How Do You Destroy a Chemical Weapon?

A lot of news attention has been focused on Syria lately due to the stockpiling and use of certain chemical weapons in its civil war.  The world has demanded that Syria hand off its chemical weapons to third-party countries for destruction.  Syria is known to have mustard gas, VX nerve gas, and sarin nerve gas.  Sarin has a history of being used as a weapon of mass destruction by terrorist groups, most notably in the Tokyo subway attacks in 1995.  These attacks killed and severely injured thousands of people, inundating hospitals with victims, with only around five liters of liquid sarin. Sarin has also been used in several other wars, including the 1991 US-Iraq war and the current Syrian civil war.  US intelligence believes Syria possess around one-thousand metric tons of chemical weapons.

Artillery shells filled with sarin nerve agent. Photo courtesy of the Associated Press.

So how does one safely and efficiently destroy such large quantities of some of the most dangerous chemicals known to man?  It may surprise some of you to know that the US has been actively destroying its chemical weapon stockpile since the 1980s, and it is not projected to be completed until the 2020s.  The two principal ways of destroying these weapons are by baseline incineration and a chemical neutralization process known as hydrolysis.  There are several alternative methods have been  and/or are being explored currently.