American president Joe Biden has announced on Friday that the nation has fully destroyed its decades-old stockpiles of chemical weapons, a milestone hailed as completing the elimination around the world of all known stores of the agents of mass death.
Biden stated, “Today, I am proud to announce that the United States has safely destroyed the final munition in the stockpile.” He added that the move has brought them one step closer to a world free from the horrors of chemical weapons.
The United States was the last of the signatories of the Chemical Weapons Convention, which came into effect in 1997, to complete the task of destroying the “declared” weapons. However, it is believed that some states still maintain secret reserves of chemical weapons.
The Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons called the milestone a “historic success” of disarmament, which comes after more than century after the uncontrolled uses of chemical gases during the World War I produced mass deaths.
The OPCW stated that the US announcement meant that all the world’s declared chemical weapons stockpiles were “irreversibly destroyed.”
The nation has held stores of artillery projectiles and rockets for decades that contained mustard gases, VX and sarin nerve agents, and blister agents. Such weapons were condemned widely after US employed it during the World War I.