Congressional Quarterly - Oct 28, 2002

CQ HOMELAND SECURITY - WEAPONS
Oct. 28, 2002 - 8:10 p.m.
Little Known But Influential Kentucky Group Monitors Russian Mystery
Gas
By Chris Logan, CQ Staff Writer
Before Craig Williams´ telephone began ringing early Saturday
morning in his central Kentucky home, he´d been following the hostage crisis
in a Moscow theater with only casual interest. It was, he thought, just
another troubling reminder of the bloody decade-long war in Chechnya.
But then Williams began hearing from Washington, D.C. colleagues:
Russian authorities had ended the standoff by filling the theater with a
mystery gas, which was causing heavy casualties. And that got Williams
interested fast.
Williams is director of the Chemical Weapons Working Group, a
leading advocate of the destruction of the U.S. and Russian chemical weapons
stockpiles. He´s visited Russian sites several times and conferred with
officials there. He could only guess what they still had buried under layers
of official secrecy.
The brutal end to the standoff worried him. And not just because
what happened there.
If the Russians had indeed used a new chemical weapon, Williams said
by telephone Monday, they would be violating the 1993 Chemical Weapons
Convention (CWC), which bans the development of chemical weapons. Congress´
already tenuous support for U.S. efforts to destroy existing chemical
weapons in Russia could evaporate overnight.
Williams runs the Chemical Weapons Working Group from his hometown
of Berea, Ky.
With a population of less than 10,000, the hamlet tucked into the
bucolic foothills of the western Appalachians is an unlikely center for an
international chemical weapons disarmament organization.
But less than 10 miles from Berea, in Richmond, Ky., lies the Blue
Grass Army Depot, home to an estimated 523 tons of some of the nastiest
weapons ever devised by the U.S. military-industrial complex: nerve gas,
mustard gas and blister agents.
Taking on the U.S. Army is somewhat ironic for Williams, who was an
enlisted man with a military intelligence unit in South Vietnam in 1968-69.
After his tour he returned to his native Long Island and became active with
Vietnam Veterans Against the War, founded by now Sen. John Kerry, D-Mass.
Later he helped found Vietnam Veterans of America Foundation, Inc., a national
self-help organization that later won a share of the Nobel Peace Prize for
its campaign to ban land mines.
In the 1980s he found himself living near a U.S. Army chemical dump
in Kentucky and working toward a degree in philosophy from Eastern Kentucky
University.
"The Army announced it was going to begin incinerating chemical
weapons," he said. "I went to a meeting and raised my hand. I still have my
hand raised."
Watching for Two Decades
In 1985, Williams co-founded a grassroots group called Common
Ground: Kentuckians for Safe Disposal of Chemical Weapons, which advocated
the safe disposal of the chemical weapons at Blue Grass.
By 1990, that organization had morphed into the Kentucky
Environmental Foundation. The next year, with support from Greenpeace and
the Military Toxics Project, Williams organized a "citizens summit" on
chemical weapons disposal in Richmond, Ky. The summit attracted people
living in the shadow of nine U.S. chemical weapons stockpile sites and
around Russia´s sprawling chemical weapons complex.
The meeting began with each community dead set against having the
weapons destroyed in their backyards. By the end of the summit, however, the
representatives had agreed that they should work together to push their
governments to destroy the weapons and to do so in a way that won´t threaten
the health of people living near the sites. The Chemical Weapons Working
Group, with Williams as its head and spokesman, was born.
Today he´s worried about the fallout from the Moscow gas calamity.
"I haven´t heard from my colleagues in Russia. They´re probably
trying to figure out what´s going on," Williams said. "The problem,
notwithstanding the decision itself, is that the Russians´ silence raises
the specter of a violation of the CWC, which calls into question continued
U.S. support for the destruction of Russian chemical weapons."
The Hill Pays Attention
Williams´ group serves as an umbrella organization for more than 100
grass roots interest groups from the U.S. and Russia. It doesn´t have the
cachet of high-brow disarmament organizations such as the Carnegie Endowment
for International Peace, the Institute for Science and International
Security, or the Henry L. Stimson Center, but it is no less influential on
Capitol Hill despite its relative obscurity outside the disarmament
community.
Earlier this year, for example, the group enlisted the support of
two top Colorado Republicans, Gov. Bill Owens and Sen. Wayne Allard, in
calling on the Pentagon to drop incineration of chemical munitions stored in
Pueblo, Colo., in favor of a technology that neutralizes the agents. In May,
the Army announced it had, indeed, dropped plans to build an incinerator in
Pueblo.
Victories like that could be for naught, however, if Congress
abandons the entire program, leaving chemical weapons in place, susceptible
to leaks, accidents, and theft, throughout the U.S. and Russia. The Russian
program has been plagued by delays and refusals by Russian military
officials to allow U.S. program managers access to some sensitive
facilities, and congressional skeptics argue U.S. funding allows Russia to
spend its own money on its own military programs.
The surprise use of an unidentified gas by Moscow´s special forces
will only fan suspicions of Russian cheating, Williams said, on the part of
U.S. skeptics on Capitol Hill.
"This is going to be fodder for their arguments," he said. "It´s
hard enough trying to convince the Duncan Hunters of the world that a small
investment in destroying these weapons is better than having them turn up in
the New York City subway system."
Hunter, a southern California Republican, is chairman of the House
Armed Services Subcommittee on Military Research and Development and an
avowed skeptic of the Russian demilitarization effort.
Hunter was campaigning in California on Monday and could not be
reached for comment. A spokesman at his Capitol Hill office said the
congressman had made no official comment on the Russian program since the
end of the Moscow standoff.
Source: CQ Homeland Security
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Editor
CQ Homeland Security
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