Oregon is home to enough chemical weaponry to annihilate the entire population of the United States. The Umatilla chemical weapons depot in Northeastern Oregon is home to 12 percent of the nation’s chemical weapons stockpile, which includes nerve agents VX and GB (sarin gas) and the blister agent HD (mustard gas).
An international treaty signed in 1982 requires us to drastically reduce our chemical weapons capabilities by 2004. In order to comply with this treaty, the U.S. military has built several incinerators around the country to destroy stockpiled chemical agents. However, while the destruction of these chemical weapons will greatly improve the safety and security of people in America and around the world, the practice of incineration has lethal potential.
Test burns at Umatilla have shown unpromising results, to say the least. Small test burns were stopped when harmful amounts of lead, chromium, nickel, antimony and arsenic were being released into the atmosphere. Incinerators have already begun operations in Utah and the Marshall Islands and both have shown results similar to the tests performed at Umatilla. Gary Harris, a former chief permit coordinator at the Tooele Chemical Agent Disposal Facility, just outside of Salt Lake City, stated that test burn reports were falsified in order to conceal findings that many munitions could not be burned safely. Harris reported human health and environmental concerns to the U.S. Army and was directed not to report the findings to the state of Utah under the threat of losing his job, according to statements he made at the National Press Club on Jan. 11, 2000.
When these incinerators are not functioning “properly,” the situation looks even worse. Both the Marshall Islands and Tooele incinerators have experienced numerous operation accidents including fires, explosions, massive spillage of chemical agents and the release of nerve agents into the atmosphere and facility corridors frequented by workers.
Already, the military has wasted $1.2 billion building the hazardous Umatilla incinerator. While simply allowing these weapons to sit and corrode is clearly not a good idea, cheaper and much safer means of disposal do exist such as water neutralization/hydrolysis. A hydrolysis facility could be constructed at half the cost of a chemical incinerator. One has already been built at the Aberdeen Proving Ground in Maryland, just outside of Washington, D.C. Operations at Aberdeen have been running safely and effectively.
So now that the Bush administration has scared us all witless over weapons of mass destruction, why has this threat not been dealt with within our own borders? Have recent events blinded us to the irresponsibility of our own military? If burning chemical weapons does not sound like a good idea, I ask you to please express your concerns to the Department of Environmental Quality.
David Kurushima is a freshman in humanities.