Chemical Disarmament Won't Be Easy By Poh Si Teng A Century of Chemical Weapons: Nations have fought for a century to stop the scourge of chemical weapons. But their use continues, as evidenced by the recent sarin gas attack in Syria. Douglas C. Pizac/Associated Press Artillery shells containing the nerve gas sarin in the Deseret Chemical Depot in Tooele, Utah, in 2001. The United States' effort to dispose of chemical arms has been complicated by concerns about public health and the environment. A giant tent covers the site, alarms ready to sound if deadly poisons should leak. After decades of work, decontamination of the old burial ground for World War I chemical munitions is expected to be finished by late next year. Next year, meanwhile, is also the deadline for Syria to eliminate its entire chemical arsenal, from one end of the country to another, under the American-Russian plan announced 10 days ago. The disparity between the Syrian rush and the American slog underscores the difficulties facing that plan, even if Syria cooperates. Almost everything about the American effort to rid itself of chemical weapons manufactured from Woodrow Wilson's presidency to Ronald Reagan's has been more complex, more time-consuming, more costly and more environmentally fraught than anyone imagined. The bill now stands at $35.4 billion, with no end in sight, for an epic of chemical destruction involving not just this Washington neighborhood of ambassadors and former presidents, but hundreds of sites nationwide, from a giant incinerator in Utah to a weapons dump in Alabama more than five miles long. Of course, the American arsenal was much older than Syria's, and some 30 times as large, when the United States in 1997 embraced the global treaty banning chemical arms. And unlike Syria, it has had to contend with citizen opposition to some decommissioning plans. On the other hand, the United States has no civil war to get in the way of the dangerous work of dismantling chemical weapons. But fundamentally, the disparity between the two plans centers on differing philosophies of chemical disarmament - quick and dirty versus slow and costly. Over the decades, the United States went from one approach to the other as concerns grew about possible threats to public health and the environment. Chemical experts point to the possibility of a hybrid approach that would dispatch Syria's arms relatively quickly while minimizing the risks. "The technologies exist," said Lenny Siegel, the executive director of the Center for Public Environmental Oversight, a group in Mountain View, Calif., that has closely monitored the Army's toxic cleanups. The weapons can be destroyed safely - not real quickly, and definitely not cheaply. But it can be done. The United States" arsenal goes back to 1917, when the nation began producing mustard gas and other poisons for use in World War I. Over the decades, the arsenal got much deadlier. A leading poison was sarin, the same gas used in the Aug. 21 attack in the suburbs of the Syrian capital that the Obama administration says killed more than 1,400 Syrians. It throws nerves and muscles into overdrive, resulting in convulsions, lung paralysis and death. Victims" pupils are often tiny because the iris, a muscle, contracts so much. As a rule, chemical weapons are easier to make than to destroy. "Everybody forgets that none of these weapons were designed to be peacefully disassembled," Miguel E. Monteverde, an Army spokesman, noted in an interview. It was always assumed that they'd be used. When the United States first began destroying leaky and obsolete munitions, it took the fast approach. It burned and buried them. In time, a forgotten dump became Spring Valley - the Washington neighborhood of elegant homes. Video by USACE Baltimore Spring Valley Formerly Used Defense Site - Virtual Tour of 4825 Glenbrook Road "We know we're going to find things, but we're not sure what," Andrea Takash, an Army spokeswoman, said Friday. The overall bill for the neighborhood's cleanup, she noted, is expected to run to more than $230 million. The next means of disposal was simply to dump munitions at sea. The United States did so until the early 1970s, when a global treaty outlawed such practices. Finally (environmentalists would say belatedly), the Army turned to a costlier method. It built decommissioning plants in Alabama, Arkansas, Utah, Oregon and on a Pacific atoll. Special furnaces incinerated the poisons at extremely high temperatures and then scrubbed out dangerous waste products. But citizens near the big facilities and at sites of proposed ones worried about accidents, toxic fumes and health risks. In 1984, Craig Williams, a Vietnam veteran living in rural Kentucky, went to a public meeting about a planned incinerator. On his way home, he recalled, his wife said, "Craig, somebody's got to do something about this." William J. Broad reported from New York, and David E. Sanger from Washington.