Pine Bluff Chemical Activity (abbreviated PBCA) is a subordinate organization of the

United States Army Chemical Materials Agency The United States Army Chemical Materials Activity (CMA) is a separate reporting activity of the United States Army Materiel Command (AMC). Its role is to enhance national security by securely storing the remaining U.S. chemical warfare materie ...

located at

Pine Bluff Arsenal The Pine Bluff Arsenal is a United States Army installation in Jefferson County, Arkansas, about eight miles northwest of Pine Bluff and thirty miles southeast of Little Rock. Pine Bluff Arsenal is one of nine Army installations in the United ...

in Pine Bluff,

Arkansas Arkansas ( ) is a landlocked state in the South Central United States. It is bordered by Missouri to the north, Tennessee and Mississippi to the east, Louisiana to the south, and Texas and Oklahoma to the west. Its name is from the Osage ...

. The

U.S. Army The United States Army (USA) is the land service branch of the United States Armed Forces. It is one of the eight U.S. uniformed services, and is designated as the Army of the United States in the U.S. Constitution.Article II, section 2, cl ...

stored approximately twelve percent of its original

chemical weapon A chemical weapon (CW) is a specialized munition that uses chemicals formulated to inflict death or harm on humans. According to the Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW), this can be any chemical compound intended as a ...

s at the Pine Bluff Arsenal since 1942. Destruction of the last chemical weapons occurred on November 12, 2010."U.S. Army Completes Chemical Stockpile Destruction at Pine Bluff Chemical Agent Disposal Facility"
(news release), U.S. Army Chemical Materials Agency, Nov. 15, 2010.

Manufacture and storage

Pine Bluff Arsenal stored 90,409 M55 GB rockets, 19,608 M55 VX rockets, 9,378 M23 VX landmines and 3,705 mustard ton containers. It was also the home for the Binary Chemical Weapons Facility. The facility created one of the two toxic agents that would combine to form

sarin Sarin (NATO designation GB G-series, "B"">Nerve_agent#G-series.html" ;"title="hort for Nerve agent#G-series">G-series, "B" is an extremely toxic synthetic organophosphorus compound.diphenylcyanoarsine Diphenylcyanoarsine, also called Clark 2 (Chlor-Arsen-Kampfstoff 2, being the successor of Clark 1) by the Germans, was discovered in 1918 by Sturniolo and BellinzoniSturniolo, G. und Bellinzoni, G. (1919); ''Boll. chim. pharm.'', 58, 409–410 an ...

(DC) facility began in the mid-1980s and a classified number of canisters were produced. A facility was also planned to produce DC, but it was never constructed. A facility was planned to produce QL (

diisopropyl aminoethylmethyl phosphonite Isopropyl aminoethylmethyl phosphonite (NATO designation QL), also known as ''O''-(2-diisopropylaminoethyl) '-ethyl methylphosphonite, is a precursor chemical to the nerve agent VX and VR-56. It is a colorless liquid with a strong fishy odor, ...

), a precursor to the nerve agent VX. Construction began in the late 1980s, but it was mothballed prior to completion in the early 1990s as part of the chemical weapons treaties. Only partial construction of the Bigeye Bomb (BLU-80) fill and close facility at the Pine Bluff Integrated Production Facilities (IBPF) was completed and no filling of the air-delivered binary bomb ever took place. The Army only produced a few of these bombs. They remained empty or filled with a safe, simulated chemical for test purposes. International treaty inspectors witnessed the destruction of all these bombs in the summer of 1999.

Decommissioning

The Pine Bluff Chemical Agent Disposal Facility was completed in 2002, and the Army began weapons disposal in March 2005. By May 2007, the facility had destroyed all of its GB (sarin)-containing rockets and began processing VX-containing munitions. In February 2008 they processed their last VX-containing rocket and in May 2008 began processing VX landmines. Landmine processing was completed in June 2008 and the facility changed over to processing ton containers of

mustard gas Mustard gas or sulfur mustard is a chemical compound belonging to a family of cytotoxic and blister agents known as mustard agents. The name ''mustard gas'' is technically incorrect: the substance, when dispersed, is often not actually a gas, b ...

, the last remaining chemical weapons on site. Workers began destruction of mustard agent-filled ton containers in December 2008. The facility reached 100% destruction of its total chemical stockpile of 3,850 metric tons on November 12, 2010.
The facility and Pine Bluff Chemical Activity are undergoing closure operations in accordance with strict internal policies and procedures and federal laws and regulations and were scheduled to be finished by 2014.

References

External links

Official site
{{coord missing, Arkansas United States chemical weapons depots Buildings and structures in Pine Bluff, Arkansas