136th Year... and still on the job!	Friday July 29, 2005

Rocket fires could slow some chem demil work

The Pueblo Chemical Depot has one of the largest stockpiles of chemical weapons in the United States with 780,000 artillery shells and mortar rounds holding 2,611 tons of mustard agent.

But the destruction of those weapons could be one of the easier jobs faced by the Defense Department as it tries to comply with the terms of an international treaty that calls for their elimination by 2012.

Fires have broken out at the Umatilla Chemical Depot in Oregon and the Pine Bluff Arsenal in Arkansas while workers were cutting into rockets containing nerve agent as they were getting them ready for incineration.

It's believed that nitroglycerin in the rocket fuel had leaked and contaminated the rockets. Because of that, work at the Blue Grass Army Depot in Kentucky will be put on hold until a study is completed.

Both Blue Grass and Pueblo are part of the Assembled Chemical Weapons Alternatives program, which will use water neutralization to break down the chemical agents instead of incineration.

Blue Grass has more than 69,000 M55 rockets holding nerve agent, a poison much more dangerous than the mustard agent in the Pueblo weapons.

While nerve gas can kill, mustard is a blister agent that burns the skin and lungs. It has the potential to be deadly, but was used in World War I mainly to incapacitate enemy troops. The use of poison gas was banned by the Geneva Convention in 1925 and it was not used by the major combatants in World War II, although Japan and Italy reportedly used it in their respective invasions of China and Ethiopia.

Pueblo's stockpile consists of 155.mm and 105.mm artillery shells and mortar rounds. The explosive propellants, bags of powder for the shells and wafers for the mortar rounds, are stored with the weapons but are not an integral part of them.

The only explosive elements of the weapons here are the fuses and bursters that were made to blow up the shells and turn the agent into a gas cloud.

Those will be removed early in the weapons destruction process and Bechtel engineers are working on the plan for that now, called "advanced reconfiguration." The fuses and bursters, along with propellants, will be stored separately from the shells that still contain mustard agent and will be shipped to another location for recycling or destruction, as long as none are contaminated with mustard agent.

Bechtel originally planned to remove the fuses and bursters as the weapons were going into the water neutralization process but dropped that plan as part of an effort to reduce costs and reduce the amount of work done at the Pueblo plant.