United Kingdom Destroys “Legacy” Chemical Weapons Stock

By Chris Schneidmiller
Global Security Newswire

WASHINGTON — The United Kingdom announced today that it had finished destroying thousands of decades-old chemical weapons (see GSN, June 6, 2002).

The elimination of the last known “legacy” munitions containing agents such as sulfur mustard and phosgene is in keeping with the nation’s obligations under the Chemical Weapon Convention, a Defense Ministry spokesman said.

The British military began using chemical weapons in World War I, and maintained an offensive program until 1956.  The Porton Down research facility was already regularly destroying weapons when the treaty entered into force in the United Kingdom in 1997.  A total of 7,000 munitions have been destroyed since 1989, with work ending on March 7.

The 3,812 weapons eliminated at Porton Down over the last decade were recovered individually or in small numbers from existing or former military sites.  Most dated from 1939 to 1945, The Herald newspaper reported.  The artillery and mortar shells were “rusty, old, they couldn’t be used,” the Defense Ministry spokesman said.

Some weapons were drained of agent and then incinerated, while others were detonated if they were found not to contain any dangerous substances.  The entire project cost nearly $20 million.

“Britain now no longer has any chemical weapons, usable or not,” the spokesman said.  “What we’ve destroyed is a drop in the ocean, but symbolically it’s very important.”

“I’d say this is a very favorable development,” said John Gilbert, a senior science fellow at the Center for Arms Control and Nonproliferation.  “Obviously, it eliminates those [weapons] that could be stolen and then used for blackmail or a terrorist attack” (see GSN, March 26).

Most of the attention on chemical weapons today focuses on the ongoing work to destroy tens of thousands of potentially still-usable munitions in Russia, the United States and several other treaty nations.

However, a number of European nations, including France and Germany, are still dealing with chemical weapons that remain scattered around the continent from World Wars I and II, experts said.  Other weapons ended up in underwater dumps (see GSN, Aug. 4, 2006 and Nov. 1, 2006).

Hundreds of thousands of weapons are believed to remain in China, abandoned by the Japanese army at the end of World War II (see GSN, Dec. 21, 2006).

These munitions generally would fall under the Chemical Weapons Convention’s definition of old and abandoned weapons.  “Old chemical weapons” are defined as those produced before 1925 or produced “between 1925 and 1946 that have deteriorated to such extent that they can no longer be used as chemical weapons.”  “Abandoned chemical weapons” are those left in another nation’s territory without consent after Jan. 1, 1925.

Nations are generally considered to face the same deadlines for destruction of old and abandoned weapons stocks as they do for current arsenals, said chemical weapons expert Jonathan Tucker, a Fulbright fellow at the German Institute for International and Security Affairs.  For the United Kingdom, that deadline would have been April 29, 2007, the 10th anniversary of the treaty’s entry into force.

The United Kingdom will maintain its weapons disposal infrastructure at Porton Down to deal with any buried weapons that are found in the future, the Defense Ministry said in a release.

The facility also plans to maintain limited amounts of chemical agents, to be used in research on defense against chemical weapons, the Herald reported.

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