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Russia's stockpile of deadly
weapons
By Jeremy Bransten
PRAGUE - The fact that United Nations weapons
inspectors have not found a plausible "smoking gun" in
their search for weapons of mass destruction in Iraq
means one of two things: either Baghdad no longer
possesses such weapons, as it claims, or they are so
well hidden that inspectors have yet to discover them,
as the US administration believes.
Either way,
many experts believe that the situation in Iraq is less
immediately threatening than the dangers that exist in
Russia and some of the former Soviet republics.
More than a decade after the end of the Cold
War, Russia - by its own admission - possesses some
40,000 tons of chemical weapons - the world's largest
quantity - and some 1,000 tons of weapons-grade nuclear
material in scores of storage sites around the country.
Basic information about the location of these sites is
available to anyone with access to the Internet. Many
are far from adequately secure.
That fact was
demonstrated last year when Sergei Mitrokhin, a State
Duma deputy, accompanied by two Greenpeace activists and
three television cameramen, broke into a reprocessing
plant in Siberia where spent nuclear fuel was being
stored.
And it is one of the central points of a
four-volume study recently published by the
Washington-based Center for Strategic and International
Studies (CSIS). The study, entitled "Protecting Against
the Spread of Nuclear, Biological and Chemical Weapons",
assesses international efforts to help Russia secure and
reduce its chemical and nuclear-weapons stockpiles over
the past 10 years. The study warns that much more must
be done if the world is to avoid the risk of some of
these weapons falling into the wrong hands.
Lists of "hot" sites located on Russian
territory fill page after page of the CSIS report. While
UN inspectors comb Iraq for evidence of a single
chemical-laced warhead, for example, 5,400 tons of nerve
agent already packaged in thousands of portable
artillery shells and hundreds of missile warheads are
stored at Shchue, just north of Kazakhstan - a potential
"one-stop shop" for terrorists in the market for such
material.
Robert Einhorn, a former US assistant
secretary of state for nonproliferation and co-editor of
the CSIS study, said much of Russia's chemical
stockpiles are kept in such "ready-to-use" fashion. "A
lot of these chemical agents were loaded into munitions
of various sorts, including artillery shells, that would
be used to deliver those agents to their targets. So you
still have a lot of the agents in munitions and those
have to be demilitarized and destroyed," Einhorn said.
Under the Chemical Weapons Convention, which
former Russian president Boris Yeltsin signed in 1997,
Russia pledged to abolish its entire chemical weapons
stocks by the year 2007. So far, it has destroyed about
1 percent. For comparison, the US - also a party to the
convention, with an initial declared capacity of 31,500
tons of chemical weapons - has so far decommissioned 25
percent of its arsenal.
Since 1992, the US has
spent $7 billion, under the so-called Cooperative Threat
Reduction Program, to help Russia and the former Soviet
states dismantle and secure their weapons sites. There
have been notable successes, including the
de-nuclearization of Belarus, Ukraine and Kazakhstan,
the destruction of 815 ballistic missile silos, and the
scrapping of 97 heavy bombers - to cite a few
statistics.
But much remains to be done, and
progress on the non-nuclear front has moved at a glacial
pace. The September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks against
the US may have finally galvanized Western countries to
pay greater attention to the issue. Meeting in Canada
last year, the G-8 industrialized states pledged to
raise $20 billion over the next 10 years to support
nonproliferation initiatives, especially in Russia. But
the task ahead is enormous.
Einhorn said: "This
is a huge amount of material, and progress in getting
rid of it has been very, very slow. Much of that
difficulty has come from the inability of the Russians
to allocate sufficient resources, and now that is
changing. Russia has contributed its own resources to
the problem, and the US and a number of European
countries are also prepared to fund the destruction
process. So they've made a slow start, but they've
begun. But this is going to take quite a while - well
over a decade - to finish this task."
And the
Russian authorities, he adds, will have to remove some
internal roadblocks to cooperation if the program is to
be successful. "Both president Yeltsin and President
[Vladimir] Putin have been supporters of these
cooperative threat reduction programs, but problems have
developed in Russian implementation of these projects in
Russia. These problems existed under Yeltsin, and they
currently exist under Putin. These are bureaucratic
difficulties that arise. It involves the failure of
Russia to exempt these assistance programs from local
taxation. It's a failure so far to provide protections
to contractors working in Russia from liability and so
forth. These have hindered these projects from going
forward, and it's important that these implementations
be removed if Russia wants contributing countries to
increase their commitments," he said.
The exact
degree of risk posed by Russia's decaying stocks of
chemical and nuclear weapons remains open to debate.
John Eldridge is editor of Jane's Nuclear,
Biological and Chemical Defense Guidebook, an annual
survey of global weapons of mass destruction. Eldridge
cites the example of the 1995 Tokyo subway attack, in
which the Japanese Aum Shinrikyo cult attempted the mass
murder of commuters using the deadly gas sarin.
Twelve people died in the attack, but as
Eldridge notes, given the quantities of sarin the group
had at its disposal and its preparation work, its
"effectiveness" cannot be compared to terror strikes
using more basic methods. "[Aum Shinrikyo] had a major
operation in Tokyo, and when the police moved in, there
was a vat of something like 50 tons of precursor
chemical boiling away, waiting to be created into sarin.
So theirs was a huge operation, but even then, it wasn't
as successful in terms of a weapon of mass destruction,
comparing the result, as September 11 was, where much
more simple methods were used," he said.
Nevertheless, Eldridge believes Russia's massive
stocks of weapons of mass destruction do represent a
significant threat, which he compared to the former
Soviet Union's aging civilian nuclear reactors. "It's as
much a threat as the aging nuclear-power-generation
reactors in Russia and the [former] satellites - the old
RBMK reactors. That poses an equal threat. We've seen a
Chernobyl already, and there are several of those
waiting in the wings, I feel sure. But the straying of
chemical weapons and indeed expertise and radiological
materials over the borders, particularly in the south of
Russia and the southwest of Russia, is a huge problem.
And certainly it's not a case of if, but when, they fall
into the hands of terrorists. We need to be able to deal
with this," Eldridge said.
The human element -
the thousands of underpaid scientists across Russia and
the former Soviet Union who could potentially supply
their weapon-making knowledge to terror groups or
regimes across the globe - is an equally important
factor in this equation, which will be examined in Part
2 of this series.
Copyright (c) 2002, RFE/RL
Inc. Reprinted with the permission of Radio Free Europe/Radio
Liberty, 1201 Connecticut Ave NW, Washington DC
20036
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