Duncan is with Mitch Osborne, the plant's general manager, on a balmy windswept east Texas morning. Veolia's plant sits in an industrial park on the outskirts of Port Arthur, a gritty industrial town of about 60,000 perched just above the Gulf of Mexico near the Louisiana border.

The plant is incinerating a batch of neutralized VX as we speak. Though this isn't a sentiment generally shared by the public—and certainly not the activists who chronically shadow such disposal efforts—Duncan says, "We feel like we're providing a service to the country."

Duncan is an engineer by training, and from his scientific vantage point, there isn't much to worry about in the process: The VX, dosed onsite in Indiana with lye and neutralized into a caustic liquid called sodium hydrolysate, is shipped to Texas in unguarded tanker trucks. The liquid is then fed into incinerators and kilns at 1,500 to 2,050 degrees Fahrenheit and turned, according to all credible science, into a harmless trickle of steam.

The broader politics of disposal, on the other hand, are a nightmare, intensified, the Army's critics say, by the propensity of the military to try to push through disposal schemes with little, or evasive, public disclosure. Duncan, however, has some sympathy for the Army's predicament.

"It doesn't take much for someone to come out and say: 'A pin-head drop of VX will kill you in minutes—and they're sending 4,000-gallon lots of this material to Port Arthur,'" says Duncan.

Never mind that the VX arriving in Texas is neutralized residue and that Duncan says his facility handles far more harmful material from other clients. The bottom line, he says, is that those other wastes "don't have that nerve-agent connotation."

No doubt that in an America anxious about the environment, rattled by the specter of terrorists, and abloom with tort lawyers, environmental activists, and citizen watchdogs, "nerve agent connotation" is no small matter. It's also true, where a nerve agent is involved, that perception and public relations trump industrial process. But to many observers, the Army has proved awful at managing both.


The U.S. first got serious about destroying its Cold War chemical weapons stockpile in 1982; three years later, Congress adopted a mandate ordering the Pentagon to begin drawing up disposal plans. By 1993, when the U.S. signed on to the International Chemical Weapons Convention, the Army was supposed to already be well along with disposal efforts. It wasn't.

It's hard to know whether the Department of Defense was being optimistic or naïve when, under Congress' initial mandate, it decided it could most easily dispose of thousands of tons of VX, sarin, and mustard gas by simply burning the raw chemicals on-site at nine domestic storage facilities, some of them relatively close to major population centers.

In any case, the Army's initial cost estimate for the project was just under $2 billion; it projected the job would be done by 1994.

As the plan leaked out, however, communities near these sites, one by one, rose in protest. This sparked a reluctant rethinking by the Pentagon, and over time a plan that had seemed relatively simple became mind-bendingly complicated.

Years of study ensued—years that gave increasingly organized watchdogs time to do their own studies and to ratchet up political pressure. As a result, disposal became captive to local and regional politics, and the Army found itself often having to tailor its plans on a site-by-site basis in response to local protests.

Under pressure from McConnell, two facilities—one in the senator's home state of Kentucky and the other in Colorado—were put under the direct supervision of the Defense Department in 2003. The idea was to try alternative disposal methods. The Pentagon expects the Colorado site to finish its work in 2020; Kentucky in 2023.

Meanwhile, the Army program continues, though it too is slow. This is in part because most of the storage sites that the Army oversees in its program had little or no disposal capability and had to be retrofitted with what became enormously expensive facilities—neutralization chambers and, in some cases, incinerators. Thus, the original $2 billion estimate had swollen to $10.2 billion by 1994.

By last year, the Army had raised the estimate to $36 billion. One example why: By the time it is done, the disposal of the 1,269 tons of VX at Newport, Indiana, is estimated to cost $1.9 billion alone. That now includes the costs of delays, litigation, and the construction of on-site facilities to neutralize the gas. None of that had been included in the original estimate.

"I think the original estimates were probably made by somebody sitting around with the proverbial napkin and writing a figure and a timeframe on it," says Greg Mahall, an Army spokesman, "but we are held to that."