Global Security Newswire

The Pine Bluff Arsenal in Arkansas last week began its final chemical weapons disposal campaign -- eliminating bulk containers filled with mustard blister agent, the U.S. Army announced (see GSN, Nov. 10).

"Current estimates predict the duration of the ton container disposal campaign to be about three years," Mark Greer, site project manager for the Pine Bluff Chemical Agent Disposal Facility, said in a press release. "We are confident that we will complete disposal operations by the Chemical Weapons Convention treaty date of 2012."

The international pact requires the United States to eliminate its arsenal of chemical warfare materials by April 2012. U.S. officials, however, have acknowledged that the United States will miss the deadline by a number of years (see GSN, Nov. 26).

The Arkansas arsenal originally stored 2,850 tons of chemical warfare materials, 12 percent of the total U.S. stockpile. Pine Bluff began disposal operations in March 2005 and has so far eliminated rockets carrying sarin nerve agent and rockets and land mines that incorporated VX nerve agent (U.S. Army Chemical Materials Agency release, Dec. 8).