Chemical Weapons

Behind armed guards in bulletproof booths deep in the Kentucky woods, workers have begun pouring the foundations for a $3-billion complex designed to destroy America's last stockpile of deadly chemical weapons. The aging arsenal at the Blue Grass Army Depot contains 523 tons of liquid VX and sarin -- lethal nerve agents produced during the Cold War -- and mustard, a blister agent that caused horrific casualties in World War I. The Obama administration has pushed to speed up the disposal operation after decades of delay, skyrocketing costs and daunting technical problems.

Colorado health officials ordered the Defense Department to speed up its destruction of mustard gas at a chemical weapons depot, saying the military had ignored requests to do so. Health department spokeswoman Jeannine Natterman said Wednesday's order affecting the Pueblo Chemical Weapons Depot was mandatory. About 2,600 tons of the gas are stored at the site.

For the second time in two days, suspected Sunni Arab insurgents Wednesday targeted civilians with a crude chemical weapon: a bomb attached to chlorine gas canisters that killed two people, sickened 25 and injured eight others. The attack was the third in a month involving a combination of explosive devices and chlorine. Though all three attacks were apparently botched, they hint at an ominous new tactic being cultivated by insurgents to subvert a U.S.-Iraqi security crackdown in Baghdad.

Traffic stopped and people stood silent in the rain Friday as Kurds in northern Iraq commemorated the anniversary of a 1988 attack with nerve and mustard gas that killed an estimated 5,000 people. Saddam Hussein ordered the attack as part of a scorched-earth campaign to crush a Kurdish rebellion in the north, which was seen as aiding Iran in the final months of a war between Iraq and its neighbor.

The roots of Iran's nuclear ambitions wind through this mountaintop town of pine trees and streams along the Iraqi border. Here, on a crystal-clear afternoon 20 years ago, Saddam Hussein's warplanes unleashed a poisonous rain of chemical weapons, killing as many as 113 civilians and injuring thousands more. The victims gasped and vomited on rusting buses as they were rushed to hospitals. They dropped dead on the cobbled streets of the town center.

The late Saddam Hussein's former defense minister said Sunday that he had no access to chemical weapons and received no orders to use them in an operation that killed tens of thousands of Iraqi Kurds. Sultan Hashim Ahmad Jabburi Tai's testimony was followed by the defense's closing statements in the trial of former Hussein regime officials accused of war crimes and crimes against humanity for their roles in the 1980s campaign code-named the Anfal, or "spoils of war."

Former CIA Director George J. Tenet accepted blame Sunday for inaccurate statements made by then-Secretary of State Colin L. Powell in a 2003 address to the United Nations about Iraq's weapons capability. Tenet spent three days vetting Powell's Feb. 5, 2003, speech to the U.N. Security Council and thought it was "good and solid," the former CIA chief said. At the time, Powell, with Tenet seated behind him at the U.N.

United Nations weapons inspectors discovered a potentially hazardous chemical warfare agent taken from an Iraqi chemical weapons facility 11 years ago and mistakenly stored in their offices in Midtown Manhattan, officials said. The material -- identified in inventory files as phosgene, a substance used in World War I weapons -- was discovered Aug. 24.

A Syrian military installation rocked by an explosion in July was being used to develop chemical weapons, and Iranian engineers were among those killed, a defense publication reported Wednesday. Jane's Defense Weekly said the July 26 explosion took place at the site of a joint Iranian- Syrian project to fit short-range ballistic missiles with chemical warheads. It cited Syrian defense sources as saying that fuel caught fire during a test to fit a Scud C missile with a mustard-gas warhead.

The discovery of a toxic material called "the dew of death" at Rocky Mountain Arsenal Wildlife Refuge has forced closure of the refuge and the cancellation of four wildlife, nature and photo programs this weekend. Sherry James, a park ranger, told the Rocky Mountain News that about 150 people had been expected to take part.