THE HAGUE, Netherlands: The United States and Russia have been granted a five-year extension to a deadline for destroying their chemical weapon stockpiles, the international organization overseeing the process announced Monday.
U.S. authorities requested the extension earlier this year, saying they would not be able to meet the original 2007 deadline set by the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons.
Russia, which is in the process of destroying its chemical arsenal, also has until the end of April 2012 to complete the job.
The United States is one of 178 countries that belong to the Chemicals Weapons Convention, which went into effect in April 1997, obliging member countries to stop developing chemical weapons and to destroy their stockpiles within 10 years.
The extensions to the Russian and U.S. deadlines were formally approved last week in The Hague at a meeting of states that have signed up to the convention, the OPCW said in a press release.
Also granted extensions were India, which now has until the end of April 2009; Libya, which has until the end of 2010; and a country that requested anonymity that was given until the end of 2008.
Between them, the countries granted extensions are destroying a total of 71,000 metric tons of chemical agents.
In July, the U.S. ambassador to the OPCW, Eric Javits, told the AP that Russia had destroyed about 5 percent of its chemical weapons, while Washington had destroyed "37 percent and climbing."