Funding cut delays destruction of toxic gas

COLORADO SPRINGS, Colo. - (KRT) - Destruction of toxic mustard gas stored at the Pueblo Chemical Depot will be delayed for a year after a recent Pentagon order that it be done more cheaply than planned.

The order means destruction of 2,611 tons mustard gas will not begin until 2010.

The Bush administration slashed all but $4.9 million from the depot's proposed $151 million budget for 2005.

U.S. Sen. Wayne Allard, R-Colorado, got $47 million restored, but experts say it will take more than that to pay for a weapons destruction plant.

Before design work was stopped, the cost of building, operating and closing the proposed destruction plant was estimated at $2.65 billion.

The head of a citizens watchdog group said a September order slowing work at the depot is the latest indication of serious problems with the Pentagon's management of chemical weapons.

Craig Williams of the Kentucky-based Chemical Weapons Working Group said that when the program started in 1985, the Army and the Pentagon promised Congress the stockpile of 31,000 tons of chemicals would be destroyed by 1994 at a cost of $1.83 billion.

"It's now 2004, and they've destroyed 28 percent of the stockpile, and the projected budget is $24 billion, and we're hearing the real cost is closer to $30 billion," Williams said.

"Twenty-eight years and $26 billion over budget - clearly the message is that this program has been horribly managed."

Funding shortages at Pueblo and possibly at a proposed plant in Kentucky, along with technical problems at some of the nation's six other chemical depots, will almost certainly put the United States in noncompliance with the 1997 International Chemical Weapons Convention, Williams said.

The United States and Russia agreed to destroy 45 percent of their stockpiles by April 2004 and the total stockpiles by 2007.

Neither nation met the 2004 deadline and both are expected to extend the final deadline to 2012.

Williams thinks it will take the United States until 2018 to destroy its chemical stockpiles, made up of nerve gases and skin-blistering agents such as mustard gas.

Until that happens, he said, the chemical stockpiles at Pueblo and other sites across the country pose a potential environmental problem and an opportunity for terrorist sabotage.

The Pueblo Depot has had 28 reported leaks of mustard gas since 1986. Depot spokeswoman Marilyn Thompson said that's a good safety record considering the number of years the mortar rounds have been stored in concrete igloos.

The Army's site manager for the depot weapons destruction project, Gary Anderson, said the Pentagon wants local managers and contractor Bechtel Corp. to assess whether a smaller, cheaper weapons destruction plant can be built or whether such a plant would extend costs over more years.

Anderson said the Defense Acquisitions Board discussed spending on the Pueblo weapons destruction project at a meeting Friday in Washington, D.C.

Any decision on funding won't be released publicly until at least early December, he said.

Williams isn't confident the Pentagon will give the Pueblo depot what it needs to get the job done.

"The pantywaists in the Pentagon don't want to admit to Congress how much it will all cost, so someone has to pay the bill," he said. "And Colorado is paying the bill right now," he said of the latest delay.