Ukraine in Arabic | Deadly nerve-agent ordnance from WWI are set be demolished after decades in storage
Kiev/ Ukraine in Arabic/ Pueblo, United States - At a military installation on the windswept prairie of southern Colorado, a small army of workers in protective gear, assisted by precision robots, is training to destroy one of mankind's most vile inventions: chemical weapons.
"Chemical agent destruction is a hard role. It's a high hazard operation," says project manager Kim Jackson. "We have explosion hazards, and we also have agent hazards. That means anyone who might be exposed to the blister agent. So we spend a lot of our time with our personnel on training to ensure that our workforce is ready to complete chemical weapons destruction."
The facility's official name is the Pueblo Chemical Agent Destruction Pilot Plant. In the 1940s, as the US entered World War II, the military created a huge stockpile of chemical weapons, mainly in the form of artillery shells.
George Robinson has spent 30 years neutralising chemical weapons and other types of munitions. He was one of the technicians who destroyed chemical weapons and precursor chemicals given up by Syria in 2014. Those substances were destroyed onboard a US navy vessel in the Mediterranean Sea.
"The challenging part was the fact that the system was a land-based system that we put on board the ship and tested on the ship," Robinson says. While the engineers and chemists who carry out this dangerous, painstaking job do not often talk about the broader historical or moral aspects of their work, weapons engineer Jon Miller sees it is as a deeply satisfying task.
"Chemical weapons are about the worst thing going," Miller says. "They're dirty, they're nasty. So really, getting rid of them, in my opinion, is kind of an important thing."
Destroying the stockpile will take at least four years at a cost of $4.5bn.
