Army will likely miss weapons-destruction deadline

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By Paul Foy
Associated Press

SALT LAKE CITY — The Army has destroyed nearly a third of the nation’s stockpile of chemical weapons but said Wednesday it won’t get the job done before an extended treaty deadline of 2012.

Russia, which has the world’s largest stockpile of chemical weapons, is even further behind. It has destroyed only 3 percent of its 40,000 metric tons of chemical weapons, said embassy spokesman Yevgeniy Khorishko.

“Russia will do its best to met the deadline by 2012,” Khorishko told The Associated Press on Wednesday. He said Russia’s main plants for neutralizing chemical agents won’t be operating at full capacity until the end of 2007.

Along with other countries, Russia and the United States were supposed to finish destroying chemical stocks within 10 years by 2007. Both are asking an international oversight agency for a one-time, five year extension to 2012. And both are expected to miss that deadline.

So far, the Army has managed to destroy 10,125 of 27,768 metric tons of chemical weapons, said Gregory Mahall, a spokesman for the Army’s Chemical Materials Agency.

The agency offered a few details Wednesday on problems in this country, a month after Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld notified congressional leaders that the U.S. won’t be able to destroy all chemical stocks under the deadline of the treaty ratified by 178 countries.

The agency cited delays caused by state regulators and troubled chemical-weapons incinerators that have had to be shut or slowed down for modifications. It offered no new projection on how long the mission will take to finish after 2012.

A watchdog group says much of the delays have been caused by the Army’s reliance on incinerators in Utah and elsewhere, instead of plants that use water and other chemicals to break down lethal agents. Utah’s incinerator has been shut down for a troubled switch from burning nerve agent to mustard agent.

“History has taught us, in our program and Russia’s, that things don’t always go as you like,” said Craig Williams, director of the Chemical Weapons Working Group in Berea, Ky., a group pushing for safe disposal methods.

In this country, the work has been carried out at incinerators in Alabama, Arkansas, Oregon, Utah and at Johnston Atoll in the south Pacific, and at neutralization plants in Indiana and Maryland.

The Army is expected to start construction this year on other plants to neutralize rounds of mustard agent at Pueblo, Colo., and Richmond, Ky., where the Blue Grass Army Depot also is holding VX and GB nerve agent.

The only place expected to finish destroying its chemical stocks by 2012 is a chemical depot in Newport, Indiana, in addition to already completed projects at Johnston Atoll and Aberdeen, Md.

Williams cited Utah’s plant, 45 miles southwest of Salt Lake City, as a prime example of delays in destroying chemical weapons. The Deseret Chemical Depot has had difficulty draining chemical agent from old shells and tanks before burning agent and metal parts separately — and safely. Once liquid, the agent has congealed over time.

Now an Army contractor wants to burn mustard-agent munitions with most of the agent left in the munitions, after draining only a small amount that can flow out. Utah regulators are reviewing the proposal.

Williams said that to burn even one mustard agent-filled munition could take days, while separately the agent and munition can be burned in hours. Most of the Utah depot’s 6,219 tons of mustard agent is on tanks, which can be drained more easily, but Williams said burning agent and munitions together will slow down the process by years.

Mustard agent is less lethal than nerve agent but harder to burn safely. It releases dioxins and high concentrations of mercury, which can’t be destroyed in incinerators, Williams said.

“They’ve got a lot of problems,” he said. “It’s going to take forever, and that’s why these schedules are moving consistently to the right.”

Alaine Southworth, a spokeswoman for the Deseret Chemical Depot, said it hopes to start destroying mustard agent by late summer but won’t be able to extinguish the stock by 2012.

The Utah campaign started Aug. 22, 1996, when the incinerator began burning 13,616 tons of chemical warfare agents, which represented 42.3 percent of the nation’s stockpile of chemical warfare agents.

State Department spokeswoman Amanda Rogers-Harper wasn’t able to immediately explain Wednesday what sanctions the U.S. could face for failing to destroy its chemical stocks by 2012.

But Williams said the countries that make up the Organisation for Prohibition of Chemical Weapons were unlikely to sanction any members showing a determined effort.