Destroying U.S. Chemical Weapons Is an Ongoing, Decades-Long Process

At the Blue Grass Army Depot in Richmond, Ky., a city of 32,000, 45 grass-covered, semi-buried concrete bunkers fan out across 250 acres. The Department of Defense calls the bunkers “igloos.” Housed inside is a stockpile of chemical weapons, the second-largest in the U.S., awaiting destruction: 101,000 rockets and projectiles loaded with flesh-eating mustard gas and the nerve agents VX and sarin—the same deadly poisons the Syrian regime used to kill thousands of its citizens in August.

Under the deal the U.S. and Russia brokered with Syrian President Bashar al-Assad, international inspectors are taking inventory of Assad’s chemical arsenal. The challenges the U.S. has had disposing of its own weapons suggest that even if Syria is sincere, it’s at the beginning of a long process to dismantle the stockpile. The U.S. began destroying its chemical weapons in the mid-1980s. In 1993 it signed the international Chemical Weapons Convention and agreed to eradicate its stash completely by 2012.