Russia may not be able to start scrapping its chemical weapons on schedule if the State Duma delays the draft law proposed by the defense committee, Pavel Syutkin, head of the president's staff committee on conventional chemical and biological weapons, said Tuesday.


"We need this law to be able to ratify the international convention on destruction of chemical weapons, to which Russia has become a party," Syutkin told a press conference. The Duma failed to put the draft law on its agenda recently.


Opponents of the bill blocked it because of the politics leading up to this month's election, Sergei Yushenkov, head of the Duma defense committee, said.


The convention, signed by Russia in January 1993, provides for Russia to build the first factory for decommissioning chemical weapons no later than 1998, said Lieutenant General Stanislav Petrov. In 1999, the first 400 tons of toxic chemicals should be reprocessed, and eight years later Russia should have destroyed all reserves of chemical weapons on its territory.


"We need this law because the chemical weapons must be destroyed when their storage terms come to the end, and in many cases they already have," said Alexei Arbatov, a member of the defense committee. The primary task, he added, is to destroy the dangerous chemicals stored in large tanks, because they present the most serious threat to people and the environment.