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Pentagon Faces Continuing Opposition to Chemical Weapon Destruction Techniques
The Army’s chemical weapons disposal bill in 1987 was predicted to cost $2 billion — $26 billion less than what the cost has reached today, and it has only completed one-third of the project, the Washington Post reported yesterday (see GSN, May 10). The $28 billion price tag to dispose of 27,768 metric tons of chemical weapons in the military stockpile is the result of technical hurdles and community activists challenging the incineration process used to eliminate many of the weapons, the Pentagon said. “We underestimated the job, the complexity of the job and this high-hazard environment we have to operate in,” said Michael Parker, director of the Army’s Chemical Materials Agency. The United States has the second-largest inventory of chemical weapons. Russia has 40,000 tons of weapons and will also probably miss a 2012 treaty deadline to finish disposing of its weapons. The United States is incinerating weapons in Alabama, Arkansas, Oregon and Utah and has completed the project on Johnston Atoll in the Pacific. Activists, however, have demanded that the Pentagon chemically neutralize weapons in Colorado, Indiana, Kentucky and Maryland. Work was completed in Maryland, but plants have yet to be constructed this year in Colorado and Kentucky. Though the United States hopes to get a five-year extension, Parker estimated that the neutralization sites could finish their weapons by 2014. “We are making progress every day,” Parker said. “Some days are better than others.” Pentagon officials said incineration is more efficient but opponents have argued that the emissions could have long-term effects on communities. Senator Mitch McConnell (R-KY) and Craig Williams, director of the Chemical Weapons Working Group in Berea, Ky., have spent almost 20 years to get the Army to chemically neutralize warfare agents. “We basically ended up forcing them to consider alternative disposal methods,” McConnell said. “Environmental cleanup, I guess, is not high in the mission statement” of the Defense Department. Parker said the Army was only being practical in incinerating the weapons and does not contest chemical neutralization. “Incineration was a much more mature technology in the late ‘80s and early ‘90s,” Parker said. “The department was put in an impossible bind. The Congress mandated some very aggressive disposal schedules, and in order to comply with the law the department pursued the single option that was available, which was to use incineration technology” (Juliet Eilperin, Washington Post, July 4).
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