FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
SEPTEMBER 7, 2006
11:05 AM

WASHINGTON - September 7 - Global Green USA, the U.S. affiliate of Mikhail Gorbachev’s Green Cross International, welcomes the official opening of the Russian Federal Agency for Industry’s third major facility for the destruction of its chemical weapons arsenal and urges safety and transparency as destruction gets underway. The facility, located near Maradikovsky in the Kirov Oblast (300 miles NE of Moscow), is the first to destroy nerve agents.

Dr. Paul Walker, Legacy Program Director at Global Green USA said: “Global Green USA congratulates the Russian Federation on destroying over 2,200 tons of deadly chemical agents over the past four years. The start-up of a third destruction facility this month will now help Russia to accelerate their CW stockpile destruction and potentially meet the April 2007 deadline of the Chemical Weapons Convention for 20% stockpile elimination. However, deadlines must not trump safety and protection of public health, and we urge Russia to be extremely cautious as they move forward with this dangerous process.”

The Maradikovsky facility is the first to be fully funded by the Russian government. The official opening is scheduled for September 8, 2006. Some 7,400 metric tons of VX, soman, sarin, and a mixture of lewisite/mustard are stored at the facility which Russia hopes to destroy by 2012. According to Global Green USA calculations, in order to meet the April 2007 CWC deadline, Russia must destroy over 4,200 metric tons of agent (over 525 metric tons per month) at Maradikovsky – about 57% of the stockpile – over the next eight months. This is a very ambitious goal, especially if compared to prior U.S. and Russian rates of CW agent destruction. Russia may only achieve this goal if no accidents or technical problems emerge in the process.

The Maradikovsky facility will operate a double destruction line, one for nerve agents and the other for blister agents, and is estimated to start full operations in December 2008. Bombs filled with VX agent will be destroyed first with a new “neutralization-in-place” process. The process will consist of cutting open the bomb, draining some nerve agent out, and introducing water with RD-4 neutralization agent. The bomb will be sealed and allowed to react or “cook” for three months or more with occasional turning of the munitions for mixing purposes.

Potential problems with this labor-intensive process have been raised by analysts, observers, and local community members. Walker added: “It is unclear if adequate testing, training, and systemization has been conducted to date with this new process, facility, and workforce to provide a high degree of safety for all. Furthermore, the reaction mass resulting from VX neutralization will still contain treaty-banned phosphorous-carbon bonds; further treatment will be required, but Russia has not provided much public detail to date, except to say that this mechanism will consist of a high-temperature process. Much more community outreach, public discussion, transparency, and emergency preparedness will be required before all stakeholders are confident that the process will be safe.”

Russia opened its first chemical weapons destruction facility in Gorny in the Saratov Oblast in December 2002 and completed the neutralization of 1,143 metric tons of bulk lewisite and mustard agents there in December 2005. Kambarka, about 850 miles east of Moscow, is the site of 6,349 metric tons of bulk lewisite stored in railway tank cars. Russia began testing its new Kambarka facility on 20 December 2005 and officially opened it on 1 March 2006; it has neutralized over 1,100 tons of lewisite to date. Russia, which signed the international Chemical Weapons Convention in 1993 and ratified it in 1997, is legally obliged to destroy its 40,000 tons of declared chemical weapons by 2012.

The U.S. agreed a decade ago to help Russia with its CW destruction efforts and has appropriated almost $1 billion to date under the Cooperative Threat Reduction (CTR) Program to help construct a nerve agent neutralization facility at Shchuch’ye, a stockpile site in the Kurgan Oblast. The G8 industrial nations agreed in 2002 in Kananaskis, Canada, to establish a “Global Partnership” to provide Russia with $20 billion of support over a decade for securing and dismantling weapons of mass destruction – nuclear, chemical, and biological – and related systems. The Global Partnership (including the U.S.) has committed about $1.8 billion to Russian CW destruction to date.

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