For more than 15 years, the Army's chemical demilitarization program has been criticized and castigated as a potentially dangerous effort, poorly executed without concern for the public. By reviewing the chemical demilitarization program as a public policy area, Mauroni offers a different perspective on how the Army worked with Congress and the public to offer the safest program possible. The Army was forced to delay its own schedule and increase the breadth and depth of the program to address political demands and idealistic environmental concerns. Mauroni contends that Army and Department of Defense leadership's insistence on treating this program as a strictly technical effort, rather than as a public policy concern is in part responsible for the public's misunderstanding of the Army's execution of the program. Despite its challenges, the Army is well on its way to accomplishing its goal of destroying the U.S. chemical weapons stockpile with no impact on the public or environment. They have stumbled through, however, rather than planned their exit. According to Mauroni, the Army needs to examine this program carefully to identify how to address public policy questions better in the future, to include responding to chemical and biological terrorism, developing a biological warfare vaccine program, and addressing future Gulf War illness questions. Their failure to learn will otherwise result in a continued inability to address critical questions on how they respond to chemical and biological warfare issues.

One of the major problems associated with the disposal of chemical weapons is that the agents have degraded over time, some quite seriously. Detecting and identifying the products of this decomposition are necessary prerequisites to the safe, complete and environmentally benign destruction of stockpiled weapons. The book presents and discusses both basic and novel techniques in a variety of areas of analytical chemistry which are relevant to achieving the ultimate destruction of chemical weapons. Presentations address sample collection and preparation, mass spectrometry, chromatographic techniques, NMR, and air monitoring techniques. The work shows that analytical methods do exist to effectively support the destruction of chemical munitions. While further research is needed, the book provides an excellent baseline for further advances in the field.

This study is a review and evaluation of the U.S. Army's Report to Congress on Alternative Approaches for the Treatment and Disposal of Chemical Agent Identification Sets (CAIS). CAIS are test kits that were used to train soldiers from 1928 to 1969 in defensive responses to a chemical attack. They contain samples of chemicals that had been or might have been used by opponents as chemical warfare agents. The Army's baseline approach for treating and disposing of CAIS has been to develop a mobile treatment system, called the Rapid Response System (RRS), which can be carried by several large over-the-road trailers.

Chemical warfare materiel (CWM) is a collection of diverse items that were used during 60 years of efforts by the United States to develop a capability for conducting chemical warfare. Nonstockpile CWM, which is not included in the current U.S. inventory of chemical munitions, includes buried materiel, recovered materiel, binary chemical weapons, former production facilities, and miscellaneous materiel. CWM that was buried in pits on former military sites is now being dug up as the land is being developed for other purposes. Other CWM is on or near the surface at former test and firing ranges. According to the Chemical Weapons Convention (CWC), which was ratified by the United States in April 1997, nonstockpile CWM items in storage at the time of ratification must be destroyed by 2007. The U.S. Army is the designated executive agent for destroying CWM. Nonstockpile CWM is being handled by the Non-Stockpile Chemical Materiel Program (NSCMP); stockpile CWM is the responsibility of the Chemical Stockpile Disposal Program. Because nonstockpile CWM is stored or buried in many locations, the Army is developing transportable disposal systems that can be moved from site to site as needed. The Army has plans to test prototypes of three transportable systems-the rapid response system (RRS), the munitions management device (MMD), and the explosive destruction system (EDS)-for accessing and destroying a range of nonstockpile chemical agents and militarized industrial chemicals. The RRS is designed to treat recovered chemical agent identification sets (CAIS), which contain small amounts of chemical agents and a variety of highly toxic industrial chemicals. The MMD is designed to treat nonexplosively configured chemical munitions. The EDS is designed to treat munitions containing chemical agents with energetics equivalent to three pounds of TNT or less. These munitions are considered too unstable to be transported or stored. A prototype EDS system has recently been tested in England by non-stockpile program personnel. Although originally proposed for evaluation in this report, no test data were available to the committee on the composition of wastes from the EDS. Therefore, alternative technologies for the destruction of EDS wastes will be discussed in a supplemental report in fall 2001. Treatment of solid wastes, such as metal munition bodies, packing materials, and carbon air filters, were excluded from this report. Review and Evaluation of the Army Non-Stockpile Chemical Materiel Disposal Program: Disposal of Neutralent Wastes evaluates the near-term (1999-2005) application of advanced (nonincineration) technologies, such as from the Army's Assembled Chemical Weapons Assessment Program and the Alternative Technologies and Approaches Project, in a semi-fixed, skid-mounted mode to process Rapid Response System, Munitions Management Device, and Explosive Destruction System liquid neutralization wastes.