The Long Wait for U.S. Cash to Destroy Arms

Munitions Agency head Zinovy Pak was on his way to the Pentagon on Sept. 11 for negotiations over U.S. funding for a southern Urals chemical weapons destruction facility when he saw a plane crash into the building. Just minutes separated him from possible death.

The talks were postponed -- and more than two months later, it remains unclear whether Russia will receive the U.S. cash it desperately needs for the facility in Shchuchye, Kurgan region.

"We appeal to the United States to once and for all solve this problem and provide us with the money," said General Valery Kapashin, head of the Munitions Agency department for secure stockpiling and destruction of chemical weapons, at a public forum in Moscow last week organized by international environmental organization Green Cross.

Russia is dependent on foreign -- mostly U.S. -- cash to destroy its deadly arsenal of chemical weapons, the biggest in the world. Russia's accumulated 40,000 tons of blistering and nerve agents, together with the United States' 30,000 tons, are enough to destroy the world's population 300,000 times, chemists say.

Building the facility in Shchuchye is part of a federal program to destroy chemical weapons that was approved in 1996, to fulfill the Chemical Weapons Convention that Russia ratified in 1997.

For several years, U.S. funds have been contributed for building the Shchuchye plant, but much of the $260 million allocated before 1999 has vanished into thin air. Due to the lack of progress, U.S. funding stalled in 2000, and was restored this year only after intense lobbying by Pak. But the U.S. Congress has imposed six conditions that Russia must meet before it qualifies for the money in 2002.

Pak was recently quoted by Reuters as saying that Russia had "fully met [U.S. demands] and more."

But in an interview last week, the director of Global Green's Legacy of the Cold War program, Paul Walker, said at least two conditions had not been met: No. 3, according to which Russia must develop a practical plan for destroying of its nerve agents stockpile; and No.4, which demands the enactment of a law providing for the elimination of all nerve agents at a single site.

"In essence that means that our American Congress is telling Russia that it has to come up with a new plan to destroy the nerve agents," said Walker, who was in Moscow to attend the forum.

Shchuchye is one of three chemical weapons disposal plants to be built in Russia under this summer's newly revised federal program. Shchuchye is to destroy nerve agents while the other two plants, in the village of Gorny in the Saratov region and in Kambarka, Udmurtia, are to process lewisite, mustard gas and mixtures of them. In the first version of the program, seven processing facilities were planned, one at each site where chemical weapons are stockpiled, but federal funding was inadequate.

At present, 32,000 tons of nerve agents, including soman and sarin, are stored in five areas of Russia.

The Federation Council last week approved a bill to allow the transportation of chemical weapons throughout Russia, which Munitions Agency spokesman Dmitry Timashkov said was an effort to meet the single-site requirement.

However, it is unclear whether authorities intend to destroy all Russia's nerve agents at the Shchuchye plant, for which the total cost is set at $888 million. Pak said last week that nerve agents from only one place, Kizner in Udmurtia, would be transported to Shchuchye.

Residents of Shchuchye, however, expect the worst.

"I just got a letter from people in my region who found out about the bill and they said public opinion is stirred up because chemical weapons from other places will be brought to our area," said Galina Vepreva, head of Green Cross' information center in Shchuchye.

"We don't know how much will be brought here and how much it will increase the danger for us," said Vepreva, who lives 6 kilometers from the site designated for the facility.

Timashkov said he had not seen a detailed plan explaining what is to happen to the 20,000 tons of nerve agents stockpiled in Maradykovo in the Kirov region, Leonidovka in the Penza region and Pochep in Bryansk.

At last week's public forum, Munitions Agency officials said that perhaps small facilities would be built at these three sites to detoxicate chemical weapons, after which the neutralized materials would be shipped to various enterprises in Russia, to be processed into construction materials or other useful products. However, it is not clear where the money would come from -- the program's budget provides no funds for the construction of three extra facilities to detoxicate chemical weapons. Furthermore, such plans contradict U.S. requirements.

The cash is almost on the table: Seth Brugger, chemical and biological analyst with the Washington-based NGO Arms Control Association, said in an e-mailed statement that "the bill has been stalled in Congress for some time, but the funding has passed through both houses of Congress and only needs to be approved in committee."

Walker suggested that Congress had imposed the conditions because it wanted to get more use out of the facility at Shchuchye, where the local stockpile amounts to about 13 percent of the national total. "They want to make sure that if we spend $1 billion in Shchuchye, we get rid of all the nerve agents in Russia," Walker said.

The bill allocates $35 million for Shchuchye for 2002 -- not much, but it could allow construction to begin, which the Defense Department's Defense Threat Reduction Agency planned for the third quarter of 2002.

The agency's web site says Shchuchye is being built "for the elimination of 32,000 metric tons of Russian nerve agent-filled munitions. Once completed, this facility will be capable of eliminating over 500 metric tons of agent per year."

It is already clear that Russia will not be able to complete the destruction of its chemical weapons by 2007, as the convention demands. At the end of October, the government applied to the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons for an extension until 2012. However, the 500-ton-a-year capacity currently planned for the facility at Shchuchye is inadequate to meet even this extended deadline.

A government expert on the program, Natalya Kalinina, who said she spoke at the public forum as an independent expert, stressing that her opinion is not an official one, criticized the U.S. plans for Shchuchye.

"The American side is putting substantial political pressure on Russia, dictating conditions it must meet to be given its aid," she told the forum.

"So what does it mean? Either the American party is consciously pushing Russia not to fulfill the convention, because it is just impossible to fulfill all these conditions and we are heading to a trap -- or this is intended to exercise even more political pressure on Russia, to win total governance over the process of chemical weapons disposal in Russia."