The alleged use of chemical weapons in Syria thrusts the international spotlight onto the same deadly "nerve agents" stored at Blue Grass Army Depot in Madison County.
Sarin, one of the world's most dangerous chemical warfare agents, has been identified by the United States as the substance loaded onto rockets on Aug. 21 and shot into the suburbs of Damascus. The Obama administration estimates that more than 1,400 people died.
Syrian President Bashar Assad is also thought to have used a network of front companies to import the precursors needed to make VX, the deadliest nerve agent ever created, The New York Times reported Sunday.
Both sarin and VX are internationally banned, both are stored in Madison County and both are scheduled to be destroyed there by a massive plant that is 72 percent complete. The plant is supposed to be finished in 2015, but it will take until 2020 for it to become operational. Then, according to the current timeline, it will take from 2020 to 2023 to destroy the weapons, said Craig Williams, director of the Chemical Weapons Working Group, a Berea-based citizens group that monitors the remaining weapons in Kentucky and Pueblo, Colo.