In The Category Of Home-Grown Terror... US Military Chemical Weapons

Problems Plague Army Weapons-Burning

During my years on active duty (US Navy Hospital Corps) I took a course on the Treatment of Chemical Agent Casualities, which covered treatment of injuries and exposure to most of the chemical weapons that were not classified as "top secret" at the time. The power to devastate large numbers of people, and animals, exposed to most of the blood agents, nerve agents, caustics and control agents (i.e. tear gas) was quite remarkable. But when the military claims "Ooops, we under-estimated the job.", we must ask the question, "Is this not merely a contrived excuse to keep a modicum of these agents available in the face of terrorism?"

We cannot trust the military under its current leadership, especially the civilian leadership of Donald Rumsfeld. He has lied to us numerous times and has taken a cavalier attitude to the loss of life and injury caused by not supplying our troops with proper and adequate armor and equipment. He has shown a propensity for keeping even the least likely of data secret and under wraps until such time as it is exposed by a working media. He initially lied to us about Abu Ghraib, events in Afghanistan and at Camp Delta in Gitmo. The generals and Joint Chiefs of Staff, as well as the various components of the intelligence community that work with him, have all lied unnecessarily to us.

The fact is that the military under-estimated the job because they did not want us to know the extent of our chemical weapon stores. We have probably violated several treaties and international laws by keeping so many chemical weapons in storage. But the real fear I have is that even the military is not prepared to deal with chemical exposure in the field or on our own soil. In 1983 I served on active duty with the Massachusetts Army National Guard. During that time I met many members of the 363rd Chemical Weapons Group, a unit designated to respond to chemical weapons attacks in the field. At that time they were the only such unit designated in the National Guard, there was one similar unit in the Army Reserves, and only two such units in the Regular Army. Each unit was comprised of about 100-125 personnel.

I hate to point out the obvious, but 400 to 500 personnel with a limited number of decon stations and equipment would never be enough to deal with a major chemical attack in a city the size of my hometown (Lynn, Massachusetts: population @80,000), never mind a big city like New York, Chicago, San Francisco or LA.

Given the previous post I wrote about the realities of unsecure HAZMAT transportation, and the lack of adequate HAZMAT training in most areas of our nation, and the fact that the military is NOT telling us about a lot of top secret stuff in the field of chemical and biological warfare (yes, we are involved in both), we are woefully unprepared for any type of unconventional terrorist attack, a major leak or release incident, or even a natural exposure (i.e. naturally occuring Anthrax)... not to mention the issues of radioactive waste leaks and incidents.

We've been damn lucky so far. We have the CDC and the top secret Army bio-warfare lab in Louisiana working on these issues, but none of our preparation is adequate or effective. If we really do have a major chemical, biological or radioactive incident in this country, we will lose thousands within minutes, hundreds of thousands within hours and live with the fallout results for as long, if not longer, than the survivors of Hiroshima or Nagasaki.

We should be afraid... very afraid... of our own government as well as terrorists.

In 1987, the Army estimated it would cost $2 billion to dispose of the 27,768 metric tons of chemical weapons in its stockpile.

Today, the price has mushroomed to $28 billion, and the military is about a third of the way through the job. An array of problems -- including technical challenges and protests from community activists concerned about the impact of burning the weapons -- has dogged the progress. In May, officials announced the Army will be unable to destroy all the weapons by 2012 -- which would be a five-year extension to the current deadline.

"We underestimated the job, the complexity of the job and this high-hazard environment we have to operate in," said Michael A. Parker, director of the Army's Chemical Materials Agency.

The United States has the second-largest inventory of chemical weapons next to Russia, which has 40,000 tons of warfare agents and is also struggling to meet the 2007 disposal deadline under an international treaty dating to 1997. Both countries are seeking five-year extensions.

The Army is incinerating weapons in Alabama, Arkansas, Oregon and Utah, and has finished work on Johnston Atoll in the Pacific. Under pressure from activists, the Pentagon has opted for chemically neutralizing warfare agents in Colorado, Indiana, Kentucky and Maryland. It has completed work in Maryland, but plant construction in Colorado and Kentucky will only begin this year. By Parker's estimate, the chemical neutralization facilities will not finish disposing warfare agents until 2014.

"We are making progress every day," Parker said. "Some days are better than others."

Congress mandated disposal of the weapons a decade ago, and ever since, the Defense Department has been battling environmental activists and some members of Congress over its reliance on burning the chemicals.

Pentagon officials have argued that incineration is most efficient. But Craig E. Williams, director of the Chemical Weapons Working Group in Berea, Ky., said that emissions could have lasting effects on communities such as his. Working with Sen. Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.), he has spent nearly two decades pushing the Army to develop a chemical neutralization approach.

"We basically ended up forcing them to consider alternative disposal methods," McConnell said. "Environmental cleanup, I guess, is not high in the mission statement" of the Defense Department.

Parker said the Army does not oppose chemical neutralization but was simply taking a pragmatic approach.

"Incineration was a much more mature technology in the late '80s and early '90s," he said. "The department was put in an impossible bind. The Congress mandated some very aggressive disposal schedules, and in order to comply with the law the department pursued the single option that was available, which was to use incineration technology."

The approach has produced mixed results. Chemical agents have escaped three times from incinerator plant stacks and twice from plant equipment, Parker said, adding that the release exceeded the permitted federal limit only once.

But critics such as Jason Groenewold, executive director of the Salt Lake City-based Healthy Environmental Alliance of Utah, said those chemical releases, such as the one from Utah's Tooele Chemical Agent Disposal Facility, add to air pollution and could have long-term effects on residents.

"On all accounts we were misled," Groenewold said. "We've had tremendous delays and problems."

The plant in Tooele, Utah, has been at the center of the controversy. In the mid-1990s, the former general manager and chief safety manager left and suggested that the plant's operations were flawed. Gary M. Millar, the former general manager, wrote the plant's top management in November 1996 that he had to conclude that their actions "are typical of the senior management at Three Mile Island before their nuclear incident or at NASA before the Challenger incident."

While Millar's dire predictions have not materialized, the plant has experienced problems. A 1999 leak briefly exposed seven plant workers to nerve agent. The Pentagon determined the employees were not harmed, though the following year a former worker suggested he had suffered cognitive and memory problems because of long-term exposure at the plant.

The federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention monitors the public health impact of the chemical weapons disposal, and its officials remain confident that incinerators do not pose a threat and are no more dangerous than chemical neutralization.

But some community activists question that. Two mathematics professors at Berea College, a liberal-arts school near one of the planned disposal facilities, constructed a computer model 10 years ago to determine how dioxins released from the proposed incinerator would affect families in the area. Jan Pearce and James K. Blackburn-Lynch determined that when it rained, subsistence farmers living near the incinerator would accumulate dioxins in their fatty tissues that would exceed the federal legal limit.

Craig E. Williams, a Vietnam veterans leader who won the $125,000 Goldman Environmental Prize this past spring for his work opposing the incineration of warfare agents, said he spent 20 years urging defense officials to listen to the people who live and work near chemical weapons stockpiles.

"My overwhelming focus on this was to force them to prioritize the safety of the community and the environmental impact of destroying the most dangerous weapons ever devised," Williams said.