It's time to eliminate chemical weapons

Chapel Hill News; 4/27/03; Martha Gwyn

Forty years ago my husband and I participated in a week-long silent vigil demanding the end of the manufacture of chemical weapons to be used in war. It was an April Easter week. The location was Indiana prairie near Newport. It was bitter cold. We stood in two-hour shifts and moved around the line every 15 minutes to deal with freezing temperatures and fatigue.

Six years ago the U.S. government ratified the Chemical Weapons Convention, agreeing with a group of international countries to destroy all of their chemical weapons by the year 2007. Concern about possession of these weapons was heightened by Sept. 11 and fear that these plants could be designated for terrorist attack. The process should be speeded up.

There are eight of these plants. The one we protested at Newport, Indiana made and stored VX. This is a liquid designed to contaminate battlefields. A drop on the skin brings death in about 10 minutes. It has never been used. Other plants made other nerve agents.

The first proposal for disposal of VX was incineration. Newport's response was, No. Neutralization was begun. This is done in two steps. Some has gone through step one and is still a very nasty caustic liquid. With fear of terrorism, it has been proposed to move it to another site for step two so the Newport plant could continue with step one neutralizing remaining supplies of VX. A company at the new location would perform step two and put the solids of the fully neutralized material in a landfill and dump the liquid into the city's sewer system.

Concerns are abundant. What if a transport truck has a leak or a spill? Who will test the fully neutralized material? Can the testing be fully trusted? Is there any process that is fully safe? The entire process should be done at Newport, where there is a secure facility and expert staff with appropriate emergency plans.

And the other plants? Four plan to use incineration on site. One other will neutralize as is being done at Newport. How great it is to see this small step toward ridding our planet of WMD, an acronym that trivializes the danger and ugliness of weapons of mass destruction. Our challenge is to move ahead cooperatively removing all weapons of mass destruction from our planet protecting ourselves and all coming generations. I hope Congress, in my case Congressman Price and senators Edwards and Dole, are cognizant of the disarmament way we must go.