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DESTRUCTION OF NON-STOCKPILE WEAPONS ON TARGET

By Bobbie Crockett/OF THE COMMERCIAL STAFF
Saturday, August 14, 2004 10:56 PM CDT

The Bigeye Bomb will never see the light of day. That's because most of the facilities built at the Pine Bluff Arsenal for producing chemical weapons ingredients have been dismantled.

"We have destroyed two-thirds of the facilities that are used to produce binary precursor chemicals," said Joe Daven, a non-stockpile field office manager with the Army Chemical Materials Agency.

Once mixed with other ingredients, binary precursor chemicals create nerve agents.

The Bigeye Bomb, designed to produce the nerve agent VX, never reached production. The creation of other binary weapons was halted in the 1990s after the U.S. and the former Soviet Union reached agreements on chemical weapons destruction.

Nearly all the former Integrated Binary Production Facilities at the Arsenal will be gone by January, Daven said.

Those facilities and others across the nation have been or are being demolished under the Chemical Weapons Convention. The global treaty mandates the elimination of chemical weapons and requires the destruction of facilities built to produce them.

The U.S. reached a milestone in December 2003 by destroying more than 80 percent of nation's chemical weapons production capabilities 16 months ahead of schedule, Jeff Lindblad, a public affairs officer for the Chemical Materials Agency, said.

"Pine Bluff was key to getting us to that 80 percent mark," he said. "We continue to move forward."

Daven said the dismantling of the structures at the Arsenal began in October 2003. Two areas have been destroyed and work has begun on a third.

The remaining binary chemicals will be neutralized using a process that involves heat and water.

In addition to the production facilities and binary chemicals, the non-stockpile area deals with recovered chemical warfare materiel -- including items from range-clearing operations, chemical weapons burial sites and other locations that can date back to the World War I era. Other miscellaneous materiel includes empty ton containers previously used to store chemicals.

About 96 percent of the recovered non-stockpile materiel was uncovered on the Arsenal while about 4 percent came from off-post.

Workers have been using non-intrusive X-ray and gamma ray technology to verify weapons' content, Daven said.

"We're in the process of assessing to determine what we have and how we'll go about destroying items," he said

Except for the miscellaneous items, all the munitions must be destroyed in accordance with the Chemical Weapons Convention's April 2007 deadline, Daven said.

The majority of the non-stockpile weapons elimination at the Arsenal will occur in 2005 and 2006, he said.

The project is separate from the planned disposal of the mostly obsolete chemical stockpile weapons stored at the Arsenal.

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