THE TORONTO STAR
September 28, 2003

U.S. lags in destroying chemical weapons

Likely won't meet deadline to be rid of chemical stores
Efforts to raze arsenal hindered by cost overruns

KATHLEEN KENNA
STAFF REPORTER

While the United States continues its search for weapons of mass
destruction in Iraq, it is struggling to dismantle its own.  With the
world's second largest stockpile of chemical weapons,the American
government has admitted that cost overruns and delays will force it
to miss deadlines for destruction set by an international treaty. The
U.S. asked the Organization for the Prohibition of
Chemical Weapons (OPCW) this month for an extension of its
long-standing pledge to destroy 45 per cent of its chemical weapons
by 2004.


There is a "great risk" that the U.S., one of the original forces
behind the 1993 Chemical Weapons Convention, will miss the final,
2007 deadline for getting rid of all chemical munitions, says a new
report from the U.S. government's
General Accounting Office.


Experts predict that Russia, with the world's largest chemical
weapons stockpile, also will miss the 2012 deadline recently set
after an OPCW extension. Russia has failed to meet almost every
deadline under the 1993convention,
which holds the promise of seeing a single class of
weapons destroyed for the first time in history. Russia has about
40,000 tonnes of chemical weapons; the United States, about 31,000
tonnes. "The amounts stockpiled could kill all human life several
times over," says Peter Kaiser of the OPCW at The Hague in the
Netherlands. It takes only a pinprick drop of the nerve agent VX to
kill almost instantly.


Even with heightened security at sites around the world after 9/11,
the most lethal chemical weapons ever produced are stored in decaying
rockets, mortars, artillery shells, land mines and tanks in the U.S.
and Russia. Both of the former Cold War enemies have been burning
their chemical weapons in incinerators at temperatures of about 1,500
C. Yet the pace is slow and the work is dangerous and costly.


"It's like building a nuclear power plant in your backyard but the
risks are far greater," says Paul Walker, one of the world's top
experts on weapons of mass destruction. The director of Global Green
U.S.A., he has visited every knownchemical weapons site
in the American and Russian arsenals.
Destroying chemical weapons is much more difficult than people
imagine," Walker adds. "Everyone is very committed, from the Russians
and Americans to the other G-8 countries (including Canada) to
getting the job done. The Russians are absolutely committed to
getting rid of theirs. They don't really have the money."


The U.S. has spent $25 billion (U.S.) so far on getting rid of its
chemical weapons. The original army estimate, in 1985, was $1.8
billion to destroy the entire stockpile in four years.

The U.S. is also the world's largest donor to Russia's campaign to
destroy weapons ranging from chemicals to spent nuclear fuel from
submarines. It committed the bulk of the $20 billion in aid promised
over 10 years at the G-8 summit in Kananaskis, Alta., last year.
Canada promised $1 billion over the next decade.


The danger outweighs the cost, says Walker. "It's a real threat," he
warns from his Washington office. "We have to get rid of these
weapons as soon as possible. We don't want them to wind up in the
hands of terrorists."


To prove the portability of chemical weapons, U.S. Senator Richard
Lugar, an Indiana Republican, stuck three filled shells into a
briefcase last year during a tour of Russian arsenals by U.S.
Congress members. Yet the bunkers back in the States pose their own
hazard. "We're still vulnerable to a suicide attack with an
aircraft," warns Jonathan Tucker, senior researcher at the Center for
Proliferation Studies at the Monterey Institute in California. "The
sooner the weapons can be destroyed, the better for homeland
security."


The U.S. has destroyed about 20 per cent of its stockpile, starting
with a controversial incinerator opened in 1990 and closed in 2000 at
Johnston Atoll, near Hawaii. The army's attempt to build similar
plants in eight other states has been stalled by
technical problems, protests and lawsuits
but an incinerator is operating in Utah. An international citizen's
coalition known as the Chemical Weapons Working Group has helped
convince the military to adopt neutralization, rather than burning,
at disposal sites in Arkansas, Colorado, Indiana, Kentucky, Maryland
and Oregon.


"I have found the weapons of mass destruction and they're in
Anniston, Ala.," says Rev. Pamela Cheney, a United Church of Christ
minister in Cleveland, who spent her childhood in the area. "I'm
worried to death about my 94-year-old grandmother and all my uncles
and aunts and cousins there."


The U.S. Army began burning chemical weapons last month at Anniston,
about two hours from Birmingham, Ala., and Atlanta, Ga. Some of the
hundreds of thousands of Anniston rockets are so old that after 50
years, their liquid chemical agents have turned to gel. The city of
25,000 has new sirens and homeowners have "alarm" radios, plastic and
duct tape in case of a leak or other disaster. Families closest to
the plant got plastic air-filtration hoods for protection.
"We didn't even know the weapons were there," says university
instructor Rufus Kinney, adding, "It has scared the hell out of
people."