ABSTRACT
If I had to pick one case study that I was both personally involved in and that illustrates the utility, challenges and fascination of risk analysis, I would pick the destruction of the U.S. chemical weapon stockpile. I served for six years on the National Research Council’s so-called “Stockpile” Committee, one of the overseers of the United States Army’s program to destroy its unitary chemical weapon stockpile. I know from personal experiences and surveys that the public has been
concerned about chemical weapons – somewhere between frightened by what they have heard and yet subtly attracted by the exotic nature of these agents. For example, I have spoken to local high school chemistry classes about weapons, and each time the talks were switched to larger rooms to accommodate more students, faculty and staff. On one occasion, the audience asked questions well into their lunch hour. As far as I could see, no one even looked at their cell phone. The most frequently asked question is if chemical weapons really look like those green beads in Sean Connery’s action movie The Rock (1996). This chapter is an opportunity to dig into a multiple-stage interaction between
risk assessment and risk management. The chapter begins by briefly recounting the first major use of chemical weapons during World War I. Then it summarizes the world-wide effort to destroy the weapons. Most of the chapter is devoted to efforts to destroy the weapons in the United States, focusing on whether to use incineration, which was the baseline method, suggested by the Stockpile committee, including this author, and other methods, some of which were bad ideas that would have increased risk, and several others that have been deployed at four of the nine stockpile sites. The Army used standard risk assessment tools (Chapter 2), which are described
in this chapter. It also reached out to community groups, using typical and innovative risk communication approaches, which many thought that it would not do. The bottom line is that in 2015, all the weapons at the five incineration sites were destroyed. Smaller stockpiles were destroyed with hydrolysis (heated water) at two other sites, and two with smaller stockpiles remain to be destroyed. By now, I believe that the entire stockpile would have been destroyed had the Army used incineration. It chose not to for reasons described and highlighted in the chapter. I was in the middle of a great deal of this risk analysis activity, and I have deliberately introduced personal experiences in this chapter because some of the interactions between risk assessment and risk management would only be known to those that were personally involved, and I believe some of these interactions were among the most interesting.
