Hypocrisy: U.S. Has Not Destroyed All Its Chemical Weapons

105 millimeter shells
containing chemical weapons

by Bill Smith, Editor: The United States has in storage 3100 tons of chemical weapons -- three times as large as Syria’s reported 1000 tons. Bloomberg reports that "Weapons armed with the same nerve gas used on Syrian citizens last month sit in grass-topped concrete bunkers at an Army depot in Kentucky, 20 years after the U.S. government promised to destroy them. The bunkers, in a field at the Blue Grass Army Depot in Richmond, house rockets and other artillery holding 523 tons of the nerve agents VX and sarin in addition to flesh-blistering mustard gas. A partnership including San Francisco-based Bechtel National Inc. is building a plant to destroy them. It will open seven years from now and will dispose of the last weapon there three years later."

PressTV identified: "The Army’s Pueblo Chemical Depot, in Pueblo, Colorado, still houses an estimated 2611 tons of mustard gas and the Blue Grass Army Depot, Blue Grass, Kentucky, may have on site 523 tons of sarin (the same weapons whose use in Syria caused such an uproar), VX and mustard gas agent. That’s a whole lot of poison to dispose of safely."

The United States is not the only the only one with hypocrisy issues. The Washington Times noted that while Russia "has destroyed 60 percent of its declared stockpile and has some 16,000 metric tons left to be neutralized, according to a November report by the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons — the Netherlands-based body that oversees the ban treaty."

PressTV addressed the difficulty in disposing of chemical weapons: "The United Nations Convention on Chemical Weapons, which Washington ratified in 1997, required signers to eliminate all stocks of chemical arms by 2012. But the US, like Russia, requested an extension to 2023. It claimed that “difficulties involving old chemical warheads” and environmental issues were making it impossible to comply within the framework of the treaty. Destroying the stocks is no small task."

Bloomberg noted, "As international monitors learn the size and makeup of the chemical weapons stockpile Syria has pledged to destroy by next year, the Blue Grass stash stands as a warning: Safe destruction of chemical weapons isn’t easy."

The Washington Times also noted both "Cold War pork barrel?" "[T]he slow progress of the United States Government in destroying the remainder of its chemical weapons. Published reports show U.S. Army estimates of $28 billion to cover the total cost of destroying the U.S. chemical weapons stockpile — a process not anticipated to be completed before 2021. That the effort is mired with complications has been known for years in Washington. A 2003 report by the Government Accountability Office said it was in 'turmoil,' lacked 'stable leadership at the upper management levels,' and noted that the U.S. was expected to miss “milestones because of schedule delays due to environmental, safety, community relations, and funding issues.”

PressTV further noted, "Even in the purportedly safest, most stable settings, like those US sites, destroying chemicals and poison gas is a tricky proposition, with vast environmental, health and safety risks. After all, these substances can kill hundreds of people in short order if anything goes wrong. But such concerns surely must be multiplied ten-fold when the same process is being undertaken in a civil war environment in a third-world country such as Syria.

"Yet the US is insisting that Syria’s gas stocks must be gone or destroyed within the next eight and a half months. If that doesn’t happen, says Washington, the UN Security Council should sign off on a military campaign. As further backup, the US is still prepared to act unilaterally with a punitive bombing and rocket blitz against the Syrian government’s forces.

"That impatience is astonishing when one considers that the US itself says it needs over a quarter of a century to destroy its own chemical arsenal. That’s because it wants to construct those two expensive state-of-the-art chemical weapons destruction facilities, ostensibly for safety reasons (though presumably pork barrel politics plays a role.) And it plans to take its time. The Army says the facility in Pueblo won’t begin operation until 2017, and the one in Blue Grass won’t even be ready for operation until 2020.

"Another reason some are skeptical about the US’s intentions is that notwithstanding this long-term proposition, the US admits it already possesses and has in the past used mobile truck-mounted destruction equipment capable of destroying five tons of toxic weapons per day. Do the math: at this rate the entire US stockpile could be eliminated in less than two years, not ten times as long. . . ."

President Obama in addressing the Syrian situation expressed that the United States had destroyed its stockpile of chemical weapons. This was not fully correct. While it is true that a majority of the previous U.S. stockpiles have been destroyed, the U.S still has more than Syria.

Finally, we cannot forget that besides Russia, Syria and the United States, there are other countries that have or are believed to have chemical weapons including: Albania, Burma, China, Egypt, India, Iran, Israel, Japan, Libya, North Korea, Pakistan, Russia, Serbia, Montenegro, Sudan, Taiwan, and Vietnam. Therefore the issue of Chemical weapons is far from over.

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