[CPEO-MEF] CHEMWEAPONS: "U.S. Is Destroying the Last of Its Once-Vast Chemical Weapons Arsenal"

[Lenny Siegel <LSiegel@cpeo.org>]

U.S. Is Destroying the Last of Its Once-Vast Chemical Weapons Arsenal
Decades behind its initial schedule, the dangerous job of eliminating the world’s only remaining declared stockpile of lethal chemical munitions will be completed as soon as Friday.


By Dave Philipps and John Ismay
New York Times
July 6, 2023

In a sealed room behind a gantlet of armed guards and three rows of high barbed wire at the Army’s Pueblo Chemical Depot in Colorado, a team of robotic arms  was busily  disassembling some of the last of the United States’ vast and ghastly stockpile of chemical weapons.

In went artillery shells filled with deadly mustard agent that the Army had been storing for more than 70 years. The bright yellow robots pierced, drained and washed each shell, then baked it at 1,500 degrees Fahrenheit. Out came inert and harmless scrap metal, falling off a conveyor belt into an ordinary brown dumpster with a resounding clank.

“That’s the sound of a chemical weapon dying,” said Kingston Reif, who spent years pushing for disarmament outside government and is now the deputy assistant secretary of defense for threat reduction and arms control. He smiled as another shell clanked into the dumpster. 

…

For the entire article, see
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/07/06/us/chemical-weapons-stockpile.html

—

Lenny Siegel
Executive Director
Center for Public Environmental Oversight
A project of the Pacific Studies Center
LSiegel@cpeo.org
P.O. Box 998, Mountain View, CA 94042
Voice/Fax: 650-961-8918
http://www.cpeo.org
Author: DISTURBING THE WAR: The Inside Story of the Movement to Get Stanford University out of Southeast Asia - 1965–1975 (See http://a3mreunion.org)

_______________________________________________
Military mailing list
Military@lists.cpeo.org
http://lists.cpeo.org/listinfo.cgi/military-cpeo.org