No One's Sure How to Go About Destroying Syria's Chemical Weapons

There's a stockpile of some 1,000 tons of poison gas and deadly chemical agents currently stuck in Syria.

With international support, the US and Russia reached a deal in September to eliminate the war-torn country's arsenal of chemical munitions, and the Syrian regime is cooperating. Unfortunately, no one's quite sure how to go about disposing of the deadly weapons and their precursor materials—the dangerous ingredients used to make the explosives.

So far no country will agree to host the operation, understandably wary of the prospect of destroying toxic chemicals on their turf. The latest roadblock came on Friday when the Albanian government refused to allow the weapons destruction to occur on its soil, after thousands of citizens protested in the streets.

Staring that rejection in the face, the US is considering moving on to plan B: shipping the stockpile out to sea and disposing of the chemical agents safely in international waters.

Officials told the AFP the plan would be to load the weapons onto a barge along with five incinerators, and sending the ship off into the ocean. The super-hot furnaces would burn the chemicals at 2,700 degrees, either on the ship or at an offshore rig. The whole process would take about two months.

Burning chemical weapons at sea has been done before, though not with today's safetyguards in place nor at the scale experts are dealing with in Syria. To that end, a spokesman for the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW), the watchdog group supervising the weapons' destruction, said no decision's been made yet, and the group will still look for countries willing to destory the weapons on land.

No matter how you slice it, the multifaceted process of disarming Syria's chemical munitions is complicated and precarious at each step—legally, logistically, and technically.

First, the OPCW will train Syrian forces to package and load the one- to two-ton containers of toxic gas onto trucks and transport them to the coast. Even this part is tricky; experts are afraid the troops will be attacked or the weapons stolen en route.

Once safely out of Syria, there are two methods for destroying the chemicals OPCW's considering. The first is incineration—the most effective approach when you’re dealing with sarin gas and mustard gas. But while officials say the byproducts of the high-temp combustion would be harmless, environmentalists aren’t so convinced.

"One of the concerns with such incinerators is the production of toxic stuff that then gets into the sea, the food chain, including dioxins and so forth," weapons disarmament expert Jean-Pascal Zanders told AFP.

The other approach that's been used in the past is to neutralize the toxic chemicals through hydrolysis—specifically, the Pentagon's transportable Field Deployable Hydrolysis System. The toxic liquid agent is separated from its casing, then mixed with water and chemicals to create a reaction that neutralizes the liquid. Meanwhile, the explosive portion of the weapon is destroyed separately, in a furnace-like container called a "bang box."

Unfortunately, hydrolysis also produces noxious liquids as a result of the reaction. The fluid isn't dangerous enough to be considered a "weapon," but is classed as hazardous waste.

So, while the good news is that international law mandates safe disposal methods—under the 1993 Chemical Weapons Convention signed by 90 nations—the bad news is that leaves very limited options for how to get rid of today's stockpiles of chemical weapons. The New Yorker elaborates:

Before then, many nations destroyed their chemical weapons by burning, burying, or dumping them in the sea, where they remain threats to health and safety. After the Second World War, for instance, some forty thousand metric tons of chemical munitions, containing around thirteen thousand metric tons of chemical-warfare agents, were dumped into the Baltic Sea; several thousand metric tons have resurfaced over the last several decades, either by floating ashore, as they did in 1955, when lumps of solidified mustard gas washed up on Polish beaches, injuring more than a hundred people, or by being caught by fishing vessels.

The conundrum isn't exclusive to Syria. Belgium and France are still stuck with chemical munitions left over from World War I, and the US hasn't yet managed to destroy the chemical weapons the military amassed 30 years ago. America and Russia, which have the largest stockpiles today, have both repeatedly missed deadlines to destroy them. Russia hopes to dispose of its chemical weapons by 2015, the US as late as 2023.

Moreover, both the US and Russia say they can't destroy the Syrian munitions on their soil because of state laws prohibiting the transport of chemical weapons across national borders.

In Syria’s case, officials are eager to get rid of the dangerous weapons as quickly as possible. The OPCW announced a roadmap for elimination program this week; the goal is to ship the weapons out of Syria by the end of this year, and destroy them by mid-2014. But the prevailing opinion is that deadline, too, will be missed. If history teaches us anything, it's going to take time to figure out exactly how to pull this off.