Nation/Politics  

Chemical arms pose risk worldwide


By Charles J. Hanley
ASSOCIATED PRESS

They were no-shows in Iraq, but tons of chemical weapons are stoking fears and costing billions to clean up elsewhere in the world, from concrete "igloos" in Oregon, to the Panama rain forest, to the highlands of China, where Japanese war leftovers reportedly have killed hundreds.
   
More chemical munitions have turned up lately in Australia than in Iraq, where the Bush administration said up to 500 tons would be found. As Baghdad arms hunters searched in vain, chemical-weapons material was being unearthed even in Washington, four miles from the White House.
   
At least 8 million such weapons are stockpiled worldwide, and concern is deepening not only over the health and safety of nearby communities, but also over the threat of theft or attacks on depots brimming with sarin or VX, fearsome nerve agents that can kill with one drop.
   
"Chemical terrorism is something we should all be very concerned about," said chief international watchdog Rogelio Pfirter. His Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW) oversees destruction of such weapons under a 1997 treaty.
   
As troubling as the potential is for terrorism, "these weapons are leaking and pose a threat even without terrorist involvement," said Jonathan Tucker, a specialist in unconventional weapons at Monterey Institute of International Studies Center for Nonproliferation Studies. "The sooner we get rid of them, the better."
   
Inside U.S. chemical depots, shells filled with old sulfur mustard sometimes bubble over like a deadly type of champagne. Outside, the government is handing out thousands of emergency-warning radios to nearby residents. At least 12 leaks — all apparently contained on-site — occurred last year at one Army depot alone, in Tooele, Utah, say researchers at Washington's Henry L. Stimson Center think tank.
   
National Guard companies have thrown cordons around these U.S. installations since the September 11 attacks. In terrorism-plagued Russia, specialists fret over the security protecting its 36,000 tons of nerve agent.
   
Chemical warfare reached its depths in World War I, when mustard, phosgene and other gases left more than a million wounded and dead on European battlefields. It is World War I leftovers that cleanup crews have been uncovering since 2001 at an old Army test site in residential Spring Valley, up Massachusetts Avenue from central Washington.
   
Poisonous clouds also were unleashed in the 1930s, by Italian troops in Ethiopia and Japanese invaders in China, and in the 1980s by Iraq in the Iran-Iraq war. It is thought that Egyptian gas was used in Yemen's civil war in the 1960s.
   
The Chemical Weapons Convention, the 1997 treaty outlawing the weapons, gave governments declaring possession — today the United States, Russia, India, South Korea, Albania and Libya — 10 years to destroy them.
   
Even if extended to 2012, as the treaty allows, that deadline looks unachievable by either big holder, the United States or Russia, a U.S. government study found. By April the Americans had eliminated barely 20 percent of their stockpiles, and the Russians 1 percent.
   
"The greatest difficulty is purely one of resources and cost," said Richard Guthrie of the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute.
   
The U.S. Army has learned how complex and costly it is to eliminate the dangerous stockpiles — originally more than 30,000 tons, mostly sarin, a thin liquid; VX, with the consistency of motor oil; and the molasses-like sulfur mustard.
   
Absorbed through skin or inhaled as gas, the nerve agents can produce convulsions, paralysis and death. Mustard severely blisters skin and internal membranes.
   
These agents are packed into bombs and aircraft spray tanks, artillery shells, rockets and land mines, mostly stored beneath earth-covered concrete domes at eight depots across the United States.
   
When it began its planning in 1985, the Army thought it could destroy the weapons in nine years for $1.7 billion. Two decades later, it still faces years of work and cumulative costs of more than $25 billion.
   
"There have been a variety of delays," said Greg Mahall, spokesman for the Army's Chemical Materials Agency.
   
Chemicals that gelled, crystallized or otherwise degraded require special handling, he explained. Testing, permits and oversight requirements at all levels of government slowed construction and operation. Environmental and other local groups sought court orders to block incineration. Then the Utah plant shut down for eight months in 2002 and 2003 after workers accidentally were exposed to sarin gas.
   
The pace picked up in recent months as a second incineration facility opened, at the Anniston, Ala., depot; the Army began chemically neutralizing weapons, a newer method, at its Aberdeen, Md., site; and incinerators at the Umatilla, Ore., depot began — on Sept. 8 — burning rockets loaded with nerve gas.
   
Obstacles remain. Plans to chemically neutralize weapons at a Newport, Ind., depot are stalled while the Army seeks a dumping ground for the waste. Local resistance doomed a plan to process the waste in Dayton, Ohio. Similar opposition is growing to an Army alternative: discharging it from a New Jersey site into the Delaware River.
   
The Pine Bluff, Ark., arms depot may begin burning sarin by next year. But delays have plagued the two other sites — in Richmond, Ky., where anti-burning activists forced the Army to convert to chemical neutralization, and in Pueblo, Colo., where neutralization may not begin until 2009.
   
Kentucky-based activists, the Chemical Weapons Working Group, are demanding more openness about what's going on at the facilities. Director Craig Williams noted that the Anniston Star newspaper, through a Freedom of Information Act request, found that three sarin spills had occurred inside the Alabama facility this year.
   
"They were serious incidents, and the only way anybody found out about them was through a Freedom of Information request," Mr. Williams said.
   
Information flows less freely in Russia, where destruction of chemical weapons, underwritten by U.S. and European aid, bogged down for years. Too little Russian money was available, and American aid was blocked at times as U.S. congressmen complained that Moscow wasn't doing enough. The $2 billion-plus centerpiece — a giant plant at Shchuch'ye in the Ural Mountains — may not be ready until 2009.
   
Meanwhile, "a large quantity of Russia's chemical weapons will remain vulnerable to theft or diversion," the U.S. Government Accountability Office (GAO) warned in March.
   
Undeclared stockpiles or abandoned weapons add another dimension — the unknown — to the chemical-weapons threat.
   
China has the biggest such "orphaned" stockpiles, at least 700,000 chemical munitions abandoned by Japanese troops at the end of World War II in 1945, most in the northeast province of Jilin. Last year, mustard-gas drums broke up at a construction site, killing one man and injuring 33.
   
Chinese plaintiffs suing the Japanese government say the weapons have caused 2,000 deaths since the war. Press reports in Tokyo say Japan has agreed to build a $2.75 billion facility in Jilin to dispose of the weapons, using robots to dig up the ordnance.
   
For its part, the U.S. military dropped 31,000 mustard-gas and other chemical munitions on Panama's San Jose island in 1944-1947 tests. The Pentagon long said it had left none behind, but in 2001 Panama's government said seven intact weapons were found. Researchers think hundreds more lie unexploded in the rain forest.
   
Washington offered to clean up the seven weapons found, but Panama demanded that the whole island be cleared. "The U.S. government considers the matter closed," said State Department spokesman Gonzalo Gallegos.
   
In Australia last year, 22 mustard shells were found in remote northern Queensland, leftovers from Allied chemical-warfare experiments during World War II.
   
Many more old chemical weapons lie in World War I battlefields in France and Belgium, and elsewhere around the world. But bigger questions hang over secret arsenals — in China, for example, which is suspected of having such weapons but not declaring them under the 1997 treaty.
   
The Middle East is a black hole for the treaty, with many of its governments — including Egypt, Syria and Israel, all possible chemical-weapons states — not having ratified the pact.
   
Mr. Pfirter of the OPCW said universal ratification is a prime goal this decade. But a more realistic goal might be his hope to better monitor the chemical trade and factories — 4,000-plus worldwide — whose products could end up in the hands of terrorists.
   
"We should continue to work toward better and greater coverage on the industrial front," he told the Associated Press. The GAO concluded in March, however, that "the OPCW faces resource challenges in addressing the proliferation threat posed by commercial facilities." Mr. Pfirter's 200 inspectors and $89 million annual budget can't meet the demand.