hypocritexposer
Well-known member
...do you think they'd have time to move their chemical weapons back to Iraq?
You can't just burn it. You can't bury it. And you sure can't shoot a missile at it. All those methods run the risk of spreading lethal agents, causing mass deaths and worsening an international crisis.
Based on past history, it could take billions of dollars and at least a decade to destroy Syria's estimated 1,000 tons of chemical weapons — a task complicated by the fact that removing those weapons from the mix would not end the country's civil war.
"It's a process that is very complicated and quite challenging to manage, even in normal circumstances."
Assuming Syria follows through on its promise and joins the international ban on chemical weapons, the process is actually up to ... Syria. The Assad government would have to detail its stockpile for the first time, and lay out a plan for eliminating the weapons and the production facilities. The OPCW would have to give its approval, and inspectors would monitor the process from start to finish.
The procedure typically involves draining the chemical agents (for example, blister agents like mustard gas, or nerve agents like sarin, tabun or VX) from their munitions, and then incinerating them. Under the terms of the chemical weapons ban, which went into force in 1997, the United States already has destroyed 90 percent of its own 31,500-ton chemical weapons stockpile through incineration.
The incineration process doesn't mean you just put VX in a barrel and set it on fire: There's a complicated procedure to extract the agents, subject them to high heat and dispose of the combustion products safely. Even the smoke that goes up the smokestack should be filtered. Greg Mahall, a spokesman for the U.S. Army Chemical Materials Activity, told NBC News that the disposal facilities have "various circles of safety" that require some workers to wear protective moonsuits.
"Once the weapons got into a certain area of the plant, they were never touched by human hands," he said. "It was all robotics."
The United States started getting rid of its obsolete chemical weapons even before the international ban took effect. Since the late 1980s, the disposal process has cost the Pentagon more than $35 billion, and it's not over yet.
The chemical weapons ban applies to 189 nations — but 16 years after it took effect, about 30 percent of the weapons that have been declared still haven't been destroyed. Both the United States and Russia missed last year's deadline for finishing the job.
Mahall said the Pentagon's process has run into snags because some of the older weapons had degraded over time and posed extra safety problems. For example, some of the munitions "popped like a Champagne cork," unexpectedly spraying out mustard gas.
"Safety ran this program, so anytime we had an issue, we stopped," he said.
Over time, environmental concerns led the U.S. military to develop new methods that rely on super-hot water, chemical degradation and microbial degradation rather than incineration to destroy the weapons. The last of the incinerators is due to be demolished over the next year.
Lebanese daily says 20 trucks crossed into Iraq last week, bearing equipment and material used for manufacturing chemical weapons. Syria has moved 20 trucks worth of equipment and material used for the manufacturing of chemical weapons into neighboring Iraq, the Lebanese daily Al-Mustaqbal reported on Sunday. The newspaper reported that the trucks crossed the boundary separating Syria with Iraq over the course of Thursday and Friday. Border guards did not inspect the contents of the trucks, which raises suspicions that they contained illicit cargo, according to Al-Mustaqbal.
hypocritexposer said:...do you think they'd have time to move their chemical weapons back to Iraq?
Retired Air Force Lt. Gen. James Clapper, former director of the Defense Intelligence Agency, now director of the National Imagery and Mapping Agency, told reporters that U.S. surveillance satellites captured images of vehicle traffic dispersing WMD materiel to urban locations in Iraq and moving large quantities into Syria as well.
Those below the senior leadership saw what was coming, and I think they went to extraordinary lengths to [dispose, destroy and disperse] the evidence," said Gen. Clapper.
"By the time that we got to a lot of these facilities...there wasn't that much there to look at. There was clearly an effort to disperse, bury and conceal certain equipment prior to inspections."
Gen. Clapper added that there is "no question" that people and WMD materiel were moved by truck convoys into Syria.
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^ "Obama nominates Clapper to head spy agencies, ''MSNBC'', June 05, 2010". MSNBC. Retrieved 2011-03-13.
President Obama made the official announcement on June 5, 2010 saying Clapper "possesses a quality that I value in all my advisers: a willingness to tell leaders what we need to know even if it's not what we want to hear."