138th Year... and still on the job!	Monday December 18, 2006

Program to destroy chemical weapons a dud, say critics
Program on accelerated phase would have been less costly than drawn-out version of plan.

By JOHN NORTON
THE PUEBLO CHIEFTAIN

The international body monitoring treaty-mandated destruction of chemical weapons agreed this month to extend the deadline for the United States and Russia to April 29, 2012.

However, eight months ago, former Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld told Congress that the country couldn't meet that deadline and, in October, the head of weapons destruction programs in Pueblo and Kentucky said those jobs wouldn't be complete until at least 2023.

That doesn't come as a surprise to people monitoring the international effort to destroy weapons.

Paul Walker, director of Global Green USA's LEGACY program, was at the meeting of the Conference of the States Parties to the Chemical Weapons Convention held in The Hague, Netherlands, and said that the discrepancy in dates was something the parties there were well aware of.

"There was a lot of private conversation about that," Walker said. "One of the big drumbeats was the deadlines."

He added that "behind the scenes there was a lot of discussion about the Rumsfeld letter." Walker said that it was obvious that the representatives at the meeting were concerned and in their speeches they "really hammered on the need to meet their legal deadlines under the convention."

In a roundtable discussion with local officials last October, Mike Parker, head of the Assembled Chemical Weapons Alternatives program, said that because of limited funds due to wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, the Defense Department would not spend more than $150 million annually on each of the two programs. He said that would mean that the program would not be complete until 2023, 16 years after the original treaty deadline and 11 years past the latest extension.

He also said that the new life-cycle cost of the program would be $3 billion, spread out over two decades.

With the treaty deadline a little more than five years away, there's not much of a chance that even an accelerated program could meet the new deadline.

Ross Vincent, the Sierra Club's representative on the Colorado Chemical Demilitarization Citizens Advisory Committee, said that the Pentagon effectively prevented that when it stopped work on the programs in 2004 and set them back more than a year while contractors came up with what was supposed to be a lower-cost plan.

That was because Defense Department officials had balked at the $2.7 billion life-cycle cost for the Pueblo program, which was supposed to cost $1.5 billion. That lower number was the amount certified to Congress under legislation allowing Pueblo and the Blue Grass Army Depot to avoid incineration and use the more environmentally friendly water neutralization method to destroy weapons.

But after the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, the Pentagon ordered the programs accelerated. When officials saw the price of that, they put on the brakes and demanded that the cost be brought back down to what was certified. The irony of the new price tag was not lost on some attending that October meeting who pointed out that because of the low annual budget, the program now will wind up with a total cost to taxpayers higher than what it would have been under the accelerated option.

Now, it's probably too late to meet the deadline even with an accelerated schedule. Vincent says he's asked government officials about that and "they say no and I'm inclined to believe them."

That doesn't mean that the process couldn't be speeded up. "There is some chance that if we could get rolling here we could finish before they expect us to," Vincent said. He said that he doesn't think it will take as long as the Pentagon projects to destroy the 2,611 tons of mustard agent stored at the Pueblo Chemical Depot. He said that the time estimates are based on other sites that have had problems Pueblo may not experience. "I expect we would finish before they expect we will."