{"id":25810,"date":"2016-05-17T17:48:52","date_gmt":"2016-05-18T00:48:52","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2016\/05\/darpa-has-a-simple-plan-to-clean-up-the-worlds-deadliest-weapons"},"modified":"2017-04-24T20:49:08","modified_gmt":"2017-04-25T03:49:08","slug":"darpa-has-a-simple-plan-to-clean-up-the-worlds-deadliest-weapons","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2016\/05\/darpa-has-a-simple-plan-to-clean-up-the-worlds-deadliest-weapons","title":{"rendered":"DARPA Has a Simple Plan to Clean Up the World\u2019s Deadliest Weapons"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><a class=\"aligncenter blog-photo\" href=\"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog.images\/darpa-has-a-simple-plan-to-clean-up-the-worlds-deadliest-weapons.jpg\"><\/a><\/p>\n<p>US Government may have discovered a new method of safely getting rid of old chemical and other old stockpile weapons.<\/p>\n<hr>\n<p>Getting rid of chemical weapons is one of the military\u2019s most unpleasant duties. But in the future, it may be no more difficult than incinerating garbage, thanks to a team of DARPA-funded scientists who think they can turn some of the world\u2019s deadliest poisons into harmless dirt.<\/p>\n<p>Chemical weapons, including nerve agents and mustards, have been banned under <a href=\"https:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Chemical_Weapons_Convention\" rel=\"noopener\" target=\"_blank\">international law<\/a> since the 1990s, but many countries still harbor large stockpiles. In 2013, a horrific chemical weapons attack in Syria\u2014called the <a href=\"https:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Ghouta_chemical_attack\" rel=\"noopener\" target=\"_blank\">Ghouta attack <\/a>\u2014claimed hundreds of civilian lives, prompting the international community to intervene and eliminate the country\u2019s chemical weapons reserves. By August 2014, 600 metric tons of deadly weapons had been destroyed (in the military parlance, \u201cdemilitarized\u201d) aboard the US Navy vessel <em>MV Cape Ray.<\/em><\/p>\n<p>The Ghouta attack highlighted two things: one, that the world would be a better place if we could annihilate all chemical weapons. Two, that we really don\u2019t have a safe method of doing so. \u201cThe Cape Ray did a great job achieving its objective, which was to demilitarize Syria\u2019s chemical weapons,\u201d said Dr. Tyler McQuade, a chemist and program manager at DARPA\u2019s Defense Sciences Office. \u201cThe downside is, the weapons had to be transported a long distance, and we did the demilitarization on the Mediterranean. If anything had gone wrong, it could have been really horrible for the local environment.\u201d<\/p>\n<p><!-- Link: <a href=\"http:\/\/gizmodo.com\/darpa-has-a-simple-plan-to-clean-up-the-worlds-deadlies-1776558404\">http:\/\/gizmodo.com\/darpa-has-a-simple-plan-to-clean-up-the-w...1776558404<\/a> --><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>US Government may have discovered a new method of safely getting rid of old chemical and other old stockpile weapons. Getting rid of chemical weapons is one of the military\u2019s most unpleasant duties. But in the future, it may be no more difficult than incinerating garbage, thanks to a team of DARPA-funded scientists who think [\u2026]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":395,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1490,1496,9],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-25810","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-government","category-law","category-military"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/25810","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/395"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=25810"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/25810\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":50471,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/25810\/revisions\/50471"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=25810"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=25810"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=25810"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}