The last of the U.S. chemical weapons stockpile was destroyed last week at a Kentucky munitions plant, the Pentagon said Monday.
In 1986, Congress ordered the destruction of America’s chemical weapons, and 11 years later, the U.S. joined 192 countries in the Chemical Weapons Convention of 1997, requiring the weapons’ complete elimination by September 30 of this year, The Washington Post reported. Chemical weapons were first used on a large scale in the trenches of Europe during World War I, causing horrifying deaths through suffocation and wrecking of the nervous system.
At its peak, America’s chemical weapons stockpile reached 30,000 metric tons, requiring the country to take decades to destroy the weapons while seeking the safest way to eliminate the chemical agents.
