Weapons Disposal

These are uneasy days for this slice of eastern Alabama -- a mood perhaps best understood by considering the unusual packages that Calhoun County officials are passing out to residents. The cardboard boxes contain high-tech gas masks -- see-through protective hoods with a built-in fan and filtering system -- plus portable air filters and sheets of plastic and duct tape for the home.

While the Pentagon struggles to dispose of napalm stored in Southern California, the Army is seeking to transport a toxic solution of heavy metals from a Pacific island chemical weapon site through the port of Long Beach to an incinerator near St. Louis.

Bomb experts Tuesday exploded three artillery shells found in a ravine at Rocketdyne's Santa Susana Field Laboratory last week--munitions that company officials described as small and innocuous. "There were no real surprises," Rocketdyne spokesman Dan Beck said after the detonations. "Two seemed to have some sort of high explosive in them. The third, the biggest of the three, was inert. It was in effect a dummy round.

Three 30-year-old artillery rounds were unearthed on Rocketdyne's Santa Susana Field Laboratory, leaving neighbors of the aerospace giant concerned despite assurances by company officials that the munitions are small and "innocuous." Half a dozen employees working on a $55-million project to clean up the field lab of chemical and nuclear contaminants found the cylindrical shells in a ravine beneath 20 feet of dense scrub brush and rocky dirt, Rocketdyne spokesman Dan Beck confirmed Friday.

Vice President Al Gore launched his effort to reinvent government in 1993 with a ringing call to action, telling senior bureaucrats and political appointees on the south lawn of the White House: "Abandon the obsolete. Eliminate duplication. End special privileges." Prodded by Gore's words, the Pentagon laid out an ambitious plan to privatize many noncombat operations.