The United States will destroy the last declared chemical weapons in its arsenal, including the GB nerve agent and dating back to World War I (1914-1918).
The weapons will be destroyed at a Kentucky military installation as part of a decades-long campaign to end reserves held since the end of the Cold War in the 1990s. the last century, the Defense Department announced.
The US has until September 30 this year to get rid of its remaining chemical weapons under the International Chemical Weapons Convention, which came into effect in 1997 and has been signed by 193 countries.
The ammunition now being destroyed in Kentucky is what’s left of 51,000 M55 missiles laced with GB nerve agent – a deadly poison also known as Sarin – that have been in storage since the 1940s.
A sprawling military installation in the middle of the rolling green hills of eastern Kentucky is about to reach a milestone in the history of warfare dating back to World War I. https://t.co/rMR6umLHZf
– ABC News (@ABC) July 7, 2023
By destroying this munitions, the US is acknowledging that this type of weapon is not acceptable on the battlefield, in a message intended to reach the few countries that have not adhered to the agreement, military experts said.
Chemical weapons were first used in modern times in World War I (1914-1918) where they are estimated to have killed at least 100,000 people.
Although their use was later banned by the Geneva Convention of 1949, countries continued to retain the weapons until the treaty mandated their destruction.
In the US, nearly 800,000 chemical munitions containing the mustard agent have been stored in high-security cement bunkers since the 1950s.
In the operation now taking place in Kentucky, the most problematic munitions were sent to a stainless steel armored blast chamber to be destroyed at about 593 degrees Celsius.
The US states of Colorado and Kentucky were the last of several others, including Alabama, Arkansas, Oregon and Utah, to store and destroy US chemical weapons.
Source: DN
