as short as 71/2 months "if everything goes absolutely right from the day we start up," said Arthur, the depot's spokeswoman.
But the $1 billion project has not yet resolved what will happen to the byproduct, which is called hydrolysate. The original plan was to ship the 300,000 gallons of hydrolysate to a site in Dayton, Ohio, for disposal, but public officials and environmental groups there have objected. The byproduct would be about as toxic as household drain cleaner.
"We are re-examining our options," Arthur said, stressing that the treatment of the VX would begin in any case.
Morgan said transporting the byproduct "should be the very last option."
"We don't want other communities endangered even by the hydrolysate if it doesn't have to be that way," she said.
It appears that the most likely short-term solution will be to store the byproduct at the depot until additional methods are devised to treat it further, Morgan said.
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