“It’s a big breakthrough,” said Paul F. Walker, an arms control expert with the environmental group Green Cross International who has helped in efforts to demilitarize the American and Russian chemical weapons stockpiles since the 1990s. “Even though Libya’s chemical stockpile was relatively small, the effort to destroy it was very difficult because of weather, geography and because it’s a dangerous area with warring tribes, increasing the risks of theft and diversion,” he said. 
 
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 Libya’s last two tons of chemical weapons were dwarfed by the 1,300 tons that Syria has agreed to destroy. But American and international arms experts say the need for easily transportable and efficient technology to wipe out the Libyan arms became a model for the Syria program now underway. 
 
 For Libya’s fragile transitional government, such collaboration with the West on security matters is a delicate issue. It gives the country’s leaders desperately needed assistance to defuse internal threats, but also risks accusations of compromising national sovereignty. 
 
 Asked about the American efforts to destroy the chemical weapons, Libyan security officials in Tripoli initially issued sweeping denials. One later briefly acknowledged the operation on the condition of anonymity, and then officials stopped returning phone calls. 
 
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 On Sunday, the White House said that it would ensure that the Syrian government complied with an accord to give up its chemical arsenal despite missed deadlines and delays in carrying out the deal. 
 
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 The White House chief of staff, Denis McDonough, said on the CBS News program “Face the Nation” that the deal was “not falling apart, but we would like to see it proceed much more quickly than it is.” 
 
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 The disposal of the last of Libya’s chemical weapons closes a chapter that Colonel Qaddafi began in early 2004, when his government turned over a vast cache of nuclear technology and chemical stockpiles to the United States, Britain and international nuclear inspectors. 
 
 At that time, Libya declared for destruction 24.7 metric tons of sulfur mustard, a syrupy liquid that when loaded into bombs or artillery shells and exploded creates a toxic mist that penetrates clothing, burns and blisters exposed skin, and can kill with large doses or if left untreated. The chemical was used extensively in World War I. 
 
 Libya had destroyed about half of these stocks when civil war broke out in 2011. Western spy agencies closely monitored the destruction site in the Libyan desert to ensure the stockpiles were not pilfered by insurgents. 
 
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 When the new government took control in Tripoli that fall, it signaled its intent to finish the job. Libyan officials also surprised Western inspectors by announcing the discovery in November 2011 and February 2012 of two hidden caches of mustard, or nearly two tons, that had not been declared by Colonel Qaddafi’s government. That brought the total declared amount of chemical to 26.3 tons. 
 
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 Unlike the majority of Libya’s mustard agents, which were stored in large, bulky containers, the new caches were already armed and loaded into 517 artillery shells, 45 plastic sleeves for rocket launchings and eight 500-pound bombs. 
 
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 The new stockpiles immediately posed huge challenges for the fledgling Libyan government, which had no ability to destroy the combat-ready chemical weapons, as well as for its American and European allies called upon to help. 
 
 The disposal site is deep in the desert, in an area where Islamist militants hostile to the West wield growing influence. It also sits on the front line of the struggle between Libya’s eastern and western provinces over political power and oil revenue. A defining issue in post-Qaddafi politics, the regional rivalry has often spilled out into armed blockades of the national highways and crucial oil-export terminals as well. 
 
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 Using $45 million from the Nunn-Lugar Cooperative Threat Reduction program, which has helped rid the former Soviet Union of thousands of nuclear weapons since the end of the Cold War, the Pentagon and its Defense Threat Reduction Agency tapped the Parsons Corporation, a construction firm based in Pasadena, Calif., to work with Libya to oversee the rebuilding and safeguarding of the Libyan disposal site, which had been ransacked during the civil war. 
 
 Remarkably, the mustard agents stored in bulk containers at the site were untouched and their inspection seals unbroken, American and international officials said. These have all been destroyed, too. 
 
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 Canada donated $6 million to help restore water, sewage service and electricity to the site, and to build living quarters for Western and Libyan contractors. Germany agreed to fly international inspectors to the site. 
 
 The project has relied on a custom-built device from Dynasafe, a Swedish company, to destroy the weapons. It is essentially a giant, high-tech oven called a static-detonation chamber. The munitions were fed through an automated loading system into a gas-tight chamber, where the toxic materials were vaporized at temperatures between 750 and 1,000 degrees Fahrenheit. Gases created in the process were scrubbed by special filters. 
 
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 “The destruction of these munitions was a major undertaking in arduous, technically challenging circumstances,” Ahmet Uzumcu, the director general of the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons, whose inspectors supervised the destruction of the chemical weapons, said in a written statement. 
 
 Although American officials acknowledge that Libya is awash with conventional arms, they expressed confidence that the vast Libyan desert holds no other secret caches of unconventional arms for jihadis to exploit. 
 
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 Andrew C. Weber, assistant secretary of defense for nuclear, chemical and biological defense programs, said, “This is the culmination of a major international effort to eliminate weapons of mass destruction from Libya and to ensure that they never fall into the hands of terrorists.” ||||| Lethal Cargo 
 
 Several hundred tons of Assad’s mustard gas, sarin, and VX nerve gases will be transferred from one ship to another Wednesday—in Gioia Tauro, a hub for the Calabrian mafia. 
 
 ROME, Italy — Gioia Tauro is one of the most dangerous port towns in all of southern Italy, but when 700 metric tons of Syrian chemical weapons and their precursors arrive there on Wednesday, it may briefly be perilous on an apocalyptic scale no one ever anticipated. 
 
 For one or two days, mustard gas and the active ingredients of sarin and VX nerve gases will be transferred slowly, delicately, from one ship to another in the port. The international agencies involved say there is no reason to worry about the pervasive presence of the Calabrian mafia known as ‘Ndrangheta in Gioia Tauro. They say the port handles hazardous materials 365 days a year. But the sensitivity of what’s going on there now is hard to overstate. 
 
 The good news is that the shipment marks the end—or almost—of the drama about Syria’s chemical weapons that began so horribly last August, when hundreds of men, women and children died in nerve gas attacks near Damascus. After U.S. President Barack Obama threatened military action and the Russians stepped in to mediate, Syrian President Bashar Assad agreed to declare all the chemical weapons he had and allow them to be destroyed. 
 
 The process of eliminating the arsenal was long, complicated, and risky in the middle of a country at war. But the special representative of the United Nations secretary-general and the experts from the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW) who took on the job are now satisfied that everything Assad said he had in his possession has been neutralized in Syria, put on board the Norwegian ship Taico, which is steaming toward a disposal facility in Texas, or, if it was really, really lethal stuff, loaded on the Danish ship Ark Futura, which is headed for Gioia Tauro. 
 
 What the U.N. team and the experts are not entirely sure about is whether Assad really did provide a complete inventory. In the course of collecting the weapons and their precursor chemicals from various sites around Syria and interacting with the authorities in Damascus, “discrepancies were identified in the initial declarations that Syria gave to us,” OPCW spokesman Michael Luhan told The Daily Beast. Luhan would not supply any details about what those discrepancies may be. 
 
 Intelligence from unspecified outside countries also has raised questions. (One might speculate it’s from Israel, but that’s just a calculated guess.) The team assigned to the mission by U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon has sought clarifications with trips not only to Syrian locations but to Iran. 
 
 Meanwhile, the destruction of the chemical weapons that were declared and located continues. On Wednesday, 560 of the 700 metric tons aboard the Ark Futura are to be transferred to the U.S. Navy ship Cape Ray, which will then sail out into international waters and spend about 60 days turning the weapons and their components into conventional industrial waste that will be disposed of, finally, by specialized companies in Germany and in Finland. 
 
 But before that happens, we have to hope nothing goes wrong in Gioia Tauro. The Italian government is closing off the port and claims that the work of transferring the chemicals, originally scheduled for two days, will now be done in one. 
 
 It is hard to imagine that the local crime bosses would see any reason to interfere with the operation or try to exploit it, but, then again, the ‘Ndrangheta is one of the most ruthless and one of the more imaginative crime syndicates around. 
 
 The whole city of Gioia Tauro on the Calabrian coast is a mass of illegally constructed buildings, some cobbled together from shipping containers. The city council has been dissolved a half-dozen times for corruption and mafia infiltration. At one point, more people were murdered in the town, which has a population of just over 17,000 people, than in New York City. In the 1970s, more than 1,000 people were killed in one year alone when the ‘Ndrangheta crime syndicate’s clans were fighting over lucrative contracts to build a state-of-the-art steel plant. The steel plant plans eventually were abandoned because of the ‘Ndrangheta infiltration. 
 
 According to Italy’s Parliamentary Anti-Mafia Commission, more than 80 percent of Europe’s cocaine is handled by the ‘Ndrangheta, and much of it enters the continent through this badly patrolled port. In February 2014, seven people affiliated with the Gambino crime family were arrested in New York and 17 in Gioia Tauro in a sting operation that averted plans to smuggle cocaine in frozen fish and pineapple crates to the United States. Gioia Tauro is also a hub for the illegal arms trade. 
 
 If the officials involved with the chemical weapons shipment are worried about the criminal surroundings, they are not showing it. According to Pentagon press secretary Navy Rear Admiral John Kirby, there is no danger that the chemical weapons could spill into the sea. “Neutralization will be conducted in a safe and environmentally sound manner,” Kirby said in a statement. “Nothing from this operation will be released into the environment.”
– The destruction of Syria's chemical weapons continues to hit delays—but a secret effort to rid Libya of chemical weapons has been a success, the New York Times reports. The US and Libya have been destroying what was left of Moammar Gadhafi's stockpile, including hundreds of weapons containing a mustard agent. The three-month project, which wiped out two tons of arms using what the Times calls a "giant, high-tech oven," ended last week. "It’s a big breakthrough," says an expert, noting that the process—a basis for the much larger effort in Syria—"was very difficult because of weather, geography, and because it's a dangerous area with warring tribes, increasing the risks of theft and diversion." In 2004, Gadhafi had provided some 24.7 metric tons of chemical weapons to the West for destruction, but only half were gone by the time civil war began in 2011. The post-Gadhafi Libyan government sought to rid itself of the remainder, as well as almost two tons of additional material it had found—agents already installed in bombs and artillery, the Times notes. The destruction effort, which used funds from the Pentagon as well as Canada, saw the weapons vaporized in an oven created by Swedish firm Dynasafe. Meanwhile, the BBC is airing old Gadhafi secrets in a special tonight; among them, a former ally who says the strongman ordered a plane shot down near Tripoli in 1992, killing 157 passengers in a demonstration against sanctions.