Global Security Newswire

The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency announced yesterday that it fined the Army and a contractor nearly $52,000 for releasing an unknown quantity of VX nerve agent in August 2002 on Johnston Atoll, site of the first U.S. chemical weapons incinerator (see GSN, Nov. 7, 2003).

The release at a chemical weapons facility occurred when a tray holding remnants of a VX shell was improperly loaded into an incinerator, the Associated Press reported.

No exposures or harm to any person or wildlife were reported as the result of the release, said Dean Higuchi of the environmental agency’s San Francisco office.

Located 825 miles southwest of Honolulu, the atoll is a national bird sanctuary and was once the site of 6 percent of the U.S. stockpile of chemical armaments. Congress ordered the mustard and nerve agents and explosives destroyed in 1986. Work by the Army and contractor Washington Group International began in 1990 (Associated Press/Yahoo!News, May 27).