ANNISTON, Ala. — The Army on Saturday fired up its first chemical weapons incinerator near a residential area and destroyed a Cold War-era rocket loaded with enough sarin (search)to wipe out a city.

Workers wearing protective gear loaded an M-55 rocket (search)  onto a conveyor belt and sent it into a sealed room where it was drained of nerve agent and chopped into eight pieces.

Those pieces were then fed into an 1,100-degree furnace for destruction. The slag will be trucked to a hazardous waste landfill in the western Alabama town of Emelle (search).

"This community is one rocket safer," incinerator spokesman Mike Abrams said.

The work capped years of preparation for the Army, which had to fight off legal challenges from opponents who argue that the process isn't safe. A judge on Friday gave final clearance for the $1 billion project to move ahead.

The Army planned to destroy as many 10 rockets this weekend at Anniston and slowly increase to a rate of 40 rockets an hour by next year. Its other incinerators are on Johnston Atoll in the Pacific Ocean and at Tooele, Utah, in the desert.

The military is still handing out protective hoods and other safety gear to many of the 35,000 people who live within nine miles of the Anniston incinerator, and some schools in the area have yet to be outfitted with special ventilation equipment designed to keep out lethal fumes during an accident.

The military contends incinerating the weapons is far safer than keeping them at the Anniston Army Depot (search), where nearly 1 million munitions weighing 2,254 tons have been stored for more than 40 years in earth-covered, concrete-reinforced bunkers.

Abrams said the first weapon destroyed was a 6-foot-long rocket designed to fly about six miles and strike an invading force. It contained about 1.2 gallons of sarin, also known as "GB," a nerve agent so deadly a drop on the skin can kill.

The liquid agent from the rocket was gathered in a holding tank, where chemicals will be kept until there is enough of the agent to burn in a large batch, probably in late October.

Abrams said the nerve agent VX and mustard gas also are stored at Anniston, but officials decided to begin with sarin rockets because nearly 800 of them are leaking.

Sherri Sumners, president of the Calhoun County Chamber of Commerce, was happy to hear that incineration had begun. "Slow and methodical is good," Sumners said.

One person stood outside the gate holding signs to protest the startup.