The U.S. has destroyed the last remaining stockpile of its declared chemical weapons, Republican Senator Mitch McConnell said on Friday, July 7, 2023.

The nation was facing a September 30, 2023, deadline to rid itself its lethal stockpile under the treaty made at the International Chemical Weapons Convention in 1997.  

Hundreds of thousands of rockets, some containing outlawed mustard gas, nerve agents, and toxins like sarin, have been stored in U.S. depots since the 1940s.

The project was part of a global effort to prohibit any large-scale use, production, development, stockpiling and transferring of chemical weapons.

At the end of the Cold War the chemical stockpile in the U.S. still totaled more than 30,000 tons.

“Chemical weapons are responsible for some of the most horrific episodes of human loss,” McConnell said in a statement. “Though the use of these deadly agents will always be a stain on history, today our nation has finally fulfilled our promise to rid our arsenal of this evil.

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