The last of the U.S. chemical weapons stockpile was destroyed last week at a Kentucky munitions plant, the Pentagon said Monday.
In 1986, Congress ordered the destruction of America’s chemical weapons, and 11 years later, the U.S. joined 192 countries in the Chemical Weapons Convention of 1997, requiring the weapons’ complete elimination by September 30 of this year, The Washington Post reported. Chemical weapons were first used on a large scale in the trenches of Europe during World War I, causing horrifying deaths through suffocation and wrecking of the nervous system.
At its peak, America’s chemical weapons stockpile reached 30,000 metric tons, requiring the country to take decades to destroy the weapons while seeking the safest way to eliminate the chemical agents.
“Destroying the remainder posed a greater challenge because it involved the more complicated approach of neutralizing these munitions’ chemicals,” said Douglas Bush, an Army assistant secretary.
The final chemical weapon to be destroyed was a rocket filled with a nerve agent called sarin, “one of the most toxic of the known chemical warfare agents,” according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). The CDC says that just 1 to 10 mL of sarin can be fatal, and the chemical is even more dangerous because it is odorless and tasteless. During World War I, chemicals such as chlorine, phosgene, and mustard gas killed approximately 100,000 people, according to the United Nations, The Hill reported.
Last month, the U.S. military destroyed the last of its mustard gas-filled projectiles and mortars at a destruction facility in Pueblo, Colorado. The U.S. was the final signatory of the convention to have reportedly destroyed its chemical weapons stockpile, but U.S. officials question if China and Russia followed through on their pledge.
“We have questions about some of the destruction of China’s stockpile,” said Mallory Stewart, the assistant secretary of state for arms control, verification, and compliance. “We also have concerns, specifically, with respect to the undeclared chemical weapons that Russia is maintaining.”
America’s destruction of its last chemical weapon comes as the Biden administration approved sending controversial cluster munitions to Ukraine last week. Ukraine, now engaged in a counter-offensive against Russian forces, is set to receive a round of cluster bombs from the Biden administration in a drawdown of weapons that bypasses U.S. law.
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Despite American law prohibiting the production, use, or transfer of cluster munitions with a failure rate of more than 1%, President Joe Biden is able to bypass the law through a rarely used provision of the Foreign Assistance Act, The Washington Post reported.
Cluster bombs, first developed and used during World War II, are banned by most countries due to the view that they are inhumane because of high failure rates and unexploded fragments that can linger for years, according to the BBC.