ARMAGEDDON - Part 2

   
     "And those 200 military sites represent only a small fraction of the U.S. facilities where chemicals with the potential to inflict mass casualties are manufactured. According to the Army's surgeon general, industrial chemicals in the United States are second only to bioterrorism as a threat to national security.
     By the government's own estimate, there are 15,000 chemical plants that contain large quantities of potentially deadly compounds. Many of the facilities have been shown to employ little security, offering terrorists easy access to chemicals that could be used as weapons of mass destruction.The military has a terrible track record at keeping tabs on chemical weapons stored outside its nine official stockpiles. From World War I through the 1970s, according to the Army Corps of Engineers, chemical weapons were manufactured, stored or dumped at scores of military bases, private contractors and other "non-stockpiled" facilities across the country. Because of poor record-keeping, most of the sites are dangerous question marks: The military simply doesn't know what's there.
     The military insists that it's unlikely that terrorists would be able to locate any of the lost chemical weapons, many of which were buried in unmarked and unmapped dumps, but the prospect of such a discovery is horrifying. Less than five miles from the White House, in an affluent neighborhood of Washington, investigators have dug up 75 shells and other containers filled with chemical warfare materiel since the 1990s. Some of these munitions contained mustard agent, an oily liquid that can cause severe blistering to the skin, blindness and death. Although the munitions were manufactured at a research facility that stood on the site during World War I, tests on some of the samples showed that the deadly compound "had not degraded at all over the course of 90 years," says Chuck Twing of the Army Corps of Engineers."