The U.S. has destroyed its last declared chemical weapons stockpile, marking the end of a warfare chapter dating back to World War I. The final munitions, rockets filled with the GB nerve agent (sarin), were destroyed at the Blue Grass Army Depot in Kentucky, concluding a more than 30-year effort to eliminate a stockpile that once totaled over 30,000 tons. The destruction of these weapons is significant for Richmond, Kentucky, and Pueblo, Colorado, where the last of its mustard gas weapons were destroyed last month. - The U.S. had a deadline of Sept. 30 to eliminate its remaining chemical weapons under the international Chemical Weapons Convention, which was joined by 193 countries and took effect in 1997.
- The U.S. is sending a message to the few countries that haven't joined the agreement that these types of weapons are no longer acceptable on the battlefield.
- In Colorado, workers at the Army Pueblo Chemical Depot started destroying the weapons in 2016.
- On June 22, they completed their mission of neutralizing the entire cache of about 2,600 tons of the mustard blister agent.
- The munitions destroyed in Kentucky were the last of 51,000 M55 rockets with sarin, stored at the depot since the 1940s.
According to the United Nations, chemical weapons killed nearly 100,000 people during World War I and have caused more than 1 million casualties worldwide since then. - The news of the destruction of the stockpile comes as the U.S. offloaded some of its other controversial weapons to Ukraine.
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