By Samantha Young
Stephens Washington Bureau syoung@stephensmedia.com

WASHINGTON — Pentagon officials on Thursday defended ballooning costs and missed deadlines in the program to destroy the nation’s chemical weapons stockpile.

They also informed lawmakers at a House Armed Services subcommittee hearing that the Defense Department could not dismantle the country’s chemical stockpile by 2007, breaking an international treaty deadline.

“We thought this was going to be relatively straightforward. We’ll build a facility and we’ll do it safely,” said Claude Bolton, Army assistant secretary over acquisition, logistics and technology.

“Perhaps we were naive,” Bolton said

The Pine Bluff Arsenal, one of eight sites housing the stockpile, contains 3,850 blister and nerve agents, about 12 percent of the nation’s original weapons inventory.

Responding to a blistering report by congressional investigators last month, Pentagon leaders acknowledged that the chemical weapons program has been mismanaged at the top and lacked comprehensive planning.

Patrick Wakefield, deputy assistant to Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, also attributed escalating costs to changing environmental regulations, developing technologies, lawsuits and higher demand for community response plans.

“What we have seen since 1986 is there are many unexpected and substantial challenges that must be overcome while conducting a national-scale chemical weapons destruction program,” Wakefield said.

Program costs have skyrocketed from $1.7 billion in 1986 to an estimated $25 billion today. And the timeline for completion has been pushed back until 2012.

The international Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons last week granted the United States a three-year extension for burning at least 45 percent of its weapons. The original deadline had been April 29, 2004.

To date, 26 percent of the country’s stockpile has been destroyed, Wakefield said.

“The destruction schedule has slipped,” said Rep. Edward Markey, D-Mass. “More than 23,000 tons of materiel remains providing a rich target for terrorists to wreak havoc on Americans.”

Pine Bluff’s chemical incinerator is expected to go online next year. Operations are scheduled to end by November 2009, four years past original projections, according to military timelines published by the General Accounting Office, the congressional auditing agency.

Recent operational delays at Pine Bluff occurred because of Defense Department budget shuffling to pay for emergency preparedness in Alabama, the GAO said.

Rep. Vic Snyder, D-Little Rock, criticized Pentagon leaders for portraying confusing assessments of the program, ranging from statements lauding the program as “exciting and successful” to those describing “unfortunate circumstances.”

Despite the U.S. military’s problems in destroying the weapons, its backers say the program is far ahead of Russia, which has only destroyed 1 percent of its stockpile.