Supporters of a Russian chemical weapons disposal facility set to formally open Friday in Siberia spent years overcoming obstacles posed by U.S. lawmakers and Russian officials to see the project through to completion, the New York Times reported today (see GSN, May 26).
(May. 27) -
Russia's Shchuchye chemical weapons disposal facility, shown in a drawing, is set to formally open on Friday (U.S. Defense Threat Reduction Agency image).
Over five years or longer, the new facility is expected to eliminate an estimated 5,960 tons of chemical warfare materials, including VX and sarin nerve agents, stored in millions of munitions at Russia's Shchuchye site in the Ural Mountains.
The site stores 14 percent of the Russian chemical arsenal. The weapons were once held in the near-total absence of security, despite concerns that they might fall into the wrong hands and be used in devastating attacks.
The U.S. Cooperative Threat Reduction program set aside more than $1 billion for constructing the Shchuchye facility since the project was first proposed 13 years ago. The funds prompted U.S. lawmakers to question why Moscow would not take more financial responsibility for the project, while congressional investigators raised additional concerns about Defense Department efforts to monitor the site's construction (see GSN, June 2, 2006).
After Vladimir Putin assumed the Russian presidency in 2000, the Kremlin concealed increasing levels of detail on the Shchuchye site, making it more difficult for Washington to track how its funds for the weapons disposal project were being used. Moscow worked to avoid spending its own money on the project, ultimately contributing $600 million to the effort while other nations provided additional funding.
“This is one of the most historic steps forward ever in nonproliferation,” said Paul Walker, security and sustainability chief at the environmental organization Global Green USA. “One of the most dangerous chemical weapons arsenals in the world is finally getting demilitarized. And it’s been a long, long time.”
Now that the facility is complete, though, at least one Russian environmental group has expressed fears about how Moscow would manage the chemical agent neutralization process.
“At American storage bases, many kinds of accidents have occurred, and we know about them,” said Lev Fyodorov, head of the Russian Union for Chemical Safety. “In Russia, do we know about such things at Russian bases? Of course not. I am a Russian citizen, and the Russian government does not tell me anything. Do we need to destroy chemical weapons? Of course. But do we need to violate the environmental rules of Russia to do this?” (Clifford Levy, New York Times, May 27).