PUEBLO — The United States is about to begin destroying its largest remaining stockpile of chemical-laden artillery shells, marking a milestone in the global campaign to eradicate a debilitating weapon that still creeps into modern wars.
The Pueblo Chemical Depot plans to start neutralizing 2,600 tons of aging mustard agent in March as the U.S. moves toward complying with a 1997 treaty banning all chemical weapons.
“The start of Pueblo is an enormous step forward to a world free of chemical weapons,” said Paul Walker, who has tracked chemical warfare for more than 20 years, first as a U.S. House of Representatives staffer and currently with Green Cross International.
The work starts less than a year after chlorine gas killed 13 people in Syria in April. International inspectors concluded last month that the gas had been used as a weapon.
Pueblo has about 780,000 shells containing mustard agent, which can maim or kill, blistering skin, scarring eyes and inflaming airways. Mustard agent is a thick liquid, not a gas, as commonly believed. It’s colorless and almost odorless but got its name because impurities made early versions smell like mustard.
After nightmarish gas attacks in World War I, a 1925 treaty barred the use of chemical weapons, and the 1997 Chemical Weapons Convention set a 2012 deadline to eradicate them. Four nations that acknowledged having chemical weapons have missed the deadline: the U.S., Russia, Libya and Iraq.
The cost of safely destroying the weapons, as well as concerns about public health and the environment, has slowed the process.
Libya expects to finish in 2016 and Russia in 2020, according to the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons. Iraq’s completion date is unknown.
Pueblo expects to finish the job in 2019.
