Why would the Defense Department consider moving Colorado's chemical weapons stockpile to Utah and destroying it here?

The issue may involve deadlines and money.

According to the Chemical Weapons Convention, the international treaty requiring destruction of the material, the United States must get rid of its chemical arms by April 2012.

When Congress launched the project, the law envisioned that the eight scattered stockpiles would be destroyed by plants built on site. The stockpiles are at Umatilla Chemical Depot, Ore.; Deseret Chemical Depot, near Stockton, Tooele County; Pueblo Chemical Depot, Colo.; Pine Bluff Arsenal, Ark.; Anniston Army Depot, Ala.; Newport Chemical Depot, Ind.; Blue Grass Army Depot, Ky.; and the Edgewood area of Aberdeen Proving Ground, Md.

The Army's $1 billion incinerator at Deseret Chemical Weapons Depot has been destroying the Utah stockpile since 1996. This was the largest hoard of chemical weapons in the country and the incinerator was the first such plant on American soil to begin burning the spray tanks, projectiles, ton containers, mines and other material. Chemicals included nerve and blister agent.

In September 2004, the Utah plant passed its halfway point, having burned 6,718 tons of agent.

About 2,600 tons of mustard agent is stored at Pueblo Chemical Depot, 14 miles east of Pueblo, Colo.

Plants to destroy the material have not been built, and in September 2004 the design process was halted for nine months "while the project team conducts trade studies to examine design alternatives that could reduce project costs," a Pueblo Depot news release stated at that time.

Another chemical stockpile without a plant to destroy it is at Blue Grass Army Depot, near Richmond, Ky. That depot's posting on the Internet says "plans are under way to build a chemical weapons disposal facility." Method would be "neutralization followed by supercritical water oxidation."

The United States requested an extension to December 2007 to destroy 45 percent of its stockpile. The original deadline was April 29, 2004. As of the end of December 2004, the total destroyed was only one-third, according to the Army Chemical Materials Agency.

A Defense Department release on the matter cited "several delays due to unresolved political and operational issues that forced operational shutdowns or postponed start-up dates." "At the Tooele Chemical Destruction Facility in Utah, no destruction occurred for eight months due to an investigation of safety practices following an incident where a worker was exposed to a minute quantity of chemical agent during a maintenance operation."

Time is running out on the project, with two plants not even built.

Craig Williams, director of the anti-incinerator organization Chemical Weapons Working Group, based in Berea, Ky., thinks deadline pressures are not as important as money concerns.

"It's strictly dollars," he said in a Deseret Morning News telephone interview. "The chances of meeting the treaty (deadline) are almost zero anyway, under any circumstance."

Williams said the latest figures available from the Pentagon placed cost of destroying America's chemical weapons at $25 billion. But, he added, "the internal chatter that I'm picking up on is it's closer to $32 billion."

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E-mail: bau@desnews.com