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For decades, the Army disposed of chemical arms by burying them.
That's considered unsafe now, so the government has pondered digging
them up again for proper disposal.
The Army has said related work could take $17.7 billion and 40 years.
But now the General Accounting Office, a research arm of Congress,
says those are only guesses and that no one really knows how long the
job may take or how much it will cost.
That may be of concern in Utah, which contains more than a fifth of
all suspected chemical arms burial sites in the nation - far more than
any other state. Many such arms were tested at Dugway Proving Ground
and stored at Tooele Army Depot.
Disposal of now-buried arms would be in addition to current efforts to
incinerate the stockpile of still-usable chemical arms stored at eight
bases nationally, including TAD, where a destruction plant for them
has just been completed.
The GAO said that it faces too many unknowns to give anything but the
roughest of estimates about destroying buried and other
"non-stockpile" arms - so its approximations should be considered
"uncertain" and "cannot be used for budget pur-poses."
It added, "This uncertainty is largely because the amount of materiel
to be disposed of has not been fully identified and the disposal
methods cannot be selected until the Army is further along in the
environmental assessment and permitting process."
For example, it said the Army, by searching old records, has
identified 215 sites nationwide where chemical arms may have been
buried - 48 of which are in Utah. The Army previously said most are on
the Dugway and Tooele bases, or on nearby public lands.
But the Army has little idea of exactly what kind of arms and
chemicals may be at each site and is only beginning work to determine
that.
The GAO also suspects more sites will emerge over time. "Since burial
was considered to be the final disposal act, little record-keeping was
done," it said.
Such buried arms have been known to cause problems. Contractors at
Dugway have charged they were hurt when they accidentally dug into
some while excavating for a new building. In 1993 in Washington, D.C.,
a construction crew also dug into buried arms at a new subdivision at
a former Army camp.
Besides disposing of buried arms, the Army also is trying to determine
how much it will cost to dispose of other "non-stockpile" chemical
arms - such as those recovered from range-cleaning operations or arms
captured from enemies and stored.
It said cleaning ranges at such places as Dugway has brought in a wide
variety of arms, some with explosives still attached. The Army has no
idea what chemicals may be in about one-quarter of such arms. Some
such arms are at both Dugway and TAD, the GAO said.
It added that TAD also stores some components of new binary chemical
weapons - which combine two nonlethal chemicals to form deadly nerve
gas - which the Army also plans to destroy.
It said TAD and Dugway also contain a variety of other miscellaneous
chemical warfare materiel - such as unfilled munitions and support
equipment - of which the Army plans to dispose in its non-stockpile
arms disposal program.
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