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" Update: This week the Obama Administration said it has destroyed the Syrian government&amp;#039;s declared chemical weapons stockpile, and ahead of schedule. In this feature originally published on July 14, 2014, we outlined just how you going about disarming this terrible technology. The people closest to the poison gas as it burst from the rocket shells would have died almost immediately, first violently convulsing, then, after choking on vomit, expiring from respiratory failure. Those farther from the blast might&amp;#039;ve staggered a little way toward help, noses running, eyes watering, vision blurring, until they, too, collapsed, exhausted, and slowly succumbed to asphyxiation. Sarin, a close chemical relative of the pesticide Malathion, does its damage by inhibiting enzymes that allow muscles to rest. Hence the flailing limbs and the lethal fatigue of victims too spent to breathe. This Hell drifted through the streets on Aug. 21, 2013, when the residents of Ghouta, Syria, a suburb on the outskirts of Damascus controlled by antigovernment rebels, were awakened by a series of blasts, followed by an invisible cloud of Sarin gas. Almost immediately after the attack, more than a dozen horrific videos appeared on YouTube. The clips show wounded Syrians pouring into hospitals, where they are stripped of contaminated clothing, doused with water, and then left to their solitary struggle as even more victims stream in. Some of the videos show dozens of people lying dead on hospital floors, then pan to a man frothing at the mouth, or a little girl whose twitching fingers are the final vestiges of life. President Obama watched these videos, which document the deaths of an estimated 300 to 1400 Syrian civilians. He made certain Congress saw them. Short clips were televised on CNN, with ample warnings to viewers about graphic content. And in his office at the U.S. Army&amp;#039;s Edgewood Chemical Biological Center, a sprawling facility north of Baltimore, Joseph Wienand was watching the videos too. &amp;quot;It&amp;#039;s a horrible way to die,&amp;quot; says Wienand, Edgewood&amp;#039;s technical director. &amp;quot;Sarin gas is bug spray for people.&amp;quot; At the time of the attacks in Syria, which are widely believed to have been ordered by the administration of President Bashar al-Assad, Wienand was in the midst of leading a Department of Defense fast-track acquisition program to design and manufacture a new generation of machines to neutralize chemical weapons. The program was intended specifically to deal with chemical attacks in Syria, of which Assad had long been suspected. As the Syrian civil war raged on, Wienand&amp;#039;s project was a balls-to-the-wall sprint to complete the first transportable machine that could be used to neutralize such weapons. Called the Field Deployable Hydrolysis System (FDHS), it could be sent anywhere in the world where weapons needed to be destroyed. The second machine was nearly finished. Four more were in the works. But when and where\u2014and whether\u2014the equipment would be deployed for Syria remained an unknown. Like everyone else, Wienand watched and waited to see if the United States would intervene in yet another conflict in the Middle East. Beyond the guarded gate at Edgewood, the two-lane blacktop skirts a vast airfield with flocks of choppers on the tarmac and then runs alongside a long row of anonymous, function-first office blocks. It&amp;#039;s easy to forget the staggering might of the U.S. military, but here is a full and imposing manifestation of the military\u2013industrial complex\u2014a world unto itself and yet a microcosm of the whole. As you roll deeper onto Gunpowder Spit, heading toward Chesapeake Bay, history unfolds, war by war, each era with its own architecture. The military presence here dates back to World War I\u2014as old as chemical warfare itself.  After passing through a heavily wooded area, you return to the present at a location called J-Field, a mini compound of warehouses and low-rise offices. Much of the work here consists of anticipating chemical and biological threats, figuring out how to stay a step ahead of the world&amp;#039;s rogue elements. In one of the open warehouses sits a newly assembled FDHS, the working heart of it, anyway\u2014a third sibling, to match the two already completed and shipped.  A half-dozen or so workmen in powder-blue jumpsuits go about their business, plying tools as they put together a fourth machine, this one about 30 percent completed, with obvious gaps to be filled on the steel skid that holds it. They look like regular Joes, some shaggy-haired and bearded, but they&amp;#039;re all extremely skilled, like mechanics who work on Porsches. For it&amp;#039;s a beauty all right, this hydrolysis unit, every nut and bolt gleaming like a jewel. At the vertical end of an L-shape configuration stands a towering vat the size of an upended SUV. The vat feeds into a matrix of pipes and valves installed along the horizontal section, the two parts together looking like the microbrewery of some deep-pocketed perfectionist.  Essentially, it is a cooker. Heated water plus sodium hydroxide and sodium hypochlorite\u2014the reagent\u2014flow out of the reactor vat and into the system; the poison to be disarmed is pumped in from the other end. The chemical weapons materiel begins to degrade upon contact with the reagent, and the combined fluids are then pumped back into the titanium-lined reactor for further mixing and cooking at 194 degrees Fahrenheit. By the time the liquid exits the system as effluent, the molecular structure of the chemical weapons has been permanently altered and can never again be used as a weapon of mass destruction. The hydrolysis unit&amp;#039;s basic technology and chemistry aren&amp;#039;t new. Hydrolysis has been used extensively here at Edgewood and the adjoining Aberdeen Proving Ground over the past three decades, particularly during the continuing destruction of the United States&amp;#039; own chemical weapons, some 28,000 tons in total. And while this unit is a state-of-the-art update, its parts are nearly all straight off the shelf, shopped from a vendor. The puzzle Wienand and his team solved to make it usable in Syria was in the system&amp;#039;s small size; its portability; its fail-safe, built-in redundancies; and its versatility in neutralizing a variety of chemical weapons. All the elements of the process\u2014temperatures, reagent flow rate, time of neutralization\u2014can be varied depending on the chemicals to be destroyed. It can neutralize both primary chemical weapons like mustard blistering agent\u2014a ready-to-inflict liquid poison\u2014and the binary precursor DF (methylphosphonyl difluoride), which, when added to ancillary chemicals, forms sarin nerve agent. The FDHS&amp;#039;s destruction efficiency is a near-impeccable 99.9 percent, and it can churn through between 5 and 25 metric tons of poison per day. Perhaps what&amp;#039;s most impressive, most elegant, about the hydrolysis system is what&amp;#039;s not there. No clutter. No snarls of cables or mazes of pipes. There&amp;#039;s no part you have to be a contortionist to get to. The household plumber&amp;#039;s lament is that everything is hard to reach and impossible to see. But this is extreme plumbing, in which the tiniest leak could be deadly, so no one part is obscured by another. The system is full of emptiness\u2014places to stand and see, places to work calmly and quickly within the system even while cumbered by a Level B hazmat suit. If a pump fails, switch to another. A part breaks? Swap it out. A failure at any point can be isolated from the system, which is both as large as possible so as to move a high volume of reagents and WMD, and as small as possible, for portability. It&amp;#039;s an ideal shape and size, and in that sense it approaches sculptural art. It&amp;#039;s color-coded, too, wherever practicable, to minimize the learning curve for assembly and operation. You may not be an electrical expert, but you can connect the brown cable to the brown socket. The real innovation, though, is the portability of the FDHS as a whole, a package that includes air compressors, filtration systems, water pumps, generators, a lab, a tentlike covering with attached decontamination station, and a long list of other portable components. Disassembled, all parts fit within the International Organization for Standardization&amp;#039;s standard 20-foot containers. That&amp;#039;s the design&amp;#039;s magic bullet. That means the FDHS can be loaded onto trucks, trains, and planes for transport anywhere in the world. Off-loaded from some 35 ISO containers, it can be assembled in 10 days and operated 24/7 by a crew of 15 people per shift\u2014water, fuel, and toxic materials not included.  &amp;amp;gt; &amp;amp;lt;&amp;amp;lt;&amp;amp;lt; How It Works...  President Obama Had... &amp;amp;gt;&amp;amp;gt;&amp;amp;gt;   President Obama had just returned from a vacation on Martha&amp;#039;s Vineyard, Massachusetts, when he first heard news of the August chemical attacks at an intelligence briefing in the Oval Office. Surely the perpetrators had crossed the president&amp;#039;s famous &amp;quot;red line,&amp;quot; all but assuring that the U.S. would seek U.N. approval for a military intervention. In a speech on Sept. 9, Secretary of State John Kerry delivered Assad an ultimatum: Destroy every bit of his chemical weapons within a week or face an attack\u2014a threat somewhat defused by Kerry&amp;#039;s own admission of its impossibility. And yet, in a surprising turn of events, calmer negotiations between Syria and Russia, of all countries, yielded a sudden capitulation. Without admitting guilt for the attacks on its own people, the Assad regime nevertheless agreed on Sept. 14 to sign on to the United Nations Framework for the Elimination of Syrian Chemical Weapons, and days later joined 130 other countries as the newest member of the Chemical Weapons Convention. The Syrians would destroy their stockpiled WMDs and the wherewithal to make them.  But for the multinational task force that was assembled to assist the Syrians, there were obstacles. The battle lines of the Syrian civil war were constantly shifting. Observers and facilitators from the U.N. and the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW) faced considerable danger of being shot, blown up, or kidnapped (OPCW personnel would win the 2013 Nobel Peace Prize for their risky work). There was the sheer bulk of the materiel itself\u2014some 1000 metric tons of sarin, mustard, and VX nerve agent\u2014in stockpiles at 23 different sites, which would have to be collected and moved along the deadly highway between Damascus and Homs on the way to the port of Latakia. And then there were the OPCW&amp;#039;s own rules, which state that no chemical weapons may be transported intact from one country to another. Since Syria lacked the technology and security to safely dispose of these volatile agents, a special exception had to be made\u2014U.N. Security Council Resolution 2118\u2014 to allow shipment out of the country. But who would take receipt of the skull-emblazoned barrels? Syria&amp;#039;s load of deadly poisons was an environmental and political hot potato. No country stepped up. Still, in January of this year, as Syrian compliance workers began demolishing chemical weapons production facilities with sledgehammers and poured concrete, the transport of hot materiel to the coast commenced. By April 27, with help from a multinational task force, 92.5 percent of Syria&amp;#039;s declared stockpile had either been destroyed or loaded onto Danish and Norwegian freighters docked at Latakia, with Russian and Chinese naval vessels providing security in Syrian waters.  A plan was in place for the toxic cargo once it was all collected in the ships. It was an unusual plan, even an impractical plan, but it was one to which no nation could reasonably object\u2014or at least which none would torpedo. In the arms-control community they were calling it Plan B. Instead of being delivered to a country for destruction, Syria&amp;#039;s chemical weapons would be destroyed in a place that was no place: aboard a ship on the open seas in international waters. Back in Maryland, the first two Field Deployable Hydrolysis Systems built at Edgewood were already assembled and ready to cook in the cavernous belly of a National Defense Reserve Fleet vessel, the MV Cape Ray. Ask a simple question like who made the FDHS and, given the ultracomplex nature of Defense funding, you&amp;#039;re soon drowning in an alphabet soup of acronyms. Sure, it was Edgewood (ECBC), but in partnership with the Joint Project Manager for Elimination (Provisional), that is, JPM-E(P); the Defense Threat Reduction Agency (DTRA); the Joint Program Executive Office for Chemical and Biological Defense (JPEO-CBD); and the U.S. Army Contracting Command (USACC). And that&amp;#039;s surely not everybody. But what it boiled down to was a bunch of smart people gathered around a big conference table with laptops and smartphones, working the Web hard, calling other experts all around the world, and finessing problems as they arose. Overseeing that melee of cogitation and crisis hacks was Joseph Wienand. &amp;quot;Someone had to wear a tie and be in charge,&amp;quot; he says. A tall, slender redhead with a ready laugh, Wienand was an Army chemical officer stationed at Aberdeen Proving Ground. As ECBC&amp;#039;s chief executive, he oversees more than 1200 scientists, engineers, and others working with the world&amp;#039;s deadliest substances. From the start of what could have proved an impossible deadline, his team worked 90-hour weeks. All the different specialists would come together at that conference table every morning at 9. &amp;quot;I&amp;#039;d come in, and some of the guys would&amp;#039;ve been up all night,&amp;quot; Wienand says. &amp;quot;I brought donuts on Saturdays. I think the sugar rush helped.&amp;quot; The FDHS project could&amp;#039;ve taken years, Wienand believes\u2014maybe a decade, even\u2014under normal circumstances and procedures. But the hurry-up caused by Assad&amp;#039;s increasing menace demanded that processes that would normally be done sequentially were instead performed concurrently. Everything was happening at once. The initial design was executed in virtual space, leading up to a scale model extruded by 3D printers. Once the designers and engineers knew what the FDHS would look like, they had to figure out what it would be made of. The early crises were all about materials. They wanted titanium to deal with the mustard agent, but apparently there was a world shortage, and they couldn&amp;#039;t get enough of it in time. That problem was solved by replacing titanium parts with Hastelloy corrosion- and high-temperature-resistant steel or PTFE plastic-lined piping. The switch to plastic raised its own issues of temperature tolerances and of differences in resonant frequency that demanded subtle changes in design and operation. The relative miniaturization of the hydrolysis system affected every aspect of the machine&amp;#039;s performance. Edgewood had more than 10,000 hours of experience with hydrolysis, but not in an expeditionary package. Effluent that could pass easily enough through larger pipes might clog in the mobile unit. The chemistry had to be carefully calculated to function in the smaller package. It was a lot of work. The timeline on which it all went down is catnip for conspiracy theorists: The FDHS was green-lighted back in January 2013, eight months before Assad&amp;#039;s known attack. The first unit was completed and demonstrated on June 27, and the second was ready by September, just weeks after the chemical attacks in Syria.  Why? How did the U.S. government know it would need such a machine? &amp;quot;There was recognition that something was going to happen in Syria in all likelihood that would require us to do something with those chemical materials that were known to be there,&amp;quot; Frank Kendall, under secretary of defense for acquisition, technology, and logistics, told Stars and Stripes, commenting on the timing of the Edgewood contract. In other words, everyone knew what Assad was doing. They just needed proof.  &amp;amp;gt; &amp;amp;lt;&amp;amp;lt;&amp;amp;lt; The People Closest...  How It Works... &amp;amp;gt;&amp;amp;gt;&amp;amp;gt;   Everything was going smoothly until somebody brought up the possibility that the FDHS might in fact have to be deployed to the ocean. According to Thomas Rosso, an Edgewood project manager, the shipboard option was first considered as early as May 2013, but a land-based deployment somewhere still appeared viable. By mid-October all other options were off the table. &amp;quot;Having the capability to neutralize at sea&amp;quot;\u2014in uncontested international waters\u2014&amp;quot;made the mission politically feasible,&amp;quot; says Daryl Kimball, executive director of the Arms Control Association. The ocean it would be. &amp;quot;Switch to Plan B,&amp;quot; Wienand says. Even machines his team had already completed could easily be adapted for a sea voyage. &amp;quot;I said, sure, okay, why not? What do you need for hydrolysis? Water! There&amp;#039;d be plenty of that.&amp;quot; The team went shopping for roll-on/roll-off ships in Baltimore and Norfolk, Virginia, and quickly settled on the Cape Ray, which was both available and had the space to fit all the equipment for two FDHSs. Just barely, though. The 20-foot-tall reactors could just squeeze into the 24-foot-tall space of the main trailer deck. So began a game of 3D chess played in virtual space, with hypothetical toxic pieces to move about. Each FDHS has a footprint of no less than 300 x 300 feet\u2014but that&amp;#039;s when spread out in the desert, as originally envisioned. Now two units had to fit on three decks of the Cape Ray, along with the necessary containers for the reagents and effluent (220 Conex containers, each with a capacity of 6000 gallons). The Cape Ray was expecting 700 tons of WMD, which could yield 1.5 million gallons of effluent. In addition to the space constraint, that would be a lot of weight to be distributed shipboard in a balanced configuration. In the computer modeling of the ship at sea, there were six different motion directions to consider when making the load plan. And with the extended time that the corrosive effluent might spend at sea, the container material itself became problematic. In lab tests at Edgewood, the FDHSs were showing effluents with a pH between 0 and 1. &amp;quot;That&amp;#039;s very acidic,&amp;quot; Wienand says. &amp;quot;That&amp;#039;s etched-glass acidic. Commercial tanks can&amp;#039;t take that, sitting for a long time. It was back to the chemistry.&amp;quot; New procedures had to be developed, and interim tanks provided to raise the pH. The problem took weeks to solve. But that wasn&amp;#039;t all. &amp;quot;What really surprised me was the propeller issue,&amp;quot; Wienand says. The threat was that the excitation frequency of the ship&amp;#039;s propeller might harmonize with the resonant frequency of the FDHS, and the whole apparatus begin to shake. Welds could crack. &amp;quot;It&amp;#039;s the swaying-bridge effect. You never march in step over a bridge\u2014that goes back to Roman times.&amp;quot; The prop problem was addressed when the units were installed in the Cape Ray in December. The steel frames had already been reengineered for the stresses at sea\u2014the rocking and the rolling\u2014after simulations of the highest seas expected between Spain and Syria. A 5-degree roll and a 1-degree pitch are the cut-off limits for safe neutralization ops, but the ship has stabilizers to minimize roll. Upon delivery to Norfolk, the hydrolysis skids were welded to the trailer deck and fitted with extra braces. A host of other safety measures were implemented before sea trials commenced off the coast of Virginia. In addition to isolating the FDHS units within tents under negative pressure, the entire main trailer deck was similarly depressurized: With air locks added to all the gangways, air can flow in but not out. Any toxic molecule loose in that space would stay in that space. &amp;quot;That&amp;#039;s the job: Isolate the hazards. The crew are trained and the risks are minimal,&amp;quot; Wienand says. On Jan. 7 of this year, the Cape Ray weighed anchor in Norfolk and set course for Spain on what will likely be a one-time-only historic voyage. The Department of Defense civilians on board to carry out the chemical neutralization are all volunteers. Their average age is under 35, yet their collective average experience is 15 years\u2014a mix of eager youths and seasoned veterans. All have undergone at least 445 hours of training per year in hazmat and emergency training. All have been extensively vetted, particularly for character and reliability.  As the improbable Plan B unfolds, the Cape Ray will take on the chemical weapons in Italy and then cruise the Mediterranean looking for calm seas. Granted fair weather, the two FDHSs will complete the mission in less than 90 days. The effluents will be delivered to incinerators in Finland and Germany, and, 2000 miles from the mass graves that hold the bodies of 1400 Syrian citizens gassed to death in August 2013, Syria&amp;#039;s deadly chemicals will vanish in a harmless vapor. Plans for a Deadly Cargo 1. Disposal units, built in Maryland, are loaded onto the MV Cape Ray, a National Defense Reserve Fleet vessel, in Portsmouth, Virginia. The ship sails for the port of Gioia Tauro, in Italy.  2. Syria&amp;#039;s chemical agents are transported to the port of Latakia and loaded onto cargo ships. The transport process is to be completed by June 30. 3. Naval vessels from several nations escort the ships to Gioia Tauro, where the deadliest agents are transferred to the Cape Ray. 4. The Cape Ray sails for international waters in the Mediterranean before beginning the hydrolysis process to destroy the chemicals, which is scheduled to take 60 to 90 days. 5. The resulting chemical waste is shipped to locations in Finland and Germany to await final disposal. HOW IT WORKS: Weapons Destruction Nearly 560 metric tons of chemical weapons will be destroyed on a U.S. Navy vessel, using a pair of machines called Field Deployable Hydrolysis Machines.  Depending on the type of chemical agent being treated, the FDHS can be configured to carry out the optimum process to facilitate destruction. The neutralization of the chemical agent HD (mustard gas) begins with water being pumped into a 2200-gallon titanium tank [1] and heated to 194 F.  The heated water flows through a 122-foot-long series of pipes, including specialized static mixers [2]. The agent is pumped into the static mixers from a 330-gallon holding tank [3] and combines with the heated water. The agent is continuously added, and the mixture is circulated through the pipes and the titanium tank, where large blades stir it. After about 2 hours the chemical agent is converted into safer compounds through a chemical process called hydrolysis. The process renders 99.9 percent of the chemical agent unusable. The resulting effluent is moved into separate disposal containers. The two FDHS units aboard the vessel can together process up to 50 metric tons of chemical agents daily. Ultimately, 5500 metric tons of effluent will be shipped to commercial hazardous-waste facilities in Finland and Germany.  &amp;amp;gt; &amp;amp;lt;&amp;amp;lt;&amp;amp;lt; President Obama Had...  The People Closest... &amp;amp;gt;&amp;amp;gt;&amp;amp;gt;  "^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
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