Indianapolis Monthly
October 2001

BY WILL ALLISON

Just 58 miles west of Indianapolis, the Newport Chemical Depot houses enough of the nerve agent VX to kill every person on earth. For years, the Army and local citizens clashed over how to dispose of it. Now they're on the same page, but recent delays are raising concerns about the Army's ability to destroy the stockpile by a 2007 treaty deadline. Until then, Indiana can only hold its breath and wait.
To get to the Newport Chemical Depot from Indianapolis, you head west on U.S. 36, also known as Rockville Road or, once you hit Parke County, the Ernie Pyle Memorial Highway, named for World War II's most famous newspaper correspondent, a native of Dana, Indiana. The trip takes about 90 minutes. You pass through the historic town squares of Danville and Rockville, plus a handful of even smaller communities, but mostly it's corn and soybean fields. Along the way, you might get stuck behind an Amish buggy or glimpse one of the famous covered bridges of Parke County (home of the Turkey Run Lady Warriors, 1996 IHSAA softball champions).
The depot sits a couple miles north of 36 on U.S. 63, between the Wabash River and the Illinois state line. It's one of Vermillion County's top employers, along with businesses such as Wal-Mart, Hog Slat (a maker of hog-farming equipment), and the Eli Lilly manufacturing plant (the area's biggest employer). You'll know you're getting close to the depot when you see the giant emergency speakers mounted on telephone poles. In the gently rolling hills west of the river, the speakers are the only indication that youíre approaching the world's largest stockpile of the world's deadliest nerve agent. It's called VX, and since the Vietnam War era, the Army has stored more than 2.5 million pounds of it on a site nestled between the towns of Newport and Clinton.
From the front door of her house in nearby Montezuma, three and a half miles to the east, schoolteacher Sara Morgan can see the tower lights of the Newport Chemical Depot.
"Where I live is called the 'immediate response zone,'" she says, "but back before the Army learned about public relations, they called it the 'dead zone.'"
The immediate response zone, or IRZ, extends 6 to 9 miles from the depot and designates the area in which residents are advised to take immediate cover in case of what the Army calls a "chemical event." In other words, officials don't anticipate having time to evacuate this area.
Sara Morgan grew up in these parts. A teacher for 26 years, she's also the spokesperson for Citizens Against Incineration at Newport (CAIN), a local group that opposed the Army's plan to dispose of the VX stockpile by burning it, a process locals feared would pose health and environmental dangers. Sitting in her classroom at Rockville Elementary, Morgan is wearing stretchy blue pants and a shirt picturing Winnie the Pooh's friend Eeyore. Summer session is over, and she's in a talkative mood. (The reason she was chosen to be CAIN's spokesperson, she explains, is because she likes to talk.) She says her husband, a paper mill worker, isn't a member of CAIN, but he's more tolerant of her activism than he used to be. "When I first got involved, he said, 'What do you think you're going to do? You're dealing with the government, the Army.' I told him, 'I don't want to look out my front door and see an [incinerator] cooling tower and wonder if it could have been stopped.'"
As it turns out, she and the other members of CAIN did stop incineration, convincing the Army to find what most people agree is a safer method of destroying the stockpile. It wasn't easy; there were heated meetings with Army officials, letter-writing campaigns, a petition drive, and intense lobbying on the federal, state, and local levels. Along the way, Army officials learned better than to try and bully the gabby schoolmarm with the big, loopy smile. Morgan leans back in her chair and laughs and shakes her head. She says she didn't used to be the political type. "If you'd met me when I was younger," she says, "you'd never have guessed I'd end up doing this."
Back then, Morgan didn't even know what VX was. During the Cold War, when her father was an operator in the depot's power plant, workers weren't allowed to discuss the explosives and chemical weapons manufactured there. It wasn't until the mid 1980s, when the Army announced plans to destroy its chemical weapons, that locals really began to learn about VX.
The nerve agent VX is a member of the organo-phosphate family, similar to present-day pesticides. Think of it as an extremely effective pesticide for humans (though it reportedly has never been used on people). Up until this year, Indianapolis Star reporters typically referred to VX as "nerve gas" (as did a local TV reporter this spring), but it's actually an oily, odorless, straw-colored liquid that can become an aerosol (through explosion) or a vapor (through ignition).
VX can enter the body by inhalation, ingestion, through the eyes, or through the skin. Depending on the dosage and type of exposure, it can kill you within minutes or hours. The mean lethal dose--the amount of VX capable of killing half of the people exposed to it--is only 10 milligrams, a drop so small it barely covers two columns of the Lincoln Memorial on the back of a U.S. penny. The Newport stockpile consists of about 116 billion mean lethal doses, enough to kill the world's population (roughly 6.1 billion people) many times over.
VX was invented by British chemists in 1952 at the Bacteriological and Chemical Warfare Research Centre in Porton Down, Wiltshire, England. The British didn't produce the nerve agent in mass quantities, though; instead, they opted to share their invention with the United States in exchange for information about thermonuclear weapons. Though VX is relatively easy to manufacture, only three countries are known to possess it--the United States, France, and Russia.
Of the man-made nerve agents (including Tabun, Sarin, and Soman), VX is the most potent, considered to be at least 100 times more toxic than Sarin by entry through the skin and twice as toxic by inhalation. VX is also the least volatile and most persistent nerve agent. It evaporates 1,500 times more slowly than water and is capable of contaminating whole landscapes for weeks. You could keep an open glass of it sitting on your desk and suffer no ill effects, but if a tiny drop of VX were placed on the cover of the magazine you're holding right now--and if you happened to touch that tiny drop--you would probably die.
Nerve agents such as VX are designed to kill people by binding up a compound called acetylcholinesterase, the body's "off switch." Without this compound, the body's "on switch" (acetylcholine) continually stimulates your glands and voluntary muscles until they give out. Though the order of symptoms may vary, exposure to a nerve agent typically results in a runny nose and watery eyes followed by drooling, excessive sweating, tightness of the chest, difficulty in breathing, dimness of vision, nausea, vomiting, cramps, and the loss of bladder and bowel control. You then experience twitching, jerking, and staggering accompanied by headache, confusion, and drowsiness. Finally you go into a coma, suffer convulsions, and die. Two known antidotes exist, but they must be administered very soon after contact and in precise doses. Unless you happen to carry a military Mark I kit containing auto-injectors, the antidotes won't do you much good.
The Army has safely maintained the Newport stockpile for more than 30 years, and despite the horrific potential of VX, the chances of an accident are very, very slim. The heavily guarded stockpile is stored in 1,690 cylindrical carbon steel casks called tonne containers, after the original French manufacturer, Tonne. They're commonly referred to as "ton containers" (though an empty one weighs only .8 tons) or simply TCs. For all its nastiness, VX is non-corrosive and, left undisturbed, could be stored in TCs indefinitely. The TCs are 82 inches long and 30.5 inches in diameter, with half-inch-thick sidewalls and three-quarter-inch concave ends that protect the fill and drain valves. They're stacked three high and clamped together in long rows inside the depot's Building 144, a corrugated sheet-metal warehouse with steel beams and a sealed concrete floor. (Back in the days of VX production, Building 144 is where the Army assembled and filled munitions with the agent. Until 1977, the TCs were kept in a parking lot.) The storage area has a fire-prevention system and detection systems that monitor the air 24 hours a day for signs of a leak. Building 144 is also secured by two fences (both topped with razor wire), monitors, alarms, and armed guards (not Army soldiers, but employees of the Mason and Hanger Corporation; the depot is a government-owned, contractor-operated military installation).
Once a month, the building is opened for maintenance, a visual inspection of the TCs, and tours for the occasional journalist or VIP. Visiting the stockpile is serious business. Before entering Building 144, you are issued a green canvas kit containing three auto-injectors of VX antidote and an M40 gas mask, which is computer-tested on the spot to ensure that it fits properly. The gas masks are not de rigueur inside the building; they're issued in case of an accident. (The final portion of the gas-mask test involves wearing the mask and jogging in place to ensure that the mask will retains its seal if you have to sprint from the building.) Visitors must then pass through an elaborate entry-control facility (a "sally port," in Army parlance) manned by highly trained, armed guards. Surveillance equipment is everywhere. The signs on the fence say USE OF DEADLY FORCE AUTHORIZED.
Despite all the safeguards, the Army admits the stockpile is not impenetrable. A fire or explosion is the main threat, because that's what it would take to turn liquid VX into a deadly aerosol or vapor cloud--the possible outcome of a lightning strike, tornado, terrorist attack, or plane crash (hijacked or otherwise). Major Christopher Isaacson is the depot's commander and its only uniformed Army officer. A beefy 37-year-old with a sharp stare and an earnest voice, he's halfway through a two-year assignment at the depot. According to Isaacson, three conditions would have to be met for the community to be endangered: 1) a breach of the storage building, 2) a sustained fire, and 3) winds capable of carrying a VX cloud beyond the boundaries of the 7,098-acre installation.
How far could the wind carry such a cloud? Indianapolis is downwind and almost due east of Newport, but according to Phil Roberts, deputy director of the State Emergency Management Agency (SEMA), a disaster at the depot would have to involve "extremely high heat, and it would have to be extremely windy" for a VX cloud to pose a threat to Indianapolis. But this is a theoretical extreme. In practical terms, no one expects anything to happen beyond a 30-mile radius--the worst-case-scenario distance cited in the federal guidelines upon which SEMA's emergency plans are based. Beyond the IRZ lies the protective action zone, or PAZ, which extends up to 30 miles from the depot and encompasses the area that would be evacuated in the event of a disaster. The chances of a VX cloud moving beyond the PAZ, says Roberts, are "basically nil."
The Newport Chemical Depot is not a scary-looking place. Except for the busy construction site where contractors are building the facility that will destroy the VX stockpile, it's quiet and mostly deserted. Endangered species such as the bald eagle, osprey, upland sandpiper, sandhill crane, Virginia rail, Henslow's sparrow, sedge wren, and Indiana bat have been sighted there. More than half of the land--approximately 3,511 acres--is leased to local farmers. Forest occupies another 1,900 acres. Native prairie restoration efforts were started in 1994 and encompass approximately 126 acres. Scattered here and there are reminders of the depot's history--the skeletal remains of a TNT plant, overgrown railroad tracks, 52 earthen mounds encasing magazines where munitions were once stored. Gone are the 150 farm and home sites (along with a school and two churches) that were displaced when the Army established the Wabash Valley Ordnance Works in 1942. (The depot covered 22,000 acres then.) Six cemeteries remain.
Over the years, the depot has been known by many names, but its job has always been the same: to produce weapons and weapons-related products for the Army--RDX explosives during World War II, heavy water to support the Manhattan Project in the development of nuclear weapons, and TNT during the Vietnam War. Between 1961 and 1968, the Army manufactured its entire supply of VX at Newport. Munitions arrived by rail, were filled with VX, and then shipped to strategic, classified sites around the world. (Even the exact size of the stockpile was classified until 1994.) These munitions included land mines, rockets, 8-inch projectiles, and spray tanks designed to be mounted like crop dusters on the bottom of planes, spraying VX as if it were an herbicide. All of these munitions were designed to spread VX in its aerosol form. A VX vapor, while deadly, disperses too quickly, whereas the sticky droplets in a VX aerosol cloud make for an effective and long-lasting "weapon of denial"--so named because it would deny the enemy the ability to use the contaminated area.
The manufacture of VX at Newport ceased in 1968, when Congress halted production of all chemical weapons. Shortly thereafter, Congress placed a moratorium on shipping these weapons, effectively transforming Newport into a de facto storage site for its two final--and purest--batches of VX.
Unlike Sara Morgan, Rainer Zangerl can't see the tower lights of the depot from his front door. His house is farther away than hers (about 7.5 miles) but still within the IRZ. Zangerl came to the United States in 1936 after earning his Ph.D. in paleontology from the University of Zurich. For 30 years he was a curator at the Field Museum of Natural History in Chicago. In the 1970s, when he retired, he and his wife fell in love with 71 acres of wooded land off U.S. 36. They bought the property. The house they built sits at the end of a narrow dirt road that dips across a culvert and winds through the woods past various dilapidated outbuildings. Today, the white-haired, 88-year-old widower shares the house with Schnapps, his barrel-chested Labrador retriever.
"When I bought this place," Zangerl says, "I had no idea there was anything remotely dangerous in Newport. Nobody did." It's a hot morning in late June, and Zangerl is sitting at a table in his living room in a white T-shirt, suspenders, brown corduroy pants, and tan loafers. Hummingbirds flit at the feeder just outside the window while Schnapps lounges in a slice of sunshine on the floor. "At the time, the Army was very hush-hush about VX. There were no serious plans in case of an emergency."
Word about VX began to spread in 1985, when Congress ordered the Army to destroy its chemical weapons. The following year, the Army announced plans to incinerate stockpiles at its eight storage sites in the United States. Zangerl was among a handful of local residents hired by the Army to read Army-produced materials and make recommendations on the incineration plans at Newport--"essentially a PR job," Zangerl says. But rather than rubber-stamp the Army's plan, the Newport Study Group used its 140-page report, issued in 1987, to express serious reservations about incinerating VX. In addition to concerns about air and ground pollution, they worried that the heat and pressure used during incineration would increase the chances of an accidental explosion--the kind of explosion that would result in a toxic aerosol cloud.
"Given the prevailing winds, which are mostly from the west and southwest, we figured everyone east of the plant--all the way to Indianapolis--would be in danger," Zangerl says.
Shortly after the report was issued, Zangerl joined a local anti-incineration group, but its members became discouraged as the Army forged ahead with its plan to incinerate. Soon, the only people still fighting incineration were Zangerl and a local pharmacist named Mark Hudson, a co-author of the Newport Study Group report. Their perseverance paid off in the early 1990s when more citizens, including Sara Morgan, stepped forward and helped to found CAIN. Similar organizations were springing up at other proposed incineration sites across the country, and in 1994, in response to public pressure and lobbying, the Army began to investigate alternative ways of destroying its chemical weapons at Newport and at Aberdeen, Maryland (the only two stockpiles where nerve agents are stored in bulk, with no munitions).
One such alternative--neutralization--is a three-step process whereby VX is chemically transformed into a harmless brine liquid. First the VX is drained from its tonne container and the container is cleaned. Second, the VX is mixed with hot sodium hydroxide and water, a four-hour process that destroys the agent and produces hydrolysate, a smelly sulfurous liquid about as toxic as Drain-O. (Hydrolysate is not unique to VX neutralization; it's the general name given to any product of hydrolysis, a chemical process of decomposition involving the splitting of a bond and the addition of water.) In the third step, the hydrolysate is treated using a technology called supercritical water oxidation (referred to as "SCWO," which rhymes with "crow") that results in a brine liquid that can be disposed of at an off-site facility that handles hazardous waste. The neutralization process is cheaper and, by most accounts, safer than incineration.
In 1997, with the support of area residents, the Army recommended neutralization for the Newport stockpile. Three years later, Zangerl stood at the depot a few hundred yards from the double security fences that surrounds Building 144. He was wearing a hard hat, holding a shovel, and smiling for the cameras. Fourteen years after he'd first gotten involved with VX, he'd been invited to participate in the ceremonial groundbreaking of a $295-million neutralization facility--another bit of Army PR, but this time, it was also PR for the community's victory against incineration.
On April 29, 1997, the United States joined 87 nations in ratifying the Chemical Weapons Convention treaty, which mandates that participants destroy all of their chemical weapons by 2007. The treaty deadline didn't look to be a problem for Newport. Under the original timetable, the VX stockpile was slated to be neutralized by the end of 2004, well in advance of the 2007 deadline.
But complications arose earlier this year, and on May 16, the Army announced it was seven months behind schedule at Newport. Then, on September 11, the Army announced an additional delay, pushing the target date for disposal of the stockpile to June 2006. What's more, the budget for the taxpayer-funded facility had ballooned from $295 million to an estimated $750 million.
According to site manager Chuck Galloway--the man in charge of destroying the stockpile--the construction delays were the result of a harsh winter, a lack of materials (including the absence of a suitable concrete supplier), and technical problems. At a pilot plant in Corpus Christi, Texas, Army contractors had run into trouble while testing SCWO, the third and final step of the neutralization process, in which the liquid by-product hydrolysate is transformed into brine. Only the first two steps of the process (emptying the TCs and neutralizing the VX) need to be completed for treaty compliance, but a breakdown of the SCWO reactor could have the effect of a traffic jam, backing up the whole process and causing major delays. Based on tests using a 1/10 engineering-scale model of a SCWO reactor, the contractors discovered they didn't have parts and materials capable of withstanding the extremely caustic environment inside the full-scale version they hoped to build at Newport. Subsequently, the National Research Council (NRC)--part of the National Academy of Sciences, which has independent oversight of the Army's Chemical Weapons Disposal Program--reviewed the pilot tests and issued two reports expressing concern about possible SCWO delays.
Fortunately, there are alternatives to SCWO. Commercial toxic-waste disposal facilities can effectively treat VX hydrolysate using incineration or a process called deep-well injection. (While the members of CAIN oppose incineration of VX, they have no objection to incinerating the comparatively benign hydrolysate, provided it's done at a facility with appropriate environmental permits, and provided the Army conducts public outreach in the community where the facility is located.)
Army contractors still have their hearts set on SCWO, but they're no longer betting the farm on it. As of early August, the Army said it planned to adopt a "parallel strategy" in which it would continue developing SCWO while also pursuing the option of off-site disposal. The Army has also modified the design of the disposal facility to include expanded on-site tanks where hydrolysate can be temporarily stored in case of a SCWO breakdown, thus allowing the neutralization of VX to continue on schedule. And that, says Galloway, is what matters most. "The key thing is that we are not going to miss the treaty date."
Nobody is happy about the delays, but there seems to be a general sense that the Army is acting in good faith, proceeding as quickly as possible without compromising safety.
"The Army is just trying to make sure they're doing the right thing," says Patrick Ralston, the governor-appointed director of the State Emergency Management Agency. "I think they're better off doing that than plowing ahead and taking chances."
Despite her history of head butting with the Army, Sara Morgan isn't very alarmed, either. "I don't think it really bothers anyone," she says. "We understand the delays are mostly weather- and procurement-related. We understand they're working to resolve the problems with SCWO."
But Ron Shepard, mayor of Clinton, is less optimistic. Located just 15 miles south of the depot, Clinton is the biggest town in Vermillion County, with a population of about 5,000. After the first delay was announced, Shepard publicly expressed frustration and doubted the Army's ability to meet the treaty deadline at Newport. (A year earlier, congressional investigators had predicted the U.S. would miss the treaty deadline at two other stockpile sites in Kentucky and Colorado.) The Indianapolis Star was concerned about the setbacks at Newport, too. In an editorial on June 3, assistant editorial-page editor Larry MacIntyre declared that "the destruction of this terrible substance must not be delayed any longer."
MacIntyre had also expressed concerns about the stockpile two months earlier in an opinion-and-commentary piece (one in which he erroneously stated that the VX stockpile is stored in "sheds" and in which he failed to make clear the necessary role of fire in creating a VX disaster, thereby over-emphasizing the dangers posed by rust and corrosion). What drew the ire of Newport officials was MacIntyre's assertion that the Army "is moving at a glacially slow pace to get rid of this chemical nightmare."
"He alluded to us dragging our feet out here," says Major Isaacson. "That was one thing we wanted to clear up. It may appear to the public that we're working slowly, but we're taking whatever time we need to make sure that this is done safely."
Safety is MacIntyre's main concern too, but he sees things differently. "You have to weigh the danger of keeping [the stockpile] in place against the dangers of a less-than-ideal method of destroying it," he says. "In my opinion, the danger of keeping it in place for several more tornado seasons far outweighs the environmental risks of burning it. I wish we'd burned it 10 years ago."
In his op-ed piece, MacIntyre wrote that "the Army meekly caved in to incinerator opponents," and in his editorial, he asserted that the destruction of VX "has already been delayed for over a decade because of well-intentioned but uninformed protests against an on-site incinerator" and that it was a "mistake" not to burn the stockpile "when we had the chance."
But even if local residents had gone along with the Army's plan to incinerate, it's not as though Indiana would be rid of VX by now. Under the Army's original schedule, Newport would have been the last of the eight sites to burn its stockpile, finishing up at the end of 2005.
Incineration is a moot point in Newport today, but it's not in other communities across the country. That's one reason MacIntyre's ex post facto support of incineration has ruffled feathers among members of CAIN, who have worked closely with the anti-incineration Chemical Weapons Working Group (CWWG), an international coalition of citizens who live near chemical-weapons storage sites in the United States, the Pacific, and Russia.
In making his case for incineration, MacIntyre says that the Army's chemical-weapons incinerators at Tooele, Utah, and Johnston Island in the Pacific Ocean "have worked just fine." This point is open to much debate. Yes, the incinerators have successfully destroyed chemical weapons, but have they done so without harming the environment and the people who live nearby? The EPA and Congress aren't convinced (Congress blocked incineration at two sites in 1996), and neither are citizens at the other stockpile sites (including Tooele), who continue to lobby against incineration.
The "uninformed" Newport protestors to whom MacIntyre refers were informed enough for Congress. Along with others, they successfully lobbied Congress to establish the Assembled Chemical Weapons Assessment (ACWA) program in 1997, which directed the Department of Defense to identify and demonstrate non-incineration technologies for chemical-weapons disposal.
As the public affairs officer at the Newport Chemical Depot, Terry Arthur is no stranger to bad press, but she was surprised by MacIntyre's editorial.
"In the past, all of the media took the public's side and opposed incineration," she says. "For the Indianapolis Star to take this pro-incineration stance, it's way delayed."
Arthur is a Department of Defense civilian, a non-active-duty Air Force employee. She has short red hair and a knack for speaking in memorable sound bites ("The commander owns the stockpile; Mr. Galloway is responsible for destroying it"). Once upon a time, during her 10 years of active duty, Arthur was a crew chief on B-52 bombers. After that, she worked in Davenport, Iowa, as a journalist, a job she'd like to try again some day. ("For now I'm the kind of person I was warned about in J-school," she says, "a journalist who turns to PR, someone who goes over to the other side.")
Though she is publicly a model of efficient professionalism, Arthur confides that when things at the depot get crazy--those days when she's juggling community meetings, speaking engagements, VIP visits, treaty inspectors, public tours, citizen and media queries--she will sometimes drive to a deserted corner of the installation, sit in her government-issued minivan, and scream. In her eight years at the depot, Arthur has worked with eight different commanders. When all is said and done, she's the person most responsible for maintaining the depot's relationship with the community.
During the fight over incineration, that relationship was quite strained, but things have settled down since. Arthur says that the Army has learned that it must be more forthcoming and more responsive to the community. In 1997, the depot established an outreach office in Newport that serves as an information clearinghouse on the chemical-stockpile disposal program. Citizens are invited to voice their concerns at the outreach office and at quarterly meetings of the Citizens' Advisory Commission (CAC), which relays those concerns to the governor's office. SEMA director Pat Ralston, who is also co-chair of the CAC, believes the Army has done a good job of fostering open communication with the public. Even Sara Morgan and Rainer Zangerl--who learned to be suspicious of the Army during the fight against incineration--feel better about relations with the depot now that plans for neutralization are moving forward. Mostly, though, nearby residents just want to get on with their lives.
"We're busy people," Morgan says. "I don't think you'd say we're unconcerned, but we can't worry about it all the time. We've just been living with it."
Jack Silotto, in his eleventh year as president of Vermillion's county council, agrees. "I'd say there are as many people concerned now as there were in the mid 1980s, but I don't think they have near the concerns they once had. We've dealt with this"
When it finally is over, Silotto and other local leaders are eager for the county to acquire the depot's land--more than 8,000 acres, including easements--which features excellent highway access, an on-site water supply, a sanitary sewer treatment facility, paved roads, and other infrastructure that make it very attractive to industry and businesses. Acquisition plans are already under way, with state and federal officials pledging their support and four task forces exploring ways to further develop the tract's agricultural, industrial, and wildlife areas. With all these plans in the works, nobody likes to think about the possibility of another delay, much less a VX disaster, but there's too much at stake to forget even for a second that the contents of Building 144 hold the potential to create the worst chemical disaster in the history of man.
For the three decades that the Army has stored VX in our state, public awareness of the stockpile at Newport has been sketchy at best. The manufacture of the nerve agent wasn't a secret in neighboring communities, but the Army didn't exactly publicize it, and the details--how much VX was produced, where it was shipped--were classified. In fact, it wasn't until 1994 that the Army revealed exactly how much VX is stored at Newport. Outside of Vermillion County, some Indiana residents have had a vague notion that there is some kind of chemical stored somewhere in the state, but most of us have ignored the VX stockpile in our collective backyard.
When the U.S. came under terrorist attack in September, the stockpile became much harder to ignore. As the Eastern Seaboard was placed on high alert after hijacked planes crashed into the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, security was quietly tightened at the depot. Suddenly, the Army's worst-case scenarios for protecting the stockpile--such as defending it against a terrorist attack--seemed less theoretical, more real.
If everything goes according to plan, the VX stockpile will be destroyed by 2007. When VX was nothing but a vague worry to most of us, that timeline seemed fine. Now, with the nation in a state of heightened security, 2007 seems much farther away, and the chemical stockpile must be guarded more closely, its destruction likely to be monitored more vigilantly.
Of course, according to the people who live within sight of the depot, this is what should have happened years ago.