Joe Biden said that the US has completely destroyed its decades-old stockpile of chemical weapons.
Washington:
President Joe Biden announced Friday that the United States has completely destroyed its decades-old stockpile of chemical weapons, fulfilling a commitment under the three-year Chemical Weapons Convention.
Biden said, “Today, I am proud to announce that the United States has safely destroyed the last of the ammunition in that stockpile – taking us one step closer to a world free of the horrors of chemical weapons.” have come close.”
The United States was the last of the signatories to the Chemical Weapons Convention to complete the task of destroying its “declared” stockpiles, although some are believed to maintain secret stockpiles of chemical weapons.
“This is the first time an international body has verified the destruction of an entire class of declared weapons of mass destruction,” Biden said in a statement.
The announcement came after the Blue Grass Army Depot, a US military facility in Kentucky, recently completed its four-year task of eliminating nearly 500 tons of the deadly chemical agent, the last batch the US military had.
The US had for decades stockpiles of artillery projectiles and rockets containing mustard gases, VX and sarin nerve agents and blister agents.
Such weapons were widely condemned after their use on the battlefields of World War I with dire consequences.
But many countries retained them and developed them further in later years.
The Chemical Weapons Convention, which was agreed upon in 1993 and came into effect in 1997, gave the United States until September 30 of this year to destroy all of its chemical agents and war materials.
Fernando Arias, head of the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW), said in May that other signatories to the accord had already finished their stakes.
He said that only the United States of America is left to fulfill this task.
“Over 70,000 tons of the world’s most dangerous poison has been destroyed under the supervision of the OPCW,” he added.
According to the US Arms Control Association, in 1990 the United States had approximately 28,600 tons of chemical weapons, the world’s second largest stockpile after Russia.
With the end of the Cold War, the superpowers and other countries came together to negotiate the Chemical Weapons Convention.
Eliminating the stockpiles, doubly dangerous because it meant neutralizing not only the chemical agents but also the munitions they contained, was a slow process.
Russia completed the destruction of its own declared stockpile in 2017.
By April 2022, the US had less than 600 tons left to destroy.
Biden urged continued vigilance to ensure that all chemical weapons around the world are destroyed and said that a handful of countries that have not joined the convention should do so.
“Russia and Syria must return to compliance with the Chemical Weapons Convention and acknowledge their undeclared programs, which have been used to commit brazen atrocities and attacks,” Biden said.
(Except for the headline, this story has not been edited by NDTV Staff and is published from a syndicated feed.)