If Syrian Chemical Weapons Were Found, the U.S. Army Could Safely Destroy Them

A civilian team at a base in Maryland disposed of Syrian toxins a decade ago after hundreds of people were killed in a nerve agent attack.

Since armed rebels entered Damascus, Syria, and overthrew the reign of President Bashar al-Assad on Dec. 8, U.S. government officials have been waiting to see if any remnants of the former regime’s stockpiles of chemical weapons would be found.

None are known to have turned up so far. If they did, it is unclear what might happen to them or who would be responsible for disposing of them. But a U.S. military mission to destroy Syrian chemical weapons a decade ago could offer the White House some viable options.

About a year and a half after the Syrian civil war broke out in 2011, Maj. Gen. Jay G. Santee found himself in a meeting at the Pentagon discussing a hypothetical problem.

At the time, he was the deputy director of the Defense Threat Reduction Agency, a military office that looks for ways to prevent adversaries from attacking the United States with weapons of mass destruction.

Syria had not officially declared having any chemical weapons. But U.S. intelligence assessments indicated that the Assad government probably had a clandestine cache.

The likely candidates were sarin, a nerve agent easily absorbed through the skin that disrupts a victim’s central nervous system and leads to muscle spasms, paralysis and respiratory failure; mustard, which causes horrific blistering on skin or inside a victim’s lungs if its vapors are inhaled; and chlorine, which was used by insurgents in Iraq against U.S. forces in the mid-2000s. When released in confined spaces, chlorine can lead to suffocation.

“They were discussing the civil war in Syria, and the fact that we had gotten into Iraq without a very good plan on how to destroy chemical munitions that we found,” General Santee recalled in an interview. “And then the question became: ‘Well, what if we suddenly found ourselves in possession of the Syrian chemical weapons stockpile and the precursors? What would we do?’”

He was given six months to come up with a plan for designing, building and potentially deploying devices that could destroy thousands of tons of deadly chemicals in places where there would be little to no outside support or resupply.

“At the time we had no real capability to handle the kind of quantities of chemicals that we would come across,” he recalled. But by late June 2013 a specialized team at the Army’s main base for chemical weapons expertise in Aberdeen, Md., had come up with a working prototype.

For decades chemical weapons were usually destroyed by incinerating them, but the United States largely abandoned the practice because of safety concerns near disposal sites raised by the public.

A process called hydrolysis became the preferred technique. That involves chemically breaking apart the lethal properties of liquid agents by combining them with hot water and a substance akin to commercially available drain cleaner.

It is the same method the Pentagon used to destroy the last of its own chemical weapons stockpile last year. But while that process took place in a series of warehouses spread over dozens of acres, a new portable hydrolysis system developed in Aberdeen was packed into just two standard 20-foot shipping containers.

Less than two months later, any doubt about whether the Syrian military had chemical arms was erased when Mr. al-Assad launched a chemical attack northwest of Damascus, which the State Department said killed more than 1,400 people with a liquid nerve agent.

The plans for General Santee’s hypothetical scenario were then finalized for a very real mission ordered by the White House after Syria agreed to give up its chemical weapons under international pressure.

The work in Aberdeen accelerated, and by January 2014 a U.S. Navy cargo ship called the Cape Ray had been fitted with the portable hydrolysis equipment in Virginia. The ship was then deployed to a military base in Rota, Spain, where the crew waited for orders.

At the same time, contractors hired by General Santee in Lebanon purchased heavy trucks to lend to Syrian soldiers at the border to get Mr. al-Assad’s chemical arsenal safely out of the country. The Syrian soldiers drove 78 storage tanks of liquid mustard agent and a chemical to make sarin to the port of Latakia, Syria. From there, Danish and Finnish ships transported the chemicals to southern Italy.

In early July, the tanks were moved onto the Cape Ray, which then spent 42 days at sea neutralizing the chemicals before docking in Bremen, Germany. The liquids were then offloaded for final disposal in specialized incinerators used to destroy hazardous material.

Fears that Mr. al-Assad had not given up all his chemical weapons were confirmed in early 2018 when the rebel-held town of Douma was attacked.

Since the fall of Damascus this month, Israeli warplanes have repeatedly bombed sites believed to be related to Mr. al-Assad’s chemical weapons program.

If any chemical agents are found in the detritus of the Assad regime, the phone may soon ring at the U.S. Army’s Chemical Biological Center at Aberdeen, where the team that carried out the Cape Ray operation has built improved versions of the hydrolysis system used a decade ago.

Tim Blades, a civilian employee there who helped design and operate the Cape Ray apparatus at sea, has overseen recent efforts to make even smaller devices that can fit onto a pallet and roll onto a cargo plane for quick transport.

After the 2014 mission, Mr. Blades said in an interview that he and others at Aberdeen tried to convince senior Pentagon leaders their projects needed continued support, because the capabilities they had come up with on short notice might be needed again one day.

Otherwise, he said, “every time one of these situations occurs, you’re going to be starting all over again.”