Japan recovers 36,000 chemical weapons

A Japanese official working to seal 724 chemical weapons along with five barrels of mustard gas that killed one person and injured 43 in north China in August said progress was nevertheless being made.

"A total of 36,000 chemical weapons including bombs, poisonous fume pipes and iron barrels containing chemical preparations have been retrieved and put under temporary safekeeping," the unnamed official said in an interview with Oriental Outlook magazine, carried by Xinhua on its website.

Japan started on-the-spot investigations in China in 1991 and began work on excavating munitions in northern Heilongjiang in September 2000, following on in eastern Jiangsu and northern Hebei province.

More than 700,000 chemical weapons are estimated by Japan to have been abandoned in China by its armies, although Chinese experts say as many as two million such weapons are still buried, giving China the world's largest stockpile of abandoned chemical weapons.

Attorneys for Chinese plaintiffs who have sued the Japanese government say some 2,000 Chinese have been killed or injured by abandoned chemical weapons and several thousand more have fallen victim to bombs.

Under the UN Chemical Weapons Convention, one of the earliest international treaties aimed at ending the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction, Japan has until 2007 to destroy them.

But experts say it will take much longer to safely dispose of so many bombs.

The official said both sides have agreed to build a center for the destruction of the weapons around Haerba Ridge in Dunhua city, Jilin province, but problems remained.

"Actually, the retrieved chemical weapons haven't yet been destroyed because decisions haven't been made on what technologies should be adopted for their destruction," said the official.

"What we have done are preparations for detoxification. The Japanese and Chinese sides meet monthly to discuss how to dispose of these chemical weapons and what environmental standards should be complied with.

"Why does the conferring between Japan and China take so much time? It's because the work has no precedent in human history."

He said Japan had committed 21.1 billion yen (192 million dollars) for the year from April 1 to clean up the weapons and the total budget over the past five years was 60 billion yen (US$547 million).

"We have become deeply conscious that it costs much more time and money to destroy them than to have produced them," he said.

"The Japanese side is making conscientious efforts to accomplish its mission by 2007."

Japan's brutal occupation of Chinese territory before and during World War II remains a source of constant tension between the two countries, with many Chinese accusing Japan of apparent tardiness over the weapons issue.

Beijing has called for more precise information from Tokyo on exactly where the weapons were dumped, but the official said records did not exist.

"Everything was in chaos in WWII," he said. "I'm afraid there was no data arranged at that time and even if, would have been lost by now."