THE KANSAS CITY STAR
May 5, 2002

Chemical munitions languish in depots; Delays hamper efforts to destroy the toxic stockpiles

Byline: SCOTT CANON

HERMISTON, Ore. - Stainless steel tanks that look as if they
could haul bulk milk actually hold the makings of mustard gas, the
stuff that fashioned the special hell of World War I.

In more sinister packages - land mines, bombs, rockets, artillery
shells and spray tanks that could be employed crop-dusting style -
come the nerve agents.

For years they had been stored inside the heavily guarded
Umatilla Ordnance Depot, but above ground.

"After 9-11, we moved it all into the igloos for safety's
sake," said Umatilla spokeswoman Mary Binder, referring to
half-buried, steel-reinforced concrete bunkers.

All 3,717 tons.

And this is not America's biggest stockpile.

The end for these now-outlawed chemical weapons awaits in the
belly of an oven that will crank up to 2,500 degrees and cost more
than $2 billion to build and take apart. It is just now warming up.

Weapon destruction at Umatilla, if an ambitious schedule is met,
is on course to burn up the cache here by 2008.

Long before scientists played with the powers of busted atoms,
America amassed an unconventional arsenal of chemical weapons. It
kept them in depots deliberately spread across the country - so that
no single attack could wipe out the nation's cache.

Ever more chemical weapons - ostensibly held to scare enemies
from using such horrors against U.S. troops - were manufactured until
1968. By then, international pressure and public discomfort with the
idea of their use made them obsolete for a superpower.

Still, the stockpiles remained.

In 1985, Congress ordered the Army to start destroying all the
military's chemical munitions. Soon a plan was devised, priced at
$1.7 billion, to finish the job by 1994. By some government
estimates, the ticklish work is now likely to cost $24 billion and
stretch to 2016.

To avoid moving the dangerous stockpiles, and the near-certain
political upheaval along shipping routes, the Army decided to destroy
them at the depots where they sat.

The exception was the relatively small stash of 2,000 tons held
at American bases in Asia and Europe. Those weapons were hauled to an
atoll in the South Pacific outfitted with its own incinerator. The
burning on Johnston Island was finished in late 2000.

Civic groups routinely protested - and still do - the Army's
plans. The groups typically are alarmed at burning such killers and
are lobbying for chemical neutralization as a safer option.

Army officials insisted incinerator methods borrowed a safe and
proven method from the chemical industry to get rid of its stockpile.

The result has been a series of fits and starts putting the
destruction behind the schedule Congress promised to meet by
ratifying the Chemical Weapons Convention in 1997.

Yet the plans at Umatilla, for example, would complete the
incineration a year after the treaty's 2007 deadline. Nationwide, the
country is on course to finish the chemical weapons chore by 2016 -
well beyond even a probable five-year treaty extension.

At Tooele, Utah, burning of the largest stockpile of chemical
weapons in the country has been going on since 1996. Malfunctions
that released small amounts of a nerve agent have so far been
harmless, but those problems have confirmed fears of critics worried
about plants soon to fire up in more populated areas. They contend
that the Army isn't ready to protect civilians should an incineration
plant fail more significantly.

"In Alabama, you have 75,000 people in the 'pink zone' who would
be in quite a bit of trouble if the systems fail," Craig Williams,
director of the Chemical Weapons Working Group, said of the area
within 6.5 miles of a plant. The organization is a loose network of
local groups that generally prefer chemical neutralization to
incineration.

The neutralization approach renders the weapons harmless with
chemical processes. With the skin-blistering mustard agent, for
example, the liquid is diluted with water, and decomposing microbes
are mixed in.

The Army has given in to pressure to forgo incineration at its
Aberdeen, Md., and Newport, Ind., depots - where there is a single
kind of chemical agent at each site, and where the material is not
encased in artillery shells, land mines, spray tanks, rockets or
bombs.

But at places such as Umatilla and Pine Bluff, Ark., where
incineration is slated to start late next year, weapons need to be
drilled and drained by robots. The contaminated shell casings,
emptied rockets and other munitions still need to be destroyed, and
the Army insists that is best done by burning at a minimum of 1,000
degrees.

At Umatilla the weapons sit in partly buried bunkers, and some
have begun to leak. Others, such as the M-55 rocket, have long been
suspected to be on the verge of igniting themselves.

In February the plant fired up its incinerator for testing and to
heat-cure the structure. Weapons destruction could start in early
2003.

Phillip Harness, plant manager, said that a similar design had
performed without incident where he worked at Johnston Island. And
now that design has been refined.

"I'm confident this will work safely," he said.

To reach Scott Canon , national correspondent, call (816) 234-4754
or send e-mail to scanon@kcstar.com.