Four months. 

That’s how long it was supposed to take to rid Utah of its stockpile of the deadly blister agent lewisite.  The plan was to use neutralization, a chemical process that has been used in other states to eliminate swimming pool-sized stores of chemical weapons. Environmental activists broadly prefer it to incineration.  But a decade of missteps – including flawed tests that wrongly indicated neutralization didn’t work – delayed the process. And just a few years after building a multimillion-dollar facility at Tooele’s Deseret Chemical Depot to get the job done, the Army tore the building down.  Now the Army wants to try again – by building a new incinerator. And what was once a point of rare agreement between the military and its critics has turned contentious again.  

‘A lot of naiveté’: The military had been destroying obsolete chemical weapons for decades before the U.S. added its signature to the international Chemical Weapons Convention on Jan. 13, 1993.  The treaty kicked things into high gear. With an international mandate to eliminate the stockpile – and armed with a 1984 National Research Council decision that incineration was safe – the Army planned to burn away its weapons by 2003, four years ahead of the convention’s 2007 deadline. Today, with just over half of the U.S. stockpile gone and perhaps a decade to go until it is all destroyed, Chemical Materials Agency senior engineer Cheryl Maggio recognizes that the initial goal was unrealistic.  But in the early 1990s, “We were a bunch of engineers who believed that there was an engineering solution to everything,” Maggio said. “There was a lot of naiveté there.”  Utah’s 25,000 pounds of lewisite posed a particular problem because more than a third of the deadly mixture is arsenic – which the Army determined it would be unable to keep from pouring out of an incinerator smokestack. Instead, the military decided to destroy lewisite through neutralization – a process in which hot water is used to separate deadly chemical compounds into less volatile component parts. 

But an analysis of the byproducts created in lab tests kept showing that not all the deadly compounds were breaking down. In other words, Maggio said, “we had agent that we couldn’t get rid of.”  For help, the American engineers looked north, where Canada had destroyed its own small stockpile of lewisite a few years earlier.

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