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.
US president said, “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”.
The United States was the latest signatory to the Chemical Weapons Convention to finish the work of destroying its declared stockpiles, however, some are suspected to have covert chemical weapons stocks.
“It marks the first time that an international body has verified the 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 Organisation 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 tonnes of the world’s most dangerous poisons have been destroyed under the supervision of the OPCW”, he claimed.
According to the US Arms Control Association, the United States possessed about 28,600 tonnes of chemical weapons in 1990, making it the world’s second-largest stockpile after Russia.
As the Cold War came to an end, the superpowers and other countries came together to negotiate the Chemical Weapons Convention.
Eliminating the stocks was a time-consuming process that involved neutralizing not only the chemical agents but also the bombs they were packed in.
In 2017, Russia completed the destruction of its declared stockpiles.
By April 2022, the United States had less than 600 tonnes to eliminate.
Biden urged sustained vigilance to guarantee that all chemical weapons are destroyed around the world, and he urged the few countries that have not joined the convention to do so.
“Russia and Syria should return to compliance with the Chemical Weapons Convention and admit their undeclared programmes, which have been used to commit brazen atrocities and attacks”, Biden added.
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