The United States has announced that it will complete in the coming days the last operations to destroy all chemical weapons in the US arsenal (or at least those announced through the government). , a special type of nerve agent. The destruction of those weapons, the subject of decades of debate in the United States and abroad, is to be expected under the 1997 Chemical Weapons Convention, to which 193 countries have acceded, in addition to the United States. .
The chemical weapons destroyed or being destroyed are different: projectiles, cluster bombs and mines filled with nerve agents, tanks full of poisonous ingredients that can be loaded onto planes and then sprayed on the targets below. However, we are talking about weapons filled with a chemical and supplied with an explosive rate that allows it to spread in the form of vapor capable of causing fatal inflammation once it comes into contact with the skin, eyes and respiratory tract.
In the United States, these weapons have been stored for decades in a series of underground reinforced concrete bunkers, close to farmland.
The last two chemical weapons destruction operations were conducted in Pueblo, Colorado, with the dismantling of a final cache containing some 2600 tons of mustard gas, a chemical also known as “mustard gas. “Loaded with sarin gas to be destroyed they have remained since the 1940s. After this operation, all chemical weapons declared on American soil will be eliminated: according to the New York Times, this could be as early as Friday, or at least in the coming days. .
Specifically, destruction procedures consist of a complex procedure in which a series of humanoid machines disassemble and disassemble weapons, stripping them of their chemical content and destroying their envelopes after washing them at maximum temperature. Instead, the extracted chemical content is destroyed by a procedure called neutralization where it is combined with hot water and sodium hydroxide and then verified that the chemical agent has already been destroyed.
The New York Times reported, for example, the destruction of bullets loaded with mustard gas, which they molded with mortar shells. 8. 5% of chemical weapons stockpiles delivered to the United States at the end of the Cold War, equivalent to 30,610 tons total. In a Colorado warehouse, lead was excavated and its contents emptied into a vacuum system: then the box was washed and heated to more than six hundred degrees, creating steel scrap that drove some conveyor belts to a giant waste container, and the chemical contents were destroyed by neutralization.
All these operations require professional men and women, operating in protective clothing and gloves, who, before destroying the weapons, x-ray them to ensure that they are not broken and leaking. If this is the case, a destruction procedure is foreseen, with an internal detonation of a hold.
According to available information, the United States last used chemical weapons in World War I, from 1915 to 1918. But in the Vietnam War, between 1955 and 1975, they used Agent Orange, a strong herbicide that is very destructive to humans. .
The use of chemical weapons in warfare was banned without delay after World War I, through the 1925 Geneva Protocol: however, the Protocol only prohibited their use and they were not developed, produced or possessed, as nerve agents such as sarines were developed once later. .
For decades, the United States has continued to develop chemical weapons production and garage services in several states. They mainly have a deterrent function, i. e. deterring other countries from using them and showing their willingness to use them in response.
The debate over the preference to destroy chemical weapons basically began in the 1960s: In 1968, for example, some 5,000 sheep died in Utah on land adjacent to a site where the U. S. military was killed in Utah. The U. S. was testing a nerve agent. Lobbyists and political parties have campaigned against the production and stockpiling of such weapons, and discussions have begun on the most productive way to dispose of them.
First, the military showed up to load them onto ships and destroy them at sea, as has been done with other chemical weapons in the past, but has faced strong opposition, environmental groups added. Another plan was to destroy the weapons in incinerators, however, even then there was much opposition from those who feared imaginable poisonous contamination from burning chemical agents. However, some of the guns were burned in factories in several states, adding Alabama, Arkansas, Oregon, Utah and one at Johnston Atoll in the Pacific Ocean.
Recently, new technologies have been developed to destroy chemical weapons by burning them, which are used in existing processes.
The 1997 Chemical Weapons Convention, the first multilateral global disarmament agreement to provide for the elimination of a complete range of weapons of mass destruction within a predetermined time frame. Under the original terms of the agreement, the destruction of chemical weapons must be completed within a few years and at a cost of about $1. 5 billion: it is now complete, after decades of delay, and at an estimated cost. Quoted through the New York Times Approximately $42 billion.
According to information on the conference website, to date, 99 per cent of chemical weapons declared through the nuclear-weapon States that have ratified the conference have been destroyed. The UK halted demolitions in 2007, India in 2009 and Russia in 2017. However, there are countries that have not signed the agreement, such as Egypt or North Korea, and countries that have not ratified it, such as Israel, and that even if they ratified it, would possibly have maintained unauthorized stockpiles of chemical weapons, as is believed to be the case with Russia.
Some terrorist teams also possess chemical weapons: According to IHS Conflict Monitor, a London-based intelligence gathering and research service, the Islamic State used improvised chemical weapons at least 52 times in Iraq and Syria between 2014 and 2016.
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