Sunday, April 18, 2004
U.S. lags in gutting chemical weapons
By Lee Davidson
Deseret Morning News
WASHINGTON — The nation's program to destroy chemical arms, which includes
an incinerator at Utah's Deseret Chemical Depot, continues to fall further
behind schedule as costs skyrocket, congressional researchers say.
"The program continues to falter
because several long-standing management, organizational and strategic planning
weaknesses remain unresolved," according to an update this month by the U.S.
General Accounting Office, a research arm of Congress.
The GAO noted it has sounded similar
alarms in many of the 25 reports it has issued since 1990, including one
just last September.
But even in the seven months since
that last report, it said the program managed to fall even further behind
schedule and saw costs increase more because of "ongoing incidents during
operations, environmental permitting issues, concerns about emergency preparedness
and unfunded requirements."
All chemical arms were originally
required by international treaty to be destroyed by April 29, 2007.
The United States plans to seek
an extension of that deadline to 2012, but the GAO warned, "Unless the Chem-Demil
Program is able to resolve the problems that have caused schedule delays
to destroy the stockpile, the United States will likely risk not meeting
the (extended) deadline."
Also, costs for the program increased
from an estimated $15 billion in 1998 to an estimated $23.7 billion in 2001.
The GAO said the Defense Department last year identified another $1.4 billion
beyond that, "and this estimate is certainly going to rise further, given
the information we obtained on schedule delays from fiscal year 2005 budget
documents and from program officials."
As of last month, the program had
destroyed 27.6 percent of the 31,500 tons of chemical arms it had originally
stored at nine sites.
Deseret Chemical Depot in Tooele
County originally stored 44 percent of the total national stockpile, and has
managed to destroy about half of that so far, the GAO said.
A site at Johnston Atoll in the
Pacific has completed destroying all its stockpile. A site at Anniston, Ala.,
has destroyed 5 percent of its stockpile, and another at Aberdeen, Md., destroyed
8 percent of its stockpile.
Other sites in Colorado, Oregon,
Indiana, Kentucky and Arkansas have yet to begin destruction of their stockpiles.
The GAO noted that despite several
reorganizations of the program, the changes have "not streamlined the program's
complex organization" and many questions remain "about the roles and responsibilities
of its various offices."
It added, "The program lacks strategic
and risk management plans to guide and integrate its activities" — although
it said the Defense Department reported it is working on that.
The GAO added, "In the past, because the program used a crisis management approach, it was forced to react to, rather than control, issues. We believe a risk management approach would allow DOD (the Department of Defense) and the Army to proactively anticipate and address potential problems that could adversely affect program schedule, costs and safety."
E-mail: lee@desnews.com