02/15/04

Some of America's weapons of mass destruction hide in plain sight.

In 1986, before the Cold War was over, Congress ordered the Defense Department to destroy a 31,000-ton stockpile of chemical weapons, some dating to World War I. Then in 1997, the United States signed an international treaty agreeing to eliminate chemical weapons.

Today, almost three-fourths of the original stockpile is still here, sitting in depots spread across eight states. Efforts to destroy the poisons are years behind schedule and billions of dollars over budget estimates. The Pentagon concedes it will miss the 2007 deadline set in the 1997 treaty.

The military agencies created to eliminate the weapons have drawn fire from environmentalists and the wrath of congressional investigators who say the Army often fails to anticipate public opposition to various disposal schemes.

Officials in New Jersey say the latest example of the Army's tin ear is a proposal to ship a neutralized byproduct of the nerve agent VX from an Indiana depot to Salem County in New Jersey for further treatment before it is released into the Delaware River.

The only warning of the plan was a single legal advertisement in a Salem County newspaper the week before Christmas and a small notice posted in a local library. The letters "VX" did not appear.

"They are off on the wrong foot and then some," said Rep. Rob Andrews, a New Jersey Democrat whose district is farther north along the river. Andrews said he resents that he had no answers for constituents worried about the plan, which remains under study.

"If one blurb in the paper is a public notice, then I'm a 21-year-old beauty queen," said Sara Morgan, 62, a teacher who fought plans to incinerate the VX near her home in Indiana.

Morgan has questions about the fate of the nearly 1,300-ton stockpile at the Newport Chemical Agent Disposal Facility three miles from her front door in Montezuma, Ind.

Since its inception, America's program to rid itself of chemical weapons has been at odds with people who live near the places where the deadly compounds are stored - and where the Defense Department initially planned to burn them.

Public pressure helped derail plans to incinerate weapons in Indiana, Kentucky, Maryland and Colorado and contributed to delays in incineration operations in Alabama, Arkansas, Oregon and Utah.

Though the two Defense Department agencies assigned to destroy the weapons have made public participation in their plans a cornerstone of the program, people who live near weapons depots say dealing with the bureaucracy remains a challenge.

"To be fair, they've gotten a bit better because they've gotten burned by creating public uproar where there didn't need to be," said David Christian, an architect whose office in Anniston, Ala., is near a chemical weapons incinerator that began test burns in August in preparation for full- scale operations this year.

In Anniston, 35,000 people live within the "Pink Zone" - a nine-mile radius around the weapons incinerator. All were issued duct tape and protective hoods by public health officials. There have been no reports of releases of chemical agents into the atmosphere, as has happened at incinerators in Utah and on Johnston Atoll in the Pacific Ocean.

Military officials say they're working to dispose of weapons in a way that puts a premium on public safety and awareness.

"We have an open and transparent program," said Jeffrey Lindblad, a spokesman for the Army's Chemical Materials Agency.

He said all weapons destruction occurs under the scrutiny of environmental regulators as well as the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the National Research Council.

But the task of eliminating the massive and far-flung cache of deadly weapons has been daunting.

"When these things were developed, they didn't think about how to get rid of them; it wasn't in their plan," Lindblad said.

Even critics of America's weapons disposal programs agree with assessments by the National Research Council and other experts that the greatest risk lies in not destroying the stockpiles as soon as possible.

Leonard Cole, a Rutgers University chemical and biological warfare expert, said the stockpile has been plagued by occasional accidental releases of toxins and remains a ripe target for terrorists.

Congress' General Accounting Office has drafted more than 20 reports over the past decade critical of Defense Department management of the weapons disposal program, citing leadership turnover and delays caused by safety and environmental concerns as well as snags created by rocky community relations.

The Defense Department has said that in addition to failing to meet the 2007 deadline set by the International Chemical Weapons Convention Treaty for destruction of the weapons, it may also miss a five-year extension allowed by the treaty.

The General Accounting Office reports also noted cost overruns. The program, estimated to be $1.7 billion at its inception, was projected to cost $15 billion in 1998 and is now tagged at $25 billion.

Public resistance to weapons disposal projects continues.

The Army plan for the VX stockpile in Newport, Ind., was to mix it with water and sodium hydroxide to turn it into a compound called hydrolysate, then ship it to a commercial wastewater treatment plant. The plan is now on hold.

Though hydrolysate is no longer VX, before wastewater treatment the compound is a corrosive liquid that could burn skin. Its fumes could also damage lungs.

In October, after widespread public protest and two lawsuits, the county government in Dayton refused to give an Army contractor a wastewater disposal permit to treat the hydrolysate (which the Army describes as caustic wastewater) and turn it into clean water before releasing it in the city sewer system.

The new proposal - announced Dec. 19 with the legal notice in New Jersey - called for trucking the hydrolysate to the DuPont Chambers Works plant in Deepwater, N.J., for treatment before it is released into the Delaware River. The plant already has treated hydrolysate created by the destruction of more than 50 tons of mustard blister agent from the Aberdeen Chemical Agent Disposal Facility in Maryland. More than 1,500 tons remain in the stockpile there.