Editorial

JACADS Demonstrates Need for Alternative Treatments

The Johnston Atoll Chemical Agent Disposal System was built by the U.S. Army to demonstrate how incineration might be used to destroy the country’s stockpile of chemical weapons.

It is indeed a demonstration facility – but hardly in the sense the Army might wish it to be. In the seven years of its operation, it has racked up an impressive record of mishaps, violations, miscues, and disasters. Some, such as the efforts to measure solidified mustard gas in the bottom of a deep ton of containers by using a wooden dowel as a dipstick, would not be out of place in a Marx Brothers movie, were the subject not quite so lethal.

What JACADS demonstrates, if anything, is the need for the United States to waste no more time in developing alternative methods for chemical weapons destruction.

The Army has argued and will surely continue to do so that the search for alternatives will throw off its schedule to destroy all chemical weapons by the congressionally imposed deadline of 2004. But there is not the least shred of evidence to suggest that the Army will come close to approaching that deadline should it stay on its present slow track. Indeed, as more than a dozen sober reports from the U.S. General Accounting Office show, the Army’s schedules and cost estimates are the stuff of sheerest fiction. It is preposterous that this flimsy veil of a time-table should be used as a shield against calls for serious research into alternative disposal technologies.

Why should the Army stick so fast to its present course? As one expert has put it – Ross Vincent, of the Sierra Club – the Army’s mission has changed. “No longer was the objective destroying chemical weapons. The mission has become building incinerators. Until very recently, the Army has remained relentlessly focused on that redefined mission, in spite of the fact that it’s now obvious that a number of better, safer options are available.”

The Army may wish the public and Congress to believe it is so far along in its chosen course of incineration that pursuit of alternatives at this time is folly. Far from it. The Army is barely out of the starting gate in its chemical weapons destruction program; at the end of 1995, it had destroyed just a quarter of Johnston Island’s 6.6 percent of the nation’s total stockpile. In other words, six years into its program, it had accomplished less than 2 percent of its job – and even that entailed thousands upon thousands of violations of its EPA permit, releases of small (although still dangerous) quantities of unburned chemical agents to the environment, and stresses to the incinerator systems beyond anything its designers thought possible.

The goal of removing chemical weapons from the face of the earth is certainly a worthy one, and we would want to do nothing to slow down further the already glacial pace of progress toward the day when the world is free of chemical arms. Yet it is clear that the United States will set the course for the world in this endeavor. It is terrifying to think that other nations – poorer, less technologically adept, and having populations near their weapons destruction centers – might embark on a program of incineration modeled along that of JACADS.

Yes, Johnston is a demonstration facility, illustrating what is absolutely the wrong way to destroy the bane of chemical weapons. Let it remain one of a kind, an exemplary model of what not to do.

Four years after the signing of the U.N. Convention on Chemical Weapons, the United States remains a pariah state by the Senate’s refusal to ratify the treaty. In this, it joins the ranks of such international renegade states as Libya, North Korea, Syria, and Iraq.

One might think this alone would give the Senate pause.

To leave this club of dishonor is not the only reason to ratify the treaty, however. Unless the treaty is ratified, the United States will lack the moral authority it needs to insist that other nations abide by it. To be sure, the United States has already committed itself, by act of Congress, to disarming its own chemical weapons. In a world that has been living under the shadow of chemical weapons for the last eighty years, unilateral action is simply not good enough.

In recent weeks, the environmental community of Hawai`i has lost two leading lights. William Dougherty, whose name was synonymous with the cause of drinking water protection in Hawai`i, died on January 25, 1997. He was 66 years old. William Klein Jr., director of the National Tropical Botanical Garden, died February 12. He was 63.

Bill Dougherty was an unrelenting, tireless advocate for safe drinking water. His work and record of accomplishment in this field are remarkable. The most recent achievement to be credited to him, in large measure, is the Department of Health decision last year to reissue new and improved maps of contaminated well sites. His death leaves an enormous lacuna in the environmental community of Hawai`i. No one else has shown his vigor and interest in hounding agencies and regulators to do right by Hawai`i’s water and the people who drink it.

Bill Klein brought to the islands a contagious enthusiasm that re-energized the National Tropical Botanical Garden programs in Hawai`i and elsewhere. On the island of Kaua`i, Bill supervised the NTBG’s gardens after Hurricane `Iniki in 1992. He also worked closely with the Hawaiian community on the reopening of Kahanu Gardens at Hana, Maui. He was a leader in his field, nationally and internationally, and Hawai`i was most fortunate to have benefited from his presence here.

We are extremely grateful to these two outstanding men for their generous contributions to Hawai`i and extend to their families and loved ones our profound sympathy.

Volume 7, Number 9 March 1997