Good evening, and welcome to the September 15th edition of "Debunking the New York Times."

My favorite bombastic broadsheet ("All the News That's Fit to Print"!) is running a story on a chemical weapons stockpile in Alabama that I know very well. The focus of the article is the Army's use of incineration ("baseline technology") to destroy the weapons and the danger it presents to the local population.

Incineration of chemical weapons certainly entails some nonzero risk of danger, as do all chemical weapon disposal methods. What the Times doesn't tell you, however, (and what, to be fair, they probably don't know) is that the supposedly "safer" alternative - chemical neutralization - is simply not feasible for the stockpile in Anniston.

The civic group mentioned in the article - the Chemical Weapons Working Group (CWWG) - is the driving force behind the neutralization movement. The CWWG has long opposed incineration on the basis that toxic fumes would be released in the process. While it's true that the fumes released wouldn't exactly be *healthy*, at their worst, they're no more harmful than average exposure to standard auto emissions in pre-lead-regulation eras. The real alternative - risk of exposure to the actual chemical agents as the stockpile corrodes over time - is much worse. [...]