A little bit of good news

Just a preliminary step and in that sense a small thing, to be sure, but it's still a good one. The Trib-Star (Terre Haute, IN) reported last week that

[t]he Army's countdown for destruction of the deadly nerve agent VX has begun.

The Newport Chemical Agent Destruction Facility has nearly completed the first of two final phases of preparation for nerve agent VX destruction. The destruction is scheduled to begin in September.

"Currently we are in the process of the 'demonstration of safe operations,'" Jeff Brubaker, Army site project manager, said Thursday. He said this program involves the identification of tasks and systems that must be validated before starting the destruction of chemical agent. ...

Before VX neutralization is initiated, the Army must formally notify Congress it is ready to begin on a specific date. The Army also must notify the oversight organization under the International Chemical Weapons Convention that more than 150 nations signed agreeing to destroy all chemical weapon stockpiles.

The Newport Chemical Depot is in Newport, Indiana, about 70 miles west of Indianapolis.

The destruction is taking place as part of the US's obligations under the UN Chemical Weapons Convention, which it ratified in April, 1997. Our entire chemical weapons arsenal - which consists of about 31,000 tons of VX, sarin and mustard nerve agent stored since Richard Nixon ordered their production stopped in 1969 - must be destroyed by 2007. The process is overseen internationally by the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons, which has the full text of the Convention here.

The real reason this is happening, of course, the real reason the Convention was approved in the first place, is that the big guns, i.e., the US, the then-USSR, France, the UK, and so on had come to the conclusion that chemical weapons depend a great deal on uncontrollable environmental factors (such as wind direction, most obviously) and what's more, countermeasures are available to even a moderately industrialized foe. Therefore, it was held, they are not particularly efficient and not particularly useful against any but the most defenseless targets. So it wasn't that hard in principle to give them up.

Even so, credit Nixon for taking a bold step to break the "you first" logjam. Because getting rid of these monuments to madness, even though many others remain, is, yes, to quote a long-time friend, "a good thing." In fact, a very good thing.

Footnote: According to Agencie Presse France for June 25,

[a] team of Chinese and Japanese chemical experts found 540 mustard and phosgene bombs in the latest clean-up of Japanese chemical weapons left in China in World War II, local media has reported. ...

Japan has estimated that its forces abandoned more than 700,000 chemical weapons in China after the war, although Chinese experts say as many as two million such weapons exist.

This would give China the world's largest stockpile of abandoned chemical weapons.

Some 600,000 bombs have already been collected and stored in Jilin province, awaiting the construction of a bomb incinerator to destroy them.

So much history, so much fear, so much murder, to undo. In his 1967 book The Politics of Experience, R. D. Laing wrote "Normal men have killed perhaps 100,000,000 of their fellow men in the last fifty years." It's sometimes frightening, overwhelming, to consider what we face. So we take it a bit at a time, a bite at a time, and when a bite, even a nibble, is pleasing - such as the preparations to carry out obligations under the Chemical Weapons Convention - we can and should take hope without embarrassment.