JOHNSTON Atoll, which I briefly visited this month thanks to the U.S. Army and the Hawaii Air National Guard, is supposed to finish its assigned chemical weapons disposal task by the end of 1999. It has been running ahead of schedule and is probably the best place in the world to do such dangerous work. Destroying America’s
chemical weaponsIt is 500 miles from the nearest unpopulated land at French Frigate Shoals and 800 southwest of Honolulu. Lethal as its weapons are, their poisons dissipate within a few miles of their explosion point.
That gives an adequate margin of safety to just about everyone in the world except the 1,250 people working on the island. They have an airtight building to retreat to in an emergency. They could be maintained there for six days. They keep emergency masks, oxygen canisters and medications handy always. Precautions in the immediate disposal area are intense.
They are halfway through their assignment to dispose by incineration of 6.6 percent of America's chemical weapons stockpile. What they do is the prototype for similar plants at eight stockpile sites across the mainland U.S. Johnston is visited frequently by international scientists and officials. Nothing there is secret.
The central island of the atoll is about the size and shape of Waikiki, 640 acres,over 90 percent of it man-made. Down its middle is a 9,000 foot runway. Physically it compares with Honolulu Airport's Keehi Lagoon Drive where it borders the ocean.
The weapons at Johnston are bombs, projectiles and rockets pulled back from Okinawa and Germany. A long row of large bunkers received over 170,000 of them.
Work is slow because of elaborate personnel safety and environmental protection plus anti-sabotage measures. Eleven million air samples are made on the island every year.
Robots do the critical destructive work in a sealed chamber at the downwind end of the island.They disassemble weapons and feed them by conveyor into a furnace to burn for 30 minutes at 2,000 degrees Fahrenheit. Even this does not melt the shell casings but they come out safe for recycling. The heat and additive chemicals purify the liquid poisons.
Men must go into the chamber periodically to maintain and adjust the robots. They are sealed into thick white vinyl "space suits" supplied with intense air pressure to keep contaminants out and connected by phone and heart monitors to central control. They stay inside no more than two hours. The suits, costing nearly $400 each, are destroyed after one use.
The plant runs continuously to avoid expensive shutdowns and start-ups. Some skilled workers earn over $100,000 a year. They are backed up by 300 U.S. Army security and weapons-handling personnel and some 400 less-skilled civilian workers, many from Honolulu.
Army assignments are for a year with a 30-day transportation-paid home leave in the middle. Civilians mostly sign on for a year broken into periods of eight weeks on-island followed by two at home, transportation paid.
SPOUSES are allowed only when both are employed. No children. There are ocean sports, bowling, a gym, a theater and TV out of Denver. Overall operations cost $440,000 a day.The Air Force owns the island. The Army runs it. Civilian contractors run the plant.
America has not signed the international treaty to destroy all chemical munitions by 2006. Congress instead has set a year 2004 deadline for us. It designated eight stockpile sites across the mainland to incinerate - in the same fashion as Johnston - their munitions without further moving them. Meeting that deadline will take some doing since the first Johnston look-alike, one in Utah, started up only a few months ago.
Pressure to break the commitment to shut down Johnston could develop but what to do will be a congressional decision, not a military one.