More than a decade ago, when military leaders made incineration the method of choice for destroying the nation’s obsolete chemical weapons, the world hadn’t yet decided it had seen enough poison spread on its battlefields.The Army then was under orders to eliminate moldering chemical stockpiles to make room for a new class of chemical munitions. Though safer for their handlers, these weapons would extend the vicious bloodline of the caustic ash used by Roman cavalry, the chlorine that scorched Allied troops during World War I and the mustard gas that blistered Iranians in their war with Iraq.
Though the United States hadn’t used such weapons and kept them only for retaliation against those who did, there was no diplomatic device, no global moral imperative to remove them from the earth. And there wouldn’t be one until 1997, with the worldwide treaty that outlaws the production of chemical weapons and sets a deadline for their destruction.
The product of years of negotiations, the Chemical Weapons Convention was signed by the United States in 1993 but not ratified in the Senate until 1997, four days before it became effective.
The last-minute approval marked the end of a long debate over the efficacy of the treaty. Congressional conservatives led by Sen. Jesse Helms said the agreement was unenforceable. They carped about foreign inspectors having increased access to U.S. military sites. Treaty backers argued it would reduce the risk of terrorist use of the weapons, like the 1995 sarin gas attack on a Tokyo subway.
Lost in much of the debate were the effects of existing stockpiles on the communities where they are stored.
Perhaps this was because those stockpiles already were scheduled for destruction and were to be replaced with weapons containing two gases, harmless when separated but lethal when combined.
By 1997, the debate over incineration in Anniston, marked by lawsuits and protests, already was in full swing. Now, four years later, the billion-dollar furnace is complete and awaits the nerve and mustard agents and the rockets and landmines it was built to devour.
Amid the bickering that follows the issue of chemical weapons disposal here, little mention is made of the treaty that set into motion a tide of events that could make such weapons an inhumane embarrassment of the past.
Few, if any, would now argue that we should keep chemical weapons in our midst. The risks, most say after Sept. 11, are in storage, in creating a big bulls-eye for a lightning bolt, a plummeting airliner or a terrorist plot.
And so, the arguments instead, in this place where chemical weapons aren’t a policy option or a diplomatic football but death just a few miles away, are over what to do on that one day in every 15,000 years when lightning strikes in the wrong place and hell is loosed.
