Local News
Posted: Thursday, January 26, 2012
Weapons destruction moving slowly
Pentagon delays costly to local program.
By John Norton | The Pueblo Chieftain
Pueblo still would be some distance from the finish line in the drive to destroy chemical weapons, but it would be a lot closer had there not been a costly gap in activity seven years ago.
On Saturday, the last mustard agent weapons stored at Utah’s Deseret Chemical Depot were incinerated, leaving only the stockpiles at the Pueblo Chemical Depot and Bluegrass Army Depot in Kentucky, neither of which will be destroyed for several years.
Irene Kornelly, chairwoman of the Colorado Chemical Demilitarization Citizens Advisory Commission, said Tuesday that if Pueblo’s program had proceeded on schedule, “We would probably have been in the middle of the program or maybe even further along.”
The Defense Department put on the brakes in 2005, when it balked at the lifetime cost estimate developed by Bechtel, the lead contractor.
Bechtel had designed a plant based on an order from former Undersecretary of Defense Pete Aldridge to accelerate weapons destruction efforts in the wake of the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks. But by 2005, those fears had cooled and the Pentagon was more worried about the annual costs.
Back then, estimates were that the accelerated plan would cost $2.6 billion, a billion dollars more than originally planned. Bechtel was told to scale back the size of the plant, which also would mean extending the time frame. It would be two more years before contracts again were awarded for construction work.
Local observers pointed out at the time that the delay likely would increase the lifetime costs.
The estimate now stands at $3.6 billion.
“It turned out to be not only more costly but schedule-wise, not as good for us,” Kornelly said.
It also meant that for close to three years, the United States would not be reducing the remaining stockpiles.
That gap was a big concern two years ago, prompting Defense Department officials to look at getting an early start here, destroying 125,000 of the 780,000 weapons in explosion chambers rather than having them go through the water-neutralization process that the plant was built to perform.
The argument was that it would be an act of good faith toward the other treaty nations and prove that the United States was not reneging on its obligation.
As things turned out, the only country that made an issue of the delay was Iran during a meeting of the Organization for the Prevention of Chemical Weapons late last year in The Hague, Netherlands.
The other member nations chose not to penalize either the United States or Russia, the other country still behind schedule, but encouraged them to get the job done as soon as possible.
By then, the Army already had backed off the idea of blowing up such a large number of weapons after it stirred up another storm locally and its environmental assessment came under fire from the Environmental Protection Agency.
It’s been acknowledged that some weapons will have to be destroyed by explosive means and another environmental assessment of several alternatives is under way. At least 500 weapons that were penetrated for testing and leakers, along with an unknown number that may not be able to be disarmed by robotic systems now being installed, will have to go through some other process.
ACWA plans to do that with all the mustard agent weapons at the Bluegrass Army Depot, the only other remaining stockpile, and is studying its options there, too.
Bluegrass has only 15,000 mustard agent weapons — the bulk of its stockpile is made up of rockets with nerve agents, which will go through a water neutralization process.
norton@chieftain.com