A 16-ton cache of material for chemical weapons left behind
by Albania's former Communist government will be destroyed beginning next
year with U.S. help, Sen. Richard G. Lugar (R-Ind.) announced yesterday,
describing the move as a breakthrough in the elimination of such stockpiles
around the world.
A U.S.-Albanian agreement to destroy the chemicals marks the
first expansion of a key U.S. nonproliferation program -- the Cooperative
Threat Reduction initiative -- into a country outside the former Soviet Union,
Lugar said. The program already has destroyed or dismantled more than 6,400
nuclear warheads and hundreds of other weapons in Russia and other former
Soviet republics.
"We now have latitude to work with other countries who will
know we have the willingness and the funds to cooperatively eliminate weapons
of mass destruction," said Lugar, who co-founded the program 12 years ago
with Sam Nunn, then a Democratic senator from Georgia. "If we do not continue
to pursue this avenue . . . accidents and misappropriations will occur."
Late Wednesday, the Bush administration formally authorized
the release of $20 million to fund the destruction of the Albanian cache,
which consists of barrels of an unspecified chemical stored in a small brick
depot in a rural area.
U.S. officials declined to divulge details about the cache
for security reasons, but said the chemicals were acquired more than 15 years
ago by the leaders of what was once Europe's most isolated and rigidly Marxist
government. Albania became a multi-party democracy following the overthrow
of communism in 1990, and its leaders have since sought close ties with the
United States.
In theory, the Albanian chemicals could be loaded into bombs
or artillery shells for use in a military conflict, or dispersed by terrorists
in an attack against civilians, weapons experts said. The presence of such
a cache in Albania was a violation of the country's commitments under the
Chemical Weapons Convention, which Albania ratified in 1994.
Albanian leaders have said they discovered the chemicals while
surveying the country for hidden small-arms caches placed in remote areas
by the former government. The United States has already helped Albania install
fences and surveillance gear, and will now provide money and technical support
for the destruction of the chemicals over the next two years, Lugar said.
Nunn, now chief executive of a nonproliferation
advocacy group, Nuclear Threat Initiative, said the case underscored the need
for the global expansion of U.S. nonproliferation efforts approved by Congress
last year. "We need to use this and other tools to move faster to keep dangerous
weapons and materials out of the hands of the most dangerous people," Nunn
said. "We are in a race between cooperation and catastrophe."
