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Disposal of Soviet chemical weapons stockpiles gets closer

By David E. Hoffman, Washington Post | September 2, 2007

SHCHUCHYE, Russia - Out of the flatlands and swamps about 100 miles from Russia's southern border, a huge gray box of concrete, brick, pipes, and wires is rising, a factory that next year may begin to neutralize one of the most threatening legacies of the Cold War.

A sign identifies Works No. 1207 as a structure for the storage and liquidation of chemical weapons. But the description does not begin to tell the story of the Chemical Weapons Destruction Facility, at $1 billion the largest single project in the US effort to clean up weapons of mass destruction left after the collapse of the Soviet Union, and also one of the most troubled.

After years of stalled plans and disputes over financing, contracting, and services for residents of the area, construction of the facility is now beyond the halfway point, officials said, and it could begin to destroy chemical weapons in December 2008.

Senator Richard Lugar, Republican of Indiana, and Sam Nunn, a former Democratic senator of Georgia, who authored the Nunn-Lugar program to secure the dangerous materials and weapons remaining in the former Soviet Union, returned here Thursday for the first time in five years to examine the project, a keystone of their larger effort.

Thirteen miles out from the facility, they drove past the source of their fears - a storage base surrounded by wire fences and made up of wooden warehouses, some with corrugated metal roofing, which for years have stored 1.9 million artillery shells filled with deadly nerve agents.

The shells range in size from 85mm rounds to warheads for Scud missiles, including 1.2 million pieces filled with sarin, 514,000 filled with soman, and 157,540 with VX, officials said. A tiny droplet of the nerve agents could be fatal to an individual, and the shells theoretically contain enough to kill millions of people.

Inside the warehouses, shells are stored on wooden racks, looking much like wine bottles. Paul McNelly, program manager for the chemical weapons elimination program of the Pentagon's Defense Threat Reduction Agency, said the agents inside the shells are in "pristine condition."

Nunn expressed concern that the shells could be a target for terrorists. While the perimeter of the base has been reinforced, there are many shells to track and a few might be smuggled out in a suitcase.

"I think it would be extremely hard to know if one was missing," he said. Noting estimates that it may take five or 10 more years to destroy the shells, Nunn added, "I don't think we have that much time."

The weapons here make up just 13 percent of Russia's overall declared chemical weapons stockpile of 40,000 tons in seven storage facilities. Under the 1997 Chemical Weapons Convention, Russia and the United States, which had the biggest Cold War arsenals, have until 2012 to destroy them.

Rogelio Pfirter, head of the Geneva-based Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons, said last month that Russia had destroyed 22 percent of its weapons and that the United States had eliminated 46 percent.

Russia, now rich with oil revenue, has signed a new agreement in which it pledged to pay the excess if costs for the program at large exceed the US budget.