Army showcase mobile chemical weapons neutraliser

Syria have said they will accept the Russian plan to place their chemical weapons under their control but many people are obviously still concerned that the problem is not yet resolved.

Earlier this year the US Department of Defense created a new system which could quickly move chemical weapons disposal facilities onto foreign countries. The Field Deployable Hydrolysis System (FDHS) was developed in the US Army's Edgewood Chemical and Biological Center in Maryland. This new mobile system is created to destroy chemical warfare agents en masse. The FHDS can mix chemical agents safely with water and other reagents such as sodium hydroxide and sodium hypochlorite and then heats them up to create compounds which are no longer usable as weapons. This process has proven to have a 99.9 percent success rate in tests carried out so far.

The FDHS is manned by a skilled team of 15 people and can deal with between five and 25 metric tons of chemicals each day. The system is transportable and self sufficient. The FHDS also features built in redundancy.

In the centre of the FDHS is a hydrolysis system with a 2,200 gallon titanium reactor. This can be daisy chained with more reactors to improve throughput rates. A sophisticated ventilation system can deal with lethal fumes.

There is also a personnel decontamination station with air conditioning which helps to protect people moving inside and outside of the operations area.

The platform can decommission G Type groups, including sarin, soman, tabun and VX. It can also cope with lewisite and sulfur mustard gas.

When the FDHS is paired up with the T-30 transportable detonation chamber, it proves a formidable system to deal with potential problems in the field.

The good news is that 187 countries such as Russia and America have been destroying their stockpile of chemical weapons after signing the Chemical Weapons Convention agreement in 1993. The problems have been destroying the chemical safely on a time schedule. Total destruction of chemical weapons in Russia for instance may not be completed until 2027.

Kitguru says: Syria didn't sign the CWC agreement and have been manufacturing sarin, tabun, VX and mustard gas. According to reports, Syria have amassed 1,000 tons of chemical agents.

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