President Joe Biden declared on Friday that the United States has completely destroyed its decades-old chemical weapons stocks, meeting a promise under the three-decade-old Chemical Weapons Convention.
“Today, I am proud to announce that the United States has safely destroyed the final munition in that stockpile — bringing us one step closer to a world free from the horrors of chemical weapons,” Biden said.
The United States was the last of the Chemical Weapons Convention’s signatories to complete the task of destroying their “declared” stockpiles, though some are believed to maintain secret reserves of chemical weapons.
“It marks the first time an international body has verified destruction of an entire category of declared weapons of mass destruction,” Biden said in a statement.
The declaration came after the Blue Grass Army Depot, a US Army facility in Kentucky, finished a four-year project to destroy 500 tonnes of dangerous chemical agents, the final batch stored by the US military.
For decades, the United States had stockpiled artillery projectiles and rockets containing mustard gases, VX and sarin nerve agents, and blister agents.
Following their usage with horrifying outcomes on the battlefields of World War I, such weapons were highly denounced.
However, several countries kept and developed them in the years that followed.
The Chemical Weapons Convention, signed in 1993 and ratified in 1997, gave the US until September 30 of this year to destroy all chemical agents and armaments.
Other treaty members had already eradicated their stockpiles, according to Fernando Arias, president of the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW), in May.
He stated that this left only the United States to fulfill the assignment.
“More than 70,000 tons of the world’s most dangerous poisons have been destroyed under the supervision of the OPCW,” he said.
According to the US Arms Control Association, in 1990 the United States held nearly 28,600 tonnes of chemical weapons, the world’s second largest store after Russia.
With the ebb of the Cold War the superpowers and other countries joined together to negotiate the Chemical Weapons Convention.
