Army To Destroy Deadly `Green-Dragon' Chemical

HUNTSVILLE, Ala. - Inside a barbed-wire fence and behind thick concrete walls sits a legacy of the Cold War: the nation's second-largest stockpile of a chemical so deadly that one drop on exposed skin can kill.

The bunker at the Army's Redstone Arsenal holds the chemical, pentaborane, which was rejected long ago as a possible rocket fuel because it was too corrosive and volatile. The substance, which explodes when exposed to air, burns with a green flame, and scientists call it the "green dragon."

Now, nearly 4 1/2 years after the cache was discovered, experts are preparing to destroy it. In a few months, workers will enter the dirt-covered bunker a few miles outside Huntsville and use remote-controlled machinery to neutralize the chemical by mixing it with water.

Redstone project officials insist the $1.5 million cleanup will be safe, although some residents are skeptical.

"They always say that, don't they?" said Marty Boyd, an aerospace engineer who lives just outside a gate at Redstone.

Low doses of pentaborane vapor can cause nausea, tremors, insomnia and irritability. Christopher Militscher, an Environmental Protection Agency scientist working on pentaborane cleanups, said he would not be surprised if some of those symptoms are reported in Huntsville even if there are no releases of the chemical.

A much larger stockpile of about 200,000 pounds of pentaborane is to be destroyed by detonation at Edwards Air Force Base in the California desert. But here, state officials banned the Army from burning the chemical so near the city and its 160,000 residents.

Redstone was the workshop of German scientists who developed the United States' first rockets in the late 1950s and '60s. Test materials often were brought to Redstone and NASA's Marshall Space Flight Center, which is on the base, during the Cold War.

Four 800-pound cylinders of pentaborane manufactured in 1961 were stored in the bunker with several smaller containers. They were forgotten until 1992, when state and federal inspectors found them.