The United States’s Chemical Warfare Service readied hundreds of thousands of mortar shells and artillery rounds filled with mustard gas in the 1940s. During the Cold War, even more lethal chemical weapons followed: artillery and rockets filled with VX and GB, better known as Sarin, nerve agents that, with as little as a few drops, can be deadly.
These munitions would make up the United States’s chemical weapons arsenal, one of the biggest in the world.
It’s all gone now. This summer, on July 7, at the Blue Grass Chemical Agent-Destruction Pilot Plant in Kentucky, the last M55 rocket, filled with GB, was dismantled. With it went the entirety of the US’s declared chemical munitions stockpile.
I mean, we have nuclear weapons