The Army and Chemical Weapons Destruction: Implementation in a Changing Context
In 1985, Congress directed the Army to destroy the nation's stockpile of chemical weapons. The estimate was that this task could be accomplished by 1994 at a cost of $1.7 billion. By 1998, only a portion of the stockpile has been destroyed, the deadline extended to 2007 and the estimated cost had risen to approximately $16 billion. This paper discusses the factors underlying cost escalation and missed deadlines. It examines the diffusion of control over the implementation process surrounding the chemical weapons demilitarization (Chem Demil) program in the United States. Focusing on the role of the Army and its difficulties in adjusting strategies in the face of political change from the Cold War to the post-Cold War setting, it analyzes the course of implementation through three converging “streams of political activity.” What differentiates the federal, intergovernmental, and international stream are the nature an number of actors, and the type of pressures with which the Army must deal.
The destruction of weapons under the chemical weapons convention
As the Chemical Weapons Convention (CWC) enters into force, countries with stocks of chemical weapons will begin the task of destroying them. In the U.S. whose stockpile consists of approximately 30,000 tons of nerve and blister agents at eight separate sites in the continental United States and at Johnston Atoll in the Pacific, the Army has designed a highly‐automated “baseline” system to dismantle and incinerate the weapons. Although researchers have identified potential alternatives to incineration, involving chemical neutralization and biodegradation, it appears that these techniques are likely to substitute for incineration at most, at two sites: Newport, Indiana, and Aberdeen, Maryland. The Russian destruction program is less advanced than that of the U.S. and probably cannot be carried out effectively without significant and technical assistance from abroad, an urgent requirement given that the Duma Defense Committee has described Russian Chemical weapons storage sites as insecure and unsafe.
Graphs of polyhedra; polyhedra as graphs
Relations between graph theory and polyhedra are presented in two contexts. In the first, the symbiotic dependence between 3-connected planar graphs and convex polyhedra is described in detail. In the second, a theory of nonconvex polyhedra is based on a graph-theoretic foundation. This approach eliminates the vagueness and inconsistency that pervade much of the literature dealing with polyhedra more general than the convex ones.