Government changes access policy to Blue Grass Army Depot- Chemical Warfare Facility in US

reply to post by Wrabbit2000

I had not considered that, thank you. I feel a bit foolish for not realizing that. Indeed the agents would be very dangerous to handle, transport and finally destroy. Maybe this would be a good opportunity to utilize robots for some of the tasks.
I agree that however long it takes matters not to do so safely. I still think a gesture of getting rid of all our chem weapons would be a good thing in general as well as historically.

reply to post by speculativeoptimist

Crazy stuff, isn't it? I don't know which is scarier for a place to be? The battlefield where the stuff is landing, or the bunkers this 30-40 year old stuff is being stored. You've seen the movie "The Rock" for the way the warhead is depicted for layout? I don't know how accurate that "pearl" configuration is but....



That's a real one as a cut-away showing a warhead for a U.S. rocket using old tech. Pretty close....with a whole lot more of them. That one was Sarin and comes out of Wiki Commons as the source. This is originally out of the Library Of Congress, as it happens.

I worked at one of the previous Chem Demil sights as an engineer so I have a little insight into the way the stuff is run.

The way these demil facilities work was to run one major project at a time, often with the same group of people that were certified moving from project to project. If you already had the demil experience and certs you were grandfathered in on a process that was very costly to get new folks cleared and certified on. At the project I worked on at least 70% of the staffing came from previous demil sights, and Blue grass was a future project at the time. Unless there were performance issues a job was always waiting for you at the next demil project if you wanted to follow the jobs.

I know for a fact that some of our equipment used was transported to the Bluegrass sight for utilization there as well because they were truly one of a kind items.


The projects to destroy the agents depends on how the agent is stored, the facility I worked at had the agent stored in containers that looked a lot like beer kegs, only much larger. These were called tonne containers and held about 2,000 pounds of agent. Other agent may be stored in the munitions, which is a much slower and more dangerous process for destruction. I can not say with 100% certainty but I think I recall that at least a portion of Bluegrass's agents were already stored in munitions.

I also know that once we started agent destruction at our sight everything got tight security wise, gates that used to be open were closed, searches were done in bags and lunch boxes and armed security was much more visible. Perhaps that have started up their agent operations and as happened at the facility I worked in, security is much tighter and this no more media on sight.

reply to post by k21968


Maybe they no longer plan on destroying these WMDs! Maybe they have a plan to use these agents in the
future for crowd control or to destabilize countries that resist US policy!

reply to post by ohhhh

I also know that once we started agent destruction at our sight everything got tight security wise, gates that used to be open were closed, searches were done in bags and lunch boxes and armed security was much more visible. Perhaps that have started up their agent operations and as happened at the facility I worked in, security is much tighter and this no more media on sight.

This seems to be the most likely explanation.

Also sounds like it is being handled by professionals with extensive experience and proper security.

Let's hope that is what is going on!