By Savanna Reid

Destroying chemical weapons

Russia’s chemical weapons stockpile slated for reprocessing
After years of wrangling with the U.S. over the steep expense, Moscow has finally budgeted a bill that will speed up the destruction of its chemical weapons arsenal – some 40,000 tons of poisons. Several new plants for the destruction of mustard gas, sarin, soman, and VX gas will be built at an expense of 171 billion rubles, almost all of which will come from the federal budget, rather than relying on foreign assistance. Blogger Stygius credits John Bolton with shooting down U.S. funding for Russian chemical weapons destruction (also, for undermining the Biological Weapons Convention, interestingly), which had been agreed upon at the 2002 G8 summit. Fortunately, Moscow has come up with its own funding to go forward with the accelerated reprocessing initiative. This is extremely important to the global fight against chemical weapons proliferation.

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