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chapter eight Safety, Security, and Chemical Weapons Demilitarization Generations of soldiers in the U.S. Army’s Eighty-second Airborne Division know the story well.1 At the beginning of the Battle of the Bulge in World War II, German panzers were routing U.S. forces beating a hasty retreat in the Ardennes Forest. At some point in the retreat, a tank commander unfamiliar with the terrain asked a soldier for directions, and the following exchange ensued: Soldier: You looking for a safe place to park that thing? Tank commander: I sure am. Soldier: Well, pull in right behind me, ’cause I’m the Eighty-second Airborne, and this is as far as the bastards are going. This story not only illustrates the power of heroic myths to inspire esprit de corps, a warrior culture, and a self-image among troops in the U.S. military, but it also captures the U.S. Army’s attitude since the early 1980s on demilitarizing (i.e., disposing of) Cold War stockpiles of chemical weapons. To paraphrase the above, “We know how to dispose of chemical weapons safely, so just line up behind us ’cause this is as far as those bastard regulators are going.” The saga of chemical demilitarization during the Clinton years actually begins a decade earlier in Geneva with multilateral negotiations over chemical weapons disposal under the auspices of the United Nations. With these complex negotiations still ongoing, Congress enacted the National Defense Authorization Act of 1986 (PL 99-145), directing the Pentagon to eliminate U.S. stockpiled (obsolete) chemical agents and munitions. The Reagan Pentagon designated the army as executive agent of the program, with the assistant secretary of the army for installations and environment in the OSD in charge of policy and program oversight. Then, in 1988, Congress created the Chemical Stockpile Emergency Preparedness Program. The program was charged with developing emergency evacuation plans at the nine designated army installations where chemical weapons were to be demilitarized. These installations were the Lexington Blue Grass Depot located in Kentucky; the Newport Army Ammunition Plant in Indiana; the Tooele Army Depot in Utah; the Aberdeen Proving Grounds in Maryland; the Umatilla Army Depot in Oregon; the Anniston Army Depot in Alabama; the Pueblo Army Depot in Colorado; the Johnson Atoll Chemical Agent Disposal System southwest of Hawaii; and the Pine Bluff Army Arsenal in Arkansas. Next, in 1990, came a widely heralded bilateral agreement between the United States and the Soviet Union to destroy the overwhelming majority of chemical weapons stockpiles, followed two years later by the enactment of the Chemical Weapons Convention (CWC). Ratified by the United States in 1997, the CWC required this nation and Russia to, among other things, destroy 45 percent of Category 1 (the highest “risk” category) chemical weapons by 2004 (without endangering humans or the environment), and all declared stockpiled chemical weapons by 2007. The CWC also permitted a five-year extension, if needed, for destruction of all stockpiles. Yet by 2003 the United States had to ask for a three-year extension of the 2004 deadline, having by then disposed of only 26 percent of specified chemical agent and 39 percent of all chemical stockpiles. In that same year, the chemical weapons demilitarization program earned an “ineffective” rating on President Bush’s Program Assessment Rating Tool, partly because chemical weapons destruction had begun at only two sites (Johnston Atoll and Tooele). Also responsible for that rating was OMB’s judgment that the program had inadequate measures of progress and accountability. Then, in 2004, a GAO study concluded that, at best, the government would not be able to reach the 2007 destruction target until 2014.2 Meanwhile, life-cycle costs of the program rose from 1986 estimates of $2.1 billion to $32 billion in 2005. Bad news enough in its own right, in April 2006, Donald Rumsfeld became the first secretary of defense to acknowledge that the United States would need an extension of the CWC deadline to 2012, and was unlikely even to meet the extended deadline.3 To what are these embarrassing delays, cost overruns, and lapses attributable? For starters, chemical weapons demilitarization is a difficult task. Even under the best of circumstances, the CWC’s timetables were challenging due to the unprecedented scale, technical complexity, and risks of chemical weapons destruction .4 The army was to destroy in a safe manner a stockpile comprised largely of two thousand M55 rockets containing VX or GB nerve gases; 8...

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