![]() The state's disposal plant was completed in 2015 and began destroying weapons in 2019. The Kentucky storage facility has housed mustard agent and the VX and sarin nerve agents, much of it inside rockets and other projectiles, since the 1940s. "We had a middle school of over 600 kids a mile away from the (planned) smokestack," Williams said. But the Kentucky site was adjacent to Richmond and only a few dozen miles away from Lexington, the state's second-largest city. Williams noted that the military eliminated most of its existing stockpile by burning weapons at other, more remote sites such as Johnston Atoll in the Pacific Ocean or at a chemical depot in the middle of the Utah desert. They were able to halt the planned incineration plant, and then, with help from lawmakers, prompted the Army to submit alternative methods to burning the weapons.Ĭraig Williams, who became the leading voice of the community opposition and later a partner with political leadership and the military, said residents were concerned about potential toxic pollution from burning the deadly chemical agents. In the 1980s, the community around Kentucky's Blue Grass Army Depot rose up in opposition to the Army's initial plan to incinerate the plant's 520 tons of chemical weapons, leading to a decadeslong battle over how they would be disposed of. But, he added, "you always wondered what might happen with them." "Those (weapons) sitting out there were not a threat," Pueblo Mayor Nick Gradisar said. The weapons' destruction alleviates a concern that civic leaders in Colorado and Kentucky admit was always in the back of their minds. Nearly 800,000 chemical munitions containing mustard agent were stored since the 1950s inside row after row of heavily guarded concrete and earthen bunkers that pock the landscape near a large swath of farmland east of Pueblo. The projectiles and mortars comprised about 8.5% of the country's original chemical weapons stockpile of 30,610 tons of agent. In southern Colorado, workers at the Army Pueblo Chemical Depot started destroying the weapons in 2016, and on June 22 completed their mission of neutralizing an entire cache of about 2,600 tons of mustard blister agent. Despite their use being subsequently banned by the Geneva Convention, countries continued to stockpile the weapons until the treaty calling for their destruction. National security adviser Jake Sullivan said Ukraine has promised to use the munitions - bombs that open in the air and release scores of smaller bomblets - carefully.Ĭhemical weapons were first used in modern warfare in the First World War, where they were estimated have killed at least 100,000. ![]() "Though the use of these deadly agents will always be a stain on history, today our nation has finally fulfilled our promise to rid our arsenal of this evil.įriday's announcement came as the Biden administration has also decided to provide cluster munitions to Ukraine, a weapon that two-thirds of NATO countries have banned because it can cause many civilian casualties. "Chemical weapons are responsible for some of the most horrific episodes of human loss," Senate Republican Leader Mitch McConnell of Kentucky said in a statement. is officially underscoring that these types of weapons are no longer acceptable in the battlefield and sending a message to the handful of countries that haven't joined the agreement, military experts say. The munitions being destroyed in Kentucky are the last of 51,000 M55 rockets with GB nerve agent - a deadly toxin also known as sarin - that have been stored at the depot since the 1940s.īy destroying the munitions, the U.S. 30 deadline to eliminate its remaining chemical weapons under the international Chemical Weapons Convention, which took effect in 1997 and was joined by 193 countries. It's also a defining moment for arms control efforts worldwide. The weapons' destruction is a major watershed for Richmond, Kentucky and Pueblo, Colorado, where an Army depot destroyed the last of its chemical agents last month. "Today, I am proud to announce that the United States has safely destroyed the final munition in that stockpile - bringing us one step closer to a world free from the horrors of chemical weapons." "For more than 30 years, the United States has worked tirelessly to eliminate our chemical weapons stockpile," President Joe Biden said in a statement released by the White House. Workers at the Blue Grass Army Depot in Kentucky destroyed rockets filled with GB nerve agent, completing a decadeslong campaign to eliminate a stockpile that by the end of the Cold War totaled more than 30,000 tons. The last of the United States' declared chemical weapons stockpile was destroyed at a sprawling military installation in eastern Kentucky, the White House announced Friday, a milestone that closes a chapter of warfare dating back to the First World War.
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