Thirty thousand tons of chemical weapons, and the last of it went in 2023

**In July 2023, the last of approximately 30,500 tons of stockpiled chemical
warfare agent was destroyed.** That completed the destruction of the US
stockpile and fulfilled the country's treaty obligation under the **Chemical
Weapons Convention**.

Thirty thousand tons is the figure to hold on to. Destroying it was not a
decision but a programme — decades long, requiring purpose-built plants at
each storage site, each of which then had to be dismantled.

How it was destroyed

Chemical agent destruction facilities at each site destroyed the stockpile by
incineration or neutralisation. Two organisations managed the work:

• The Chemical Materials Agency, renamed the **Chemical Materials
  Activity** in 2012
• The Program Manager for Assembled Chemical Weapons Alternatives

What is left to do

The weapons are gone; the factories built to destroy them are not.

Two sites are in the closure process:

• Blue Grass Chemical Agent-Destruction Pilot Plant, Richmond, Kentucky
• Pueblo Chemical Agent-Destruction Pilot Plant, Pueblo, Colorado

Seven sites have already been closed, beginning with the Aberdeen Chemical
Agent Disposal Facility at Aberdeen Proving Ground, Maryland.

Closing a plant that handled nerve agent is its own decontamination problem,
which is why the closure phase has a programme and a public health presence of
its own rather than being an afterthought to the destruction.

Source: Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.