PUEBLO - The Department of Homeland Security will not pressure the Pentagon to speed up destruction of chemical weapons, including mustard gas in shells at the Pueblo Chemical Depot, an official said Tuesday.
"Right now, we're fairly satisfied with the way things are going," Michael Brown, who oversees emergency preparedness and response, said Tuesday at the Chemical Stockpile Emergency Preparedness Program national workshop at the Pueblo Convention Center.
The program focuses on ways to protect the public in case of an incident involving the military stockpiles in 10 states.
"We would like to see them go quicker, but I recognize the severe constraints they're under right now," said Brown, a homeland security undersecretary. "So I'm not going to put any pressure on them to accelerate any more than what they can."
The Pentagon plans to use water and other liquids to neutralize about 2,600 tons of mustard agent stored in 780,000 weapons.
The Army tried to accelerate the process after the Sept. 11 at- tacks, but this year a Pentagon official said design work was stalled because the initial $1.6 billion price had grown to $2.6 billion.
The Pentagon had frozen about $813 million that Congress had approved for building the destruction plants at Pueblo and a nerve gas depot in Kentucky. Officials later released about $70 million of that, enough to allow progress to continue slowly.
"I'd like to see it accelerated, but I recognize they have budget constraints like we have budget constraints," said Brown, an attorney from Colorado.
"The bottom line is, they have the same goal we do -- to do this as quickly and safely as they can," he said.
On a related issue, Brown hedged on whether the government should regulate the chemical plant industry.
Experts have warned Congress in recent months that chemical facilities are a likely target for a terrorist attack.
Robert Stephan, a high-ranking aide to Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff, told the Senate that roughly 3,000 chemical plants aren't governed by even voluntary security measures.
He said the "patchwork of legal authorities" prevented the government from regulating the industry effectively and that Congress should step in.
Tuesday, Brown acknowledged that chemical plants pose a danger.
"The intelligence briefs we get show that those who would like to do us harm constantly look for vulnerabilities, and chemical plants are one of those vulnerabilities," he said. "We know they have looked at those, recognized those and studied those."
But Brown hedged on regulation, saying, "We as a department don't want to impose rules. We'd rather have a collaborative effort."
Asked about the DHS admission that voluntary measures aren't enough, Brown said the department should try to persuade citizens and businesses to assess vulnerabilities and work with the federal government to reduce them.