The Chemical Weapons Convention requires, among other things, that the signatories to the convention—which includes the United States—destroy by April 29, 2007, or as soon possible thereafter, any chemical warfare materiel that has been recovered from sites where it has been buried once discovered. For several years the United States and several other countries have been developing and using technologies to dispose of this non-stockpile materiel. To determine whether international efforts have resulted in technologies that would benefit the U.S. program, the U.S. Army asked the NRC to evaluate and compare such technologies to those now used by the United States. This book presents a discussion of factors used in the evaluations, summaries of evaluations of several promising international technologies for processing munitions and for agent-only processing, and summaries of other technologies that are less likely to be of benefit to the U.S. program at this time.

Table of Contents


Front Matter
Executive Summary
1 Introduction and Background
2 Issues Bearing on Sites Containing Large Amounts of Buried Chemical Weapons Materiel
3 Evaluation Factors for International Destruction Technologies
4 Tier 1 International Munitions Processing Technologies
5 Tier 1 International Agent-Only Processing Technologies
6 Tier 2 International Technologies for Munitions and Agent-Only Processing
7 Assessing Large Burial Sites and Accessing Chemical Warfare Materiel
Appendix A Tables Illustrative of a Variety of Non-Stockpile Items
Appendix B Tier 1 Munitions Processing Evaluation Subfactor Comparative Tables
Appendix C Tier 1 Agent-Only Processing Evaluation Subfactor Comparative Tables
Appendix D Committee Meetings and Other Activities
Appendix E Biographical Sketches of Committee Members