Saturday, January 21, 2012
Glad to hear it
The US Army is in the final stages of eliminating a horrid cocktail of chemical weapons at its incinerator in Utah.
McCloskey, a 63-year-old engineer and manager for URS Corp.'s Federal Services division, was on hand as a U.S. Army depot in Utah finished destroying the last of 1.3 million munitions filled with a witches' brew of toxins, blister and blood agents. He was on a Pacific atoll in 1986 when the Army destruction campaign started, living just 300 yards from an incinerator.That's a lot of deadly crap and it's been a long time coming. One batch recently incinerated was nerve gas captured from Nazi Germany, 65+ years ago. The world will be a better place without it. It's a sad testimony that so much money was spent creating, storing and finally destroying those evil weapons.
"These things really are detoxified and are safe," McCloskey said Wednesday at the Deseret Chemical Depot, watching a video feed of mustard agent projectiles leave an incinerator on a conveyer belt. "This is the last tray of the last weapons to go through this plant."
The last 23 projectiles were baked for two hours at 1,500 degrees, purging them of mustard agent, which can produce painful skin blisters. The Utah depot — which at its peak held 13,600 tons of chemical agents, making it the world's largest — expects to complete the job by the weekend when it incinerates bulk supplies of Lewisite, a powerful skin, eye and lung irritant.
By then, the U.S. Army will have destroyed about 90 percent of its aging chemical weapons that accumulated through the Cold War.
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