The Army's Chemical Weapons Conundrum

The Army says its stockpiles of chemical weapons are a threat to the American people that must be disposed of expeditiously. But plans to neutralize 1,269 tons of VX nerve gas and release the waste product into the environment are going nowhere fast. A rising tide of opposition is swelling against the latest scheme to ship up to 4 million gallons of corrosive wastewater more than 700 miles for further processing before it is dumped into the Delaware River.

VX is the most deadly of the chemical weapons; ingestion of only 10 milligrams can cause death. The government created the stockpile during the 1960's at the height of the Cold War, but has only recently decided to dispose of the lethal chemicals. The United States agreed to destroy its reserves of VX, GB and Mustard gases by 2015 when it signed the Chemical Weapons Convention (CWC) treaty in 1997. However, after the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, the Army accelerated the timetable ("Operation Speedy Neut") to free the country of chemical weapons by 2007, and subsequent world events have reinforced the urgency.

"The recent events in Spain underscore that terrorists will go after targets they value," said Colonel Jesse Barber, the project manager overseeing the Army's Alternative Technologies and Approaches group. "The greatest risk [to Americans] is the continued storage of our chemical weapons."

The Army has proposed to dispose of the VX nerve gas cache stored at the Newport Chemical Depot in Indiana using a two-step process. At the Newport facility, the Army would neutralize the nerve gas using sodium hydroxide and hot water, creating VX hydrolysate, or caustic wastewater that the Army likens to drain cleaner. While the resulting mix is 85 percent water, it is highly corrosive, with a pH level of about 13.5.

Tanker trucks or railroad cars would then take more than 700 trips to bring this hydrolysate to the Dupont Chambers Works treatment plant in Deepwater, NJ for further processing. According to Sarah Silverstone, President of environmental consultancy Brockport Microbiology, a tanker spill of the hydrosylate into a waterway would "kill any fish and all plant life" contained inside. Silverstone said that most organisms can not survive a pH level of greater than 11, and that while hydrolysate is much less toxic than nerve gas, it burns human skin on contact.

At the Dupont facility, the hydrolysate would first be chemically oxidized to remove odors to lessen its impact on the surrounding community. The wastewater would then be mixed with other industrial waste, treated and then dumped into the Delaware River, and the solid waste product (effluent) would be landfilled at the Dupont location.

The Army held an informational meeting in nearby Carney's Point, NJ on March 17 to allow public comment on the proposal from area residents, who nearly unanimously vowed to fight the project. A representative from Senator Rob Andrews (D-NJ) read his letter to the Army stating that he would oppose this proposal because it seeks to get rid of the chemicals "in the wrong place and in the wrong way." Andrews promised to do "everything he could to fight this plan."

Residents and environmental activists are concerned that the neutralization and treatment processes proposed have never been done before on a large scale, and that the scientific study of the waste products' toxicity is based on theoretical models. "It's experimental science," said Allen Muller, executive director of non-profit environmental group Green Delaware.

According to Jeff Lindblad, a spokesman for the Army's Chemical Materials Agency, the process has been tested on a 1/10th scale, and the hydrolysate treatment process that would be performed by Dupont is very similar to other industrial waste treatment programs.