Understandably, safety underpinned most of the political dust-ups over disposal. An accident involving leaked nerve agent could precipitate a major civilian catastrophe, causing full-body convulsions and asphyxiation after exposure to even minute doses.

It's worth noting that there have been no major accidents, though equally worth noting that the Pentagon's safety record at its storage sites is far from pristine. Whistleblowers over the years have complained of shoddy safety practices at some of the chemical weapons depots and Army officials have confirmed recent spills of raw agent at two storage sites, including a gallon drum of highly lethal sarin that leaked onto the floor of its storage igloo at its Richmond, Kentucky, storage facility this past August. (None of the incidents caused injuries.)

In fairness to the Army, though, the program has also run into a fair amount of the "not-in-my-backyard" syndrome. "People will agree on A and Z, A being that we have these weapons and Z that they need to be destroyed," says the Army's Mahall. It's the how and the where that end up sparking the controversies, he adds.

Such politics help to explain why today there is no unified disposal regimen. The Veolia project represents one method, while nerve agents at the Kentucky site are processed and neutralized onsite without incineration. At yet another storage facility in Anniston, Alabama, military contractors employ the Army's original idea—incinerating raw sarin and VX on site.

As a result, progress on the larger goal of ridding America of all of its chemical agents has been woefully uneven and costly. By the Army's own estimates, about 97 percent of the nation's sarin nerve gas has been destroyed, while only about 85 percent of its VX agent has been disposed of.

The remaining sarin is housed at a single compound known as Blue Grass near Richmond, Kentucky, while Blue Grass and three other sites, Newport, Pine Bluff, Arkansas, and Umatilla, Oregon, hold the remaining VX. Meanwhile, only about 24 percent of the nation's 17,380 tons of mustard gas, scattered among seven chemical weapons bunkers, has been done away with to date.

The U.S. isn't the only laggard. While 183 nations signed on to the 1993 Chemical Weapons Convention, they collectively have disposed of only about 40 percent of the estimated 70,000 metric tons of chemical agents that existed, according to a convention report released in May.

The U.S. and Russia between them account for about 90 percent of the world's "category 1" chemical agent stockpile—meaning the most lethal agents, including VX and sarin. So far, Russia has destroyed only about 27 percent of its category 1 agents and isn't expected to be done until 2012.

Of other nations with sizeable chemical weapons stocks—Albania, India, and Libya among them—only Albania has completed the task. India is about 97 percent complete while Libya is scheduled to finish by 2010.

In the U.S., the September 2001 terrorist attacks prodded the Army into trying to accelerate its disposal plans out of fears that terrorists might try to seize chemical weapons stored in military depots.

For the 1,269 tons of VX at Newport, on-site incineration would have been by far the quickest and cheapest way to go. But in response to intense lobbying—in part from Craig Williams' Chemical Weapons Working Group and politicians like McConnell—the Army abandoned that idea in favor of the two-step plan.

By 2002, the Pentagon thought it had found a solution when it awarded a $9 million contract to Perma-Fix Environmental Services, a unit of Parsons, a Pasadena, California, engineering and environmental services concern with more than $3 billion in annual revenues.

Perma-Fix, based in Atlanta, operated its flagship chemical treatment facility just outside of Dayton, Ohio, about 200 miles east of Newport. The contract called for Perma-Fix to neutralize the caustic sodium hydrolysate and dispose of the waste by pumping it into the local sewer system.

The Army didn't think it needed to hold public hearings on the matter, or to file an environmental impact statement on the plan. Perma-Fix officials said they went about briefing a number of local elected officials before they signed on.

But when neighbors of the Dayton facility got wind of the Army plan toward the end of 2002, alarm bells rang. The shared opinion was that the Army was trying to pull a fast one.

Soon, the Army found itself not just tangled in a public relations disaster but in a federal lawsuit filed by a group called Citizens for the Responsible Destruction of Chemical Weapons of the Miami Valley. The suit said, among other things, that the Army violated federal law by not having undertaken a formal environmental statement as required under the National Environmental Policy Act.

Perma-Fix C.E.O. Lou Centofanti has a different take. "The community didn't want it, period," he said. "And no mater what we said or how we said it…they just didn't want to hear it."

The battle over VX waste was so damaging that Perma-Fix—after trying in vain to convince the Army to let it build an on-site disposal plant at Newport—chose to sell its Dayton plant and shift its focus from chemical treatment to nuclear waste. "We made a major strategic error in doing that project," Centofanti conceded.

By October 2003, not a single gallon of sodium hydrolysate had been shipped to Dayton from Newport, and Parsons, the main contractor, decided to throw in the towel, ordering Perma-Fix to back out of the deal. The Army was back to square one.


That same year, the Army restructured its disposal efforts under a new outfit called the Chemical Materials Agency. But new or not, the C.M.A. didn't seem to apply any lessons it may have learned in Dayton to its next move.

About a year later, it concocted yet another plan to get rid of the Newport cache, this time contracting with DuPont, which operates a chemical treatment plant called the Secure Environmental Treatment facility in Deepwater, New Jersey, near the banks of the Delaware River.

The plan and tact were remarkably similar to the Dayton debacle. The Army, without briefing local or state officials, published a small legal ad in a tiny southern New Jersey newspaper announcing the barebones of the project and setting a date for a public hearing. This time, the treated sodium hydrolysate wasn't destined for public sewers—it was going to be dumped into the Delaware River.