Army Scales Back Chemical Weapons Plan

The Defense Department has withdrawn a proposal to use explosive charges or heat to destroy 125,000 chemical weapons stored at the Army’s Pueblo Chemical Depot in Colorado. Instead, officials with the Assembled Chemical Weapons Alternatives (ACWA) program say a revised plan will be offered next year that will use explosive destruction technology (EDT) to dispose of approximately 40,000 mustard-agent-filled shells. The Army had hoped to explode the 125,000 weapons as a way of speeding up destruction of the depot’s stockpile of 780,000 obsolete artillery shells and mortar rounds, which contain a total of 2,600 tons of mustard agent. A February assessment prepared by the Army concluded that the detonation plan would not harm the environment, but EPA wants a revised environmental assessment with more extensive data and modeling. “An EDT has always been part of the plant design, and we recognize the need to do a more rigorous analysis on EDT use than originally envisioned,” says Kevin Flamm, ACWA program manager. The Army will contract with Oak Ridge National Laboratory to prepare a new environmental assessment for the use of EDT.