A nearly two-year delay in completion of chemical weapons disposal in Colorado is "unacceptable," U.S. Senator Ken Salazar (D-Colo.) said yesterday in a letter to the Defense Department (see GSN, Nov. 26).
Reports last month indicated that the start of disposal operations at the Pueblo Chemical Depot had been delayed from January 2015 to December 2016 due to increasing costs, inadequate funding and other issues (see GSN, Nov. 20). Work could finish in 2020.
Pueblo is one of two chemical weapons storage sites that have not yet begun to eliminate their stockpiles. The other is the Blue Grass Army Depot in Kentucky, which is facing an even longer delay.
Congress last year demanded that the entire U.S. arsenal of chemical warfare materials be eliminated by 2017. The United States is a member nation to the international Chemical Weapons Convention, which requires that the U.S. stockpile, which once stood at more than 30,000 tons of weapons agents, be finished off by April 2012 (see GSN, Dec. 30).
"Just a few months ago the Department of Defense reported that they expected to be able to meet the 2017 deadline that we set for destroying the munitions stored at the Pueblo Chemical Depot,” Salazar said in a press release. “I worked on a bipartisan basis with my colleagues to deliver the funding the Pentagon requested to do the job. Now the Pentagon is saying that their funding request was too low and the project will be delayed. This is unacceptable and the Department of Defense needs to act swiftly to correct the problem. I fully expect the Pentagon to update its funding profile and its 2010 budget request to ensure that the weapons are safely destroyed by the 2017 deadline.”
He relayed the same message to Defense Undersecretary John Young, the release states (U.S. Senator Ken Salazar release, Dec. 3).