They had nine months to destroy 1,200 tons of Syria’s chemical weapons. How four unheralded women did the impossible, helping to avert a global showdown and saving untold lives
Ameenah Sawwan was up late on Aug. 21, 2013, scrolling through Facebook on her phone, when she saw the first report that a town not far from hers had been hit by a chemical attack. She watched footage from Eastern Ghouta, then saw another post that said that her hometown, Moadamiyat al-Sham, had been hit as well. She started tapping out a reply in the comments: “This is wrong. This is fake news. I’m in Moadamiyat and we were not hit by chemicals.” Then she started hearing screams.
The unlikely solution would ultimately involve the cooperation of 17 countries, the warp-speed work of a small cohort of U.S. Army chemists, and squabbling and infighting within the highest echelons of the U.S. government. It headed off U.S. military intervention in Syria and helped earn the Nobel Peace Prize for the intergovernmental organization under whose banner it was carried out.
For example, when an earthquake off the coast of Japan triggered a tsunami that flooded the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant, DTRA was the agency responsible for helping to coordinate the response, cleanup, and strategy. When Libyan rebels overthrew the government, emissaries from DTRA were the ones who showed up with suitcases full of cash to hire guards to protect the country’s chemical stockpile.
There’s nothing going on there.” Typically a hard-charging figure, she had completed three assignments back to back, earned two master’s degrees in two years, and, after a complicated labor, MacAulay was ready to lean out for a little bit. “People didn’t think this had any chance of success. What makes this group extraordinary is we didn’t know it From the start, the group sensed it wasn’t being taken seriously within the organization. “The accusation I got from some of the guys was: You just got pretty women to work with you because that made your life more pleasant. Your entry requirement for being on your team was they had to be good-looking women,” Cinnamon says. “It was something that they got teased about.
But those early brainstorming sessions did, eventually, lead to a meeting at Edgewood Chemical Biological Center, where Tim Blades, the center’s director of operations, had an idea for a self-contained machine that could render the component chemicals inert, leaving only relatively harmless byproducts behind. Edgewood’s chemists, Joby Warrick writes in his bookhad used the technology before “to destroy beer-keg-sized containers of leftover chemical weapons in Iraq.
But now that it was being seriously considered as a diplomatic option, it became Schoenberger and Limage’s job to run down the particulars. Schoenberger headed to Portsmouth, Virginia, where she met a salt-licked, bushy-mustached man from the Maritime Administration who was surprisingly bullish on the throwaway COA’s prospects.
at a meeting at the White House and another high-level meeting in which he believes his presentation was deliberately sabotaged. At one point, he received a direct order to stop pursuing the idea, a command Santee declined.To Limage, it was Albania that didn’t seem viable. One of her first jobs was to complete a comparison of the costs of destroying the weapons on a merchant vessel named theand incinerators in Albania.
MacAulay’s early days in the Netherlands were spent in a room with a Syrian chemical-weapons expert and a translator, compiling a listing of Assad’s chemical weapons since the program’s inception in 1970s, while a Syrian general paced silently in the background.“We knew they had this stuff, but we didn’t have all the particulars,” MacAulay says.
At the same time, pitfalls the team hadn’t anticipated were becoming real, too. There was a polar vortex that year, and as the temperatures dropped in Virginia, PVC pipes on the ship burst, pushing departure further back. The delays prompted questions about how the temperatures aboard the ship would impact the order in which the weapons would be disposed of. “We were getting towards summer. We weren’t supposed to be destroying in summer.
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