Mr Biden on Friday urged Russia and Syria to fully comply with the treaty, and called on the remaining countries to join it. Only three countries - Egypt, North Korea and South Sudan - have not signed the treaty.Ī fourth, Israel, has signed but not ratified the treaty.Ĭoncerns remain that some parties to the convention, particularly Russia and Syria, possess undeclared chemical weapons stockpiles. Officials said the elimination of the declared US stockpile was a major step forward for the Chemical Weapons Convention. The Kentucky storage facility has housed mustard agent and the VX and sarin nerve agents, much of it inside rockets and other projectiles, since the 1940s. The munitions destroyed in Kentucky were the last of 51,000 M55 rockets with GB nerve agent - a deadly toxin also known as sarin. The US faced a September 30 deadline to eliminate its remaining chemical weapons under the international Chemical Weapons Convention, which took effect in 1997 and was joined by 193 countries. "Today, I am proud to announce that the United States has safely destroyed the final munition in that stockpile - bringing us one step closer to a world free from the horrors of chemical weapons."
"For more than 30 years, the United States has worked tirelessly to eliminate our chemical weapons stockpile," US President Joe Biden said in a statement released by the White House. Workers at the Blue Grass Army Depot in Kentucky destroyed rockets filled with GB nerve agent, completing a decades-long campaign to eliminate a stockpile that by the end of the Cold War totalled more than 30,000 tonnes.
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