Syria is believed to have production facilities near Damascus, Aleppo, and Homs, as well as suspected storage sites in Latakia and Palmyra. The military would have to, in the fog of war, move in quickly to secure suspected facilities and find others. During the 2003 invasion of Iraq, for example, the American military did not secure the Tuwaitha nuclear facility after looting started in Baghdad, even though the facility was well known and fears about a potential Iraqi nuclear weapons program were a stated motivation for the war.

Once the facilities are found and secured, they must be made safe. Initially, a specialized team would have to check for signs of sabotage, booby traps, deliberately released agents, or other potentially hazardous situations, including war damage. After getting the all-clear, an inspection team would begin the task of accounting for Mr. al-Assad’s chemical stockpile. Internal records and inventory lists would be an essential part of this, but a physical inventory would also be necessary. Current amounts of precursors and agents in storage drums and munitions would be compared with the facility’s inventory lists. If a commander, for example, has failed to keep adequate records, an inspector tasked with producing an inventory of a Syrian chemical weapon facility could never state with 100 per cent confidence that none of the weapons had been stolen or used. The inventory would also serve as basis for planning the destruction of the materials.

After the stockpile has been inventoried, the weapons and stocks of agents and precursors would have to be destroyed. The inherent handling difficulties of these materials argue against shipping them to another country for destruction. The closest foreign facilities are in Libya and Russia. The materials would likely have to be airlifted because the most direct overland routes pass through unstable regions in North Africa and the Caucasus. Thus, it is far more likely that the responsible party, which may be a new Syrian government or the United States or the Russian Federation, will opt to destroy the weapons inside Syria. The United States and the Russian Federation have developed a limited number of technologies to destroy chemical weapons.

The most difficult part of destroying the weapons is separating the explosives from the highly toxic agents. Although Syrian nerve agents are believed to be stored as precursors, there have been somewhat unreliable reports that the precursors have been mixed and shells filled. Additionally, stocks of vesicants (mustard, lewisite, phosgene) and crowd-control agents are also believed to be part of the arsenal and are probably stored in bulk and in munitions.

A stable government that can provide security for the workers is necessary for building the facilities and destroying the chemical agents. The destruction would have to be overseen by the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons, the implementing organization for the Chemical Weapons Convention (CWC). Syria is not now a signatory to the CWC, but the United States and Russia are.

The entire process, from building the destruction facilities through their operation and destruction, would take years to complete