The United States’s Chemical Warfare Service readied hundreds of thousands of mortar shells and artillery rounds filled with mustard gas in the 1940s. During the Cold War, even more lethal chemical weapons followed: artillery and rockets filled with VX and GB, better known as Sarin, nerve agents that, with as little as a few drops, can be deadly.
These munitions would make up the United States’s chemical weapons arsenal, one of the biggest in the world.
It’s all gone now. This summer, on July 7, at the Blue Grass Chemical Agent-Destruction Pilot Plant in Kentucky, the last M55 rocket, filled with GB, was dismantled. With it went the entirety of the US’s declared chemical munitions stockpile.
The United States achieved this just shy of its September 30 deadline under the Chemical Weapons Convention (CWC), the 1997 international treaty that bans the production, use, and stockpiling of these weapons. The US was the last country party to the treaty to eliminate its declared chemical weapons stockpile, destroying the kinds of agents and munitions once hoarded for use on the battlefield.
The world still has chemical weapons — in countries that never signed the treaty, scattered in old war zones, and likely in nations that have broken their treaty promises.
But the US certification is still a huge achievement for America, and for the world.
The US had some 30,000 tons of chemical warfare agents at the time of the CWC ratification. The US learned quickly that agreeing to eliminate chemical weapons was one thing. Actually doing so was far more complex. “These are weapons that were built to be used, not destroyed,” said Sonia Ben Ouagrham-Gormley, an expert in weapons programs and an associate professor at George Mason University.
That treaty effort stretched more than 25 years, though the US had grappled with how to dismantle its arsenal safely and effectively even before that. The US wasn’t alone in needing extensions under the CWC, but the…
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