By Cheryl Pellerin
DoD News, Defense Media Activity
WASHINGTON, Oct. 9, 2014 - The Defense Department is like no other agency on the planet in terms of its capacity to get things done and to lead around the world, Andrew C. Weber, assistant secretary of defense for nuclear, chemical and biological defense programs, said this week.
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During an Oct. 7 media roundtable at the Pentagon, Weber reviewed the success of the international effort to destroy Syrian chemical agents.
Weber is leaving the department this month after 18 years to support the State Department's Ebola response effort as deputy to Ambassador Nancy Powell, who last month was named to lead State's Ebola Coordination Unit. The current principal deputy assistant secretary of defense, Arthur "Tom" Hopkins, will be the office's acting assistant secretary.
In the area of countering and reducing the threat of chemical weapons around the world, Weber cited successes in Libya and Syria.
"Some of the things we've been involved in [include] the destruction of Libya's chemical weapons -- 517 artillery shells filled with mustard that are gone and will never fall into the hands of terrorists," he said.
"In Syria, we've been involved in a major effort since 2011, anticipating and preparing for problems associated with the Syrian chemical weapons stockpile," Weber added, "and now a massive effort to destroy 1,300 tons of Syria's chemical weapons agents has been completed."
Strategic threat from Syrian chemical agents is eliminated
The strategic threat of Syria's chemical agents has been eliminated, the assistant secretary said. "For me," he added, "the best evidence of that is a decision earlier this year by the government of Israel to stop the distribution of gas masks to its public."
Though the Syrian regime may not have declared some small tactical chemical stockpiles, Weber said, "there's a system in place, led by the Nobel Prize-winning Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons, the OPCW, to work with the Syrian regime and the international community under the United Nations Security Council resolution to resolve any lingering discrepancies."
On Oct. 1, the OPCW announced that the OPCW-U.N. Joint Mission on eliminating Syrian chemical weapons had completed its mandate and that its operations drew to a close Sept. 30. In the same statement, the OPCW said it has signed an agreement with the U.N. Office for Project Services to provide safety, security and logistical support for the OPCW's continuing operations in Syria.
"The OPCW mission in Syria will continue to deal with the destruction of chemical weapon production facilities and clarification of certain aspects of the Syrian initial declaration," the statement said.
Confidential discussions
Weber said the department had confidential discussions about the chemical agent problem in Syria for a year before the Syrian attacks in August 2013. Experts, under the auspices of the U.S. National Security Council staff and the Russian security council, met on a confidential basis over the course of a year and developed the universal matrix -- a detailed plan for destroying Syria's chemical agents, the assistant secretary explained.
Intelligence on the Syrian chemical agentss stockpile was exquisite, he added, allowing the Defense Department to tailor a technology called the field deployable hydrolysis system, specifically to the Syrian chemical agent stockpile which was mostly in bulk liquid.
The advance work and planning made it easy when Secretary of State John F. Kerry and Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov met in Geneva in September 2013, Weber said.
"They had the plan off the shelf. They knew that we could remove these chemicals from Syria and destroy them outside Syria," he added.
Weber said Defense Department experts had "done the math early, in 2012, and determined that the entire [Syrian] stockpile would fit on fewer than 200 trucks and could be loaded up and driven across the border."
At the time, he added, "we were thinking perhaps of having a chemical weapons destruction capability available in Jordan."
Specific neutralization technology
The Syrian modus operandi was not to fill the munitions until just before use, Weber said, so most of it was in large one- and two-ton liquid containers, and that took a specific neutralization technology, called hydrolysis, that DoD designed to be usable anywhere in the world.
The field-deployable hydrolysis system was built in five months, beginning with a process from the former Aberdeen Chemical Demilitarization Facility that had been used a decade ago to neutralize 1,700 tons of mustard agents -- part of the destruction of the United States' own chemical stockpile.
"The heart of the system fits in two standard shipping containers," Weber said, "and we weren't sure when we invested in the capability whether it would be used inside Syria or in a neighboring country like Jordan.
In November 2013, according to a chemical engineer with the U.S. Army Edgewood Chemical Biological Center, the decision was made to use two of the systems at sea aboard the 648-foot Cape Ray research vessel.
On Aug. 19, the Cape Ray teams completed destruction of 600 metric tons of Syrian chemical agents and precursor chemicals. The OPCW announced that the ship would transport the resulting low-level chemical waste to Finland and Germany for disposal at land-based facilities.
Working with partners to solve a problem
From the Syria experience, Weber said, "we learned the value of working with multilateral organizations, working with international partners, to solve a problem. This was a huge security problem to the region and the world came together after Syrian leader Bashar Assad killed over 1,000 innocent men, women and children."
Having the capability to move and destroy the stockpiles was critical in convincing the global community that removal from Syria was an option, he said.
Most people thought it was impossible to move 1,300 tons of chemical agents and that it would have to be done at the sites inside Syria, and in the middle of a civil war, and it would take many years to accomplish and be a very dangerous process," Weber said.
The 1,300 tons of sarin and mustard, about half destroyed aboard the Cape Ray, will never be used by the Syrian regime again against its own people or its neighbors, and will never fall into the hands of organizations like ISIL, the assistant secretary said.
"That's a huge accomplishment," he added, "and this department had a big role in contributing to the international effort that made that happen."
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