Anisa Khalifa: Eastern Kentucky is home to lush foothills, lots of horse farms and the small city of Richmond — population: about 35,000. On the South side of town, there's a depot run by the US Army. That's not unusual in this part of the country, the South is home to a disproportionate number of military installations. But for more than 70 years, this facility housed something terrible and extraordinary.
Unidentified speaker: They held a nerve agent called sarin and it causes your central nervous system to sort of go haywire. So death is certain above a certain level of exposure.
Anisa Khalifa: The dangers of the stockpile hovered over the town's residents for decades. But recently, the army fulfilled a long standing mandate to destroy their entire supply of these deadly weapons in communities like Pine Bluff, Arkansas, Bynum, Alabama, and Richmond, Kentucky.
Unidentified speaker: It's the end of an era. I mean, it's the end of an awful, terrible weapon that a lot of people wish had never been built in the first place.
Anisa Khalifa: I'm Anisa Khalifa. This week on the Broadside, my colleague Charlie Shelton-Ormond follows the journey to safely get rid of this stockpile and learns what it's been like for the people living next door to these weapons of mass destruction.
Charlie Shelton-Ormond: It's not every day you get to witness a weapon of mass destruction be destroyed. But one day this past summer, John Ismay did.
John Ismay: It's been a really long road for Uncle Sam to get rid of this. And you know, it was a Herculean effort.
Charlie Shelton-Ormond: Back in June, John traveled from his home in DC to eastern Kentucky, where workers at the Blue Grass Army Depot were eliminating the final remnants of a deadly arsenal.
John Ismay: As a reporter, I thought it was important that we bear witness to their demise.
Charlie Shelton-Ormond: John is a Pentagon correspondent for The New York Times. Before becoming a journalist, he served in the military.
John Ismay: I spent most of my adult life prior to journalism in the US Navy, first serving on a destroyer in the Pacific and then later transferred to something called explosive ordnance disposal. EOD is basically the bomb squad. And if you saw the movie Hurt Locker, that was made about EOD techs in combat. So in the newsroom, whenever there's a question about weapons or munitions or firearms, oftentimes my phone rings.
Charlie Shelton-Ormond: So when he got wind that the country's chemical weapons supply was being destroyed, John reached out to the folks at the depot who were eager to showcase their work.
John Ismay: They will tell you these are awful things that we built, we as the United States built and it is a good thing to destroy them. It is a good thing to unmake that.
Charlie Shelton-Ormond: The Blue Grass Army Depot outside of Richmond, Kentucky, is one out of nine sites that once stored the United States' supply of chemical weapons. Four of those facilities were located in the South. The stockpile at Blue Grass originally contained more than 500 tons of munitions carrying toxic nerve agents. The rockets had been there for decades. But John says that didn't make them any less lethal.
John Ismay: They were still just as dangerous as the day they were made.
Charlie Shelton-Ormond: For example, one of the toxins inside these artillery shells was a liquid mustard agent.
John Ismay: Liquid mustard is classified as a blister agent. So if it gets on your skin, it can produce these huge blisters. I mean, I'm talking as big as the palm of your hand. That's how big we're talking. And the way people tended to die from exposure was if they inhaled a vapor or mist droplets of liquid mustard, then you'd get those blisters inside your lungs. And then those people would sometimes experience what's called dryland drowning, the blisters would pop and then their lungs would fill with liquid and they'd die. So this person was incredibly lucky, in one perspective, incredibly unlucky in another.
In fact, one of those shells was dredged up by a fishing boat while I was going through training — was going through the chemical biological warfare phase of training at the EOD school at Eglin Air Force Base, and that shell was transported to Dover Air Force Base in Delaware. And a team x-rayed it and then hit it with a small shaped charge on a demolition range and out leaked 80-year-old liquid mustard agent, and one of the EOD techs ended up getting some on their arms. And we saw these photos of just huge blisters on this poor guy's arm and it was just as active as it was when it was made. I mean, it had degraded some, but it was, it still did exactly what it was designed to do.
Charlie Shelton-Ormond: But let's take a step back for a minute. Why did the US have all these chemical weapons in the first place?
(SOUNDBITE OF NEWS BROADCAST)
There are several chemical agents which have a percutaneous effect. By absorption through the skin, they can cause casualties, or even death.
Charlie Shelton-Ormond: Chemical warfare was common during World War I more than a century ago. The effects of the weapons were brutal and horrific. In response, the Geneva Protocol prohibited the use of chemical weapons in 1925.
John Ismay: At a certain point, it went from being a battlefield weapon that was used, just like you know, a lot of other weapons, to something that was seen as uniquely hazardous even to your own people.
Charlie Shelton-Ormond: But the agreements that many countries signed had a major loophole: they didn't outlaw producing and stockpiling chemical weapons. So the US, along with many other countries continued to build up its supply to a staggering level as the Cold War ramped up. That just-in-case approach — the thinking went, if the enemy fires first, the military would have a massive response at the ready.
(SOUNDBITE FROM NEWSREEL)
Nerve gases are so toxic, that a very small amount of the liquid in contact with the skin can have a casualty effect.
Charlie Shelton-Ormond: This is audio from a 1959 film from the US Army Chemical Corps.
(SOUNDBITE FROM NEWSREEL)
For these the protective mask alone is not sufficient; the whole body must be protected with combat clothing which has been specially treated.
Charlie Shelton-Ormond: Fast forward to the 1980s. The Cold War was in its final years, and the United States seriously considered for the first time what it would take to get rid of their chemical weapons. Stronger accountability came in the late 90s with the International Chemical Weapons Convention, and mandated the US and several other countries get rid of their chemical weapons for good. But things haven't always stayed on track along the way. It took lots of money.
John Ismay: I think 42 billion, we had it that's close to 42 billion. And the initial estimate, I think my colleague found they were looking at 1.4 billion, but that's, you know, decades ago.
Charlie Shelton-Ormond: And lots of time. So why did it take so long?
John Ismay: Really two things. One is just the sheer size of the stockpile. We're talking hundreds of thousands of pieces of ordnance including cluster bombs, landmines, you know, rockets and artillery shells and other forms of weapons that were built over decades during the Cold War. The second major hurdle was how to dispose of these in a way that was not a threat to the environment, and was not a threat to people who lived in the area, say downwind of these storage facilities.
So the United States first started using incineration as a technique. They simply placed these weapons into an incineration chamber heated them to thousands of degrees, the euphemism is "thermally treated," so it is thermally treated, the liquid agent inside the shells as well as the small bits of explosives that are present in them, then the exhaust would then be, you know, filtered, and so on. But over time, thanks to community involvement, people, citizens who live near these facilities said, you know, we'd really prefer something different than incineration. So the army embarked on a program to figure out a way to neutralize the lethal liquid agents inside through chemical interaction.
Charlie Shelton-Ormond: John points out that munitions like this were meant to be blown up, not torn apart.
John Ismay: And so that took time to develop and then test and validate that it was indeed safe and then that they had a proper protocol in place to then dispose of the less toxic chemicals that remained.
Charlie Shelton-Ormond: Okay, next, how do you do it? How do you dismantle a chemical weapon of mass destruction?
John Ismay: The liquid nerve agent that I saw was mixed with water and something called caustic soda. And it was then I believe, heated and agitated or stirred in really large multi-hundred or -thousand gallon tanks or large tanks, and then that process breaks apart the sarin itself.
Charlie Shelton-Ormond: Sarin is one of the nerve agents stored at the depot. John says this process turns it into something called hydrolysate.
John Ismay: And I asked okay, well, what is this and what's it similar to they said, it's actually not that dissimilar from liquid drain cleaner like Drano that you could get at the hardware store, you know, at the grocery store. So essentially the process, the chemical reactions, resulted in producing something that is not something you'd want to drink. But if it gets on your skin, it's not going to kill you. And so that that hydrolysate itself is also pumped into holding tanks. And then that is, I believe, getting shipped out to a facility near Port Arthur, Texas, and it's going to be incinerated there.
Charlie Shelton-Ormond: So big simplification here, but essentially, they diluted the toxic liquid to a point where it could be safely transferred, and then burned somewhere else. Now, even though the nerve agent is gone from the depot, the cleanup continues. John says the army still has to break down all the munitions and make sure any equipment that came in contact with the nerve agent is free of toxic residue.
John Ismay: And ultimately, it would have the same hazard as a crushed Coke can. At the end of it, that's the goal, is to be able to recycle these. And so wherever possible material will be recycled once it's certified free of hazard.
Charlie Shelton-Ormond: So John, now all the United States publicly declared chemical weapons are gone with the dismantling of these munitions. How big of a deal is that?
John Ismay: I think it's a very big deal. If ever, someone decided that they wanted to rebuild that capability, think of the obstacles that would be in the way. Think of the time it would take the you know, somebody would have to build it back up from the ground, if they ever wanted to bring this era back. And I'll offer a personal opinion, I think it's a good thing, that there does not appear to be any political will in this country to return to those days.
Charlie Shelton-Ormond: Another thing that interests me with this story is kind of looking at this Venn diagram of sorts. So in one circle, we have civilian life, residential life, and then in the other circle, there's military life. But sometimes in a situation like this, there's that overlap, where you know, a military site is almost existing in tandem with the residential population. And I'm curious to hear from you, you know, what are the unique characteristics of the middle of that Venn diagram? When we see this overlap?
John Ismay: I think it's probably those workers, right, who live in the community. If something were to happen, that would be their family, who's being affected.
Mike Kester: Let's be frank, the chemical weapons that are here are very dangerous, we're destroying them because of their lethality, and their impact on the local community. if we're taking care of our workforce, we're inherently taking care of the community at the same time.
Charlie Shelton-Ormond: That's Mike Kester, he's a shift plant manager at Blue Grass Army Depot, and was on site the day the last munition with nerve agent was eliminated.
Mike Kester: Honestly, I kind of brushed it off as, the last one is just like the one before it is just like the one before it is just like any other rocket. But I'll tell you, as the last rocket was coming into the building to be processed and separated and punched and drained, I felt just an immense amount of pride as that rocket was coming in.
John Ismay: He did all of us a solid. They did some really dangerous work that makes all of our lives safer and better. I think they should have our gratitude. Yeah, I want to see those communities continue to thrive even when all this work is done.
Charlie Shelton-Ormond: Coming up, is that chemical smoke blowing in the wind? Not in my backyard. We'll talk with somebody who's lived near the depot for decades and lead the charge to safely get rid of these weapons.
We're back with the Broadside. I'm Charlie Shelton-Ormond. Let's go back about 40 years ago to 1984. That's when Craig Williams said something in a local paper caught his eye.
Craig Williams: There was a notice in the paper that there was going to be a meeting at the army depot concerning the army's plans to dispose of some weapons. And about 300 people showed up to that meeting. And they had an army representative, several army representatives there. And they made a presentation that there were chemical weapons stored at that location.
Charlie Shelton-Ormond: Today Craig is the director of the Kentucky Environmental Foundation. He lives in Berea, Kentucky, a town just south of the depot.
Craig Williams: They didn't say how many, they didn't say what they were made of. It was all hush hush at the time, and that they plan to destroy them, and their plan was to incinerate them on the depot grounds.
Charlie Shelton-Ormond: Earlier, reporter John Ismay talked about how long this whole project took, in part because the process for neutralizing and destroying the chemical agents is incredibly complicated. But the army's original plan back in the 80s was pretty different and a lot simpler. They wanted to burn it up right there in Richmond, Kentucky's backyard. The army said it was safe. But Craig and his neighbors weren't buying it.
Craig Williams: You know, they said, are there any questions and a lot of people had a lot of questions, and answers that were stated, but were not anywhere near sufficient on things, important things like what's coming out of the stack, how long is it going to operate? What's the chances of some of this material escaping, and the location where they were going to build this incinerator was about 1.3 miles away from a middle school of about 600 kids at a time. They had presented the plan at other locations around the country. And some of them, it was just a cruise right through, nobody seemed to care. They just said, Well, it's the army's stuff, let them do what they want.
Charlie Shelton-Ormond: Craig and his friends in the community felt something was up. So they started to do some digging,
Craig Williams: We discovered that the safety and protective capabilities of the technology were not what was being represented to the community, particularly when we started getting credible reports from our congressional representatives about live agent releases that had been documented coming out on the stacks of these prototype incinerators. In my opinion, that was the biggest turning point in this whole thing.
Charlie Shelton-Ormond: A few years ago, a documentary about the community's work came out, called Nerve. Here's a clip from the doc of Craig speaking at a town-hall style meeting with the military in the late 80s.
Craig Williams: We realized that you can hire more lawyers, get more studies and pay more experts. But what you can't get is thousands of Kentuckians to support your plan to build this plant. That is the one thing we've got that you can't get, and the people's will will prevail, and we will stop this incinerator.
Craig Williams: The military mentality does not lend itself to having outsiders, quote unquote, come in and start telling them — or not telling them, but working with them — to figure out solutions.
Charlie Shelton-Ormond: So Craig, with that, how would you describe the initial relationship between the military and folks affiliated with the depot and the community in the 1980s, when, you know, this plan was first being presented.
Craig Williams: I think it was very important and very insightful that the opposition to the plan was always very, very careful to identify this particular proposal as what we had a problem with and not the army in general, depot in general, not the employees, they're not the command. So we developed a method of outreach to the depot. We even had a couple of volleyball games where the activists versus the depot employees and, you know, had a potluck and so on and so forth, to try to impress upon them this was nothing personal, and it was nothing to do with the army in general.
Charlie Shelton-Ormond: You weren't painting it as us against them. It's us looking out for us and trying to protect us. And it's not a it's not an antagonistic effort. It's just trying to keep us as a community safe.
Craig Williams: Yeah. Well, it was antagonistic towards the people in the program inside that wanted to build this incinerator. Because I mean, it got very cantankerous, but eventually, and when I say eventually, it was, like, 15 years after they made the announcement. You know, we all started to understand that we need to work together on this in order to reach an acceptable resolution by all parties.
Charlie Shelton-Ormond: 15 years, that's a lot of potlucks.
Craig Williams: Well, you know, it's funny that you should say that because at the beginning of this opposition, there were people that were thinking, Well, you know, we have a couple of spaghetti dinners and, you know, get people to sign petitions, we can, you know, change their mind, which was far from the truth. And so it took a long time to get to the point where we had credibility and clout in order to turn this thing around.
Charlie Shelton-Ormond: Throughout the 90s, Craig and his community continued to push against the military's incineration plan. They waited and waited for the alternative to be reviewed and hopefully approved. The decision ultimately rested with Congress. Would it choose to go with the original incineration plan, or the people's proposal in the early 2000s? Congress finally nixed incineration at the depot and greenlit the alternative method. But in the meantime, all those tons of chemical agents remained in storage at the depot. And people in Richmond went about their lives, hoping they never heard the wail of a siren, alerting them of a leak at the site.
Craig Williams: Thankfully, there was never any need for the siren to go off. That said, there was a chemical warfare agent release that was wafting across the county.
Charlie Shelton-Ormond: If there was a serious leak, Craig says there was a rapid communication plan in place to alert Richmond in the nearby counties. With a cloud of toxic nerve agent coming toward their houses, people in the area only had two options. They could try to outrun it and leave town — or board up their homes and hope for the best.
Craig Williams: Well, they said plastic up your windows and you know, don't let any air in if this stuff is coming at you in a cloud, you don't want to let the air in your house.
Charlie Shelton-Ormond: Now, here's where I've gotta be upfront with you. I have a special connection to this story. I was one of those people. I'm actually a Richmond native. I was a kid there back in the 90s. And I remember talking about these at-home kits that were handed out. And people kind of laughed it off. Like we got duct tape and saran wrap to protect us from mustard gas. What good is that actually going to do us.
Craig Williams: But actually, it's very effective. So you know, it seems like a very basic kind of approach. But it you know, it's effective. And so, but again, the good news is we never had any of that stuff. The other depot employees and the community. I mean, it was just, it's an astonishing safety record. These people had over a million hours of working with the most dangerous weapons, aside from nuclear weapons on the planet. And they had a safety record of less work time lost accidents than bankers.
Charlie Shelton-Ormond: After the United States agreed to the terms of the Chemical Weapons Convention in 1997, the military had a specific month circled on the calendar: September 2023. That was the deadline for destroying their chemical weapons stockpile. With a few months to spare, the army finished the job safely. And while it may have taken decades to get there, activists like Craig Williams can rest easy or at least easier. Knowing a chemical weapons accident isn't a risk to anyone in Richmond, Kentucky, or anywhere in the United States.
Craig Williams: You got to have patience if your working with the federal government, you know, but you know, you need to value the incremental progress that you make along the way so that you don't lose sight of your capability to achieve your ultimate goal. I mean, it's, it's a tricky thing to stick with something that long. But if you believe in what you're doing, you have passion, you can get there.
Charlie Shelton-Ormond: Craig, looking back on the early days of this activism journey, what do you remember? Or what sticks out in your mind that you've been thinking about now that this long journey is coming to an end?
Craig Williams: Well, first time I was interviewed by a TV camera, a lot of the meetings, they asked me why I was doing it. And I had my one-year-old son on my hip. And I pointed to him and I said, this is why I'm doing it, not just for my son, but for the community's well-being. And that motivation stuck with me over the years until my son is now 40. We just got this done so, but it was a general sense of not having the people most likely to be impacted have a say in their own determination as to what they believed was protective of the environment and their public's health.
Anisa Khalifa: If you want to check out John Ismay's reporting for The New York Times on the destruction of America's chemical weapons stockpile, we've dropped a link in this week's show notes. This episode of the Broadside was produced by Charlie Shelton Ormond and edited by Jared Walker. Al Wodarski provided audio engineering support. The Broadside is a production of North Carolina Public Radio, WUNC. Find us on your favorite podcast app and on wunc.org. If you enjoyed the show, leave us a rating or review, or tell a friend to tell a friend. Thanks for listening, y'all. We'll be back next week.