Washington.- USA announced on Friday that it has completed the destruction of its last stockpiles of chemical weapons, an important milestone on a global scale that marks that no state has declared stockpiles of this type.
“For more than 30 years, the United States has worked tirelessly to eliminate its inventory of chemical weapons. Today I am proud to announce that the United States has safely destroyed the last munitions in that stockpile, bringing us one step closer to a world free of the horrors of chemical weapons,” President Joe Biden said in a statement.
Just after the US announcement, the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW) confirmed that all declared stockpiles of chemical weapons in the world had been “irreversibly destroyed”.
“The end of the destruction of all declared chemical weapons stocks is an important stage,” Fernando Arias, the head of the OPCW, said in a statement.
The leader of the Republicans in the Senate, Mitch McConnell, had announced this Friday that the “Blue Grass” deposit, a military installation in the state of Kentucky (central east), recently finished disposing of some 500 tons of lethal chemical agents after of a mission that lasted four years.
These stockpiles were the last held by the US military, which for decades stockpiled artillery shells and rockets containing mustard gas, as well as highly toxic nerve agents and blister agents such as VX and sarin.
In May of this year, the OPCW had indicated that only the US had yet to finish destroying its reserves, adding that under the agency’s supervision more than “70,000 tons of the world’s most dangerous poisons” had been eliminated.
Weapons like these were widely condemned after their use with terrible results on the battlefield of World War I.
However, many countries kept them and developed them further in the following years.
The Chemical Weapons Convention, which was agreed to in 1993 and entered into force in 1997, gave the United States until September of this year to destroy all of its munitions with chemical agents.
According to the US Arms Control Association, in 1990 the country stockpiled about 28,600 tons of chemical weapons, the second largest inventory in the world after Russia.
With the decline of the Cold War, the superpowers and other countries came together to negotiate the Chemical Weapons Convention.
Eliminating the inventory, in any case, is doubly dangerous because it implies neutralizing not only the chemical agents but also containing the power of the ammunition that contains them. That is why disarmament is such a slow process.
Russia completed the destruction of its declared stockpile in 2017. As of April 2022, the United States was less than 600 tons from the zero target.
“While the use of these deadly weapons will forever be an indelible stain on history, our nation has finally made good on its promise to rid us of this scourge,” McConnell said in a statement.
In his statement, President Biden also urged the rest of the world to sign on to the 1997 Convention so that “the global ban on chemical weapons will reach its full potential.”
“Russia and Syria must once again comply with the Convention and recognize their undeclared programs, which have been used to commit atrocities and infamous attacks,” the US president claimed.
